2020 was a write off for many in the eDiscovery market. Client initiatives held or cancelled outright while the judiciary granted mass continuances as they struggled with the transition to remote hearings. Many of my long-term clients issued work stoppages that lasted more than six months. 2021 arrived carrying all those backlogged matters and projects. After a few quarters scrambling to catch up and [...]
A good friend from my Summation days put Insight Optix CEO Mandi Ross in touch with me to explore her new cloud matter scoping platform, Evidence Optix (EO). At first I struggled with whether matter scoping and cost estimation was a broad enough pain point to interest my corporate clients. Most of my legal ops engagements include matter budgets and tools for inside counsel [...]
If you have not caught Tom O’Connor and Rachi Messing’s ongoing interviews with old school eDiscovery personalities, you should. Their interviews include Duane Lites of Jackson Walker, Ian Campbell of iCONECT, Gene Eames of Pfizer, Chris Dale of the eDisclosure Information Project and many more talented peers. Because there was no ‘eDiscovery career’ when many of us started down this path, they like to [...]
Microsoft change notice MC291088 announced the retirement of the Core eDiscovery Search by ID List feature because “it is not functioning to an adequate level and creates significant challenges for organizations who depend on consistent and repeatable results for eDiscovery workflows.” That is a remarkably frank statement that this feature was not working consistently. The ‘Search by ID list’ feature was part of the [...]
I have a confession. Except for a few panel invitations, I have opted out of pretty much every virtual eDiscovery/IG industry, association or customer conference since the pandemic started. Despite some excellent content and exciting trends, I missed walking the exhibit hall, bumping into old/new friends and the networking gatherings where I could make real connections. To be fair, I have been buried in [...]
Over the decades I have driven far too many defensible deletion, classification or similar initiatives aimed at removing the ROT from corporate local, network and cloud data stores. I have wondered many times whether these were Sisyphean tasks even as I generated ROI estimates based on data reduction to justify the technology and labor costs. Most of these projects achieved tangible short term corporate [...]
Fluid Office files are Microsoft’s next generation of dynamic collaboration documents for Teams Chat and other communication channels. Multiple users will be able to simultaneously edit tables, agendas and task lists within M365 online mailbox, SharePoint sites and Teams chats. “Google Docs on steroids” indeed. Thankfully, the default OneDrive and SharePoint storage locations mean that existing preservation functionality covers new .Fluid files created by [...]
Google’s definition of ‘private’ is slowly coming to light thanks to a $5B class action lawsuit and recent Congressional hearings. There seems to be some emails and second hand accounts supporting the assertion that Google executives were well aware of how the public might react if they found out that Google and other sites could still track user searches, URL’s and actions while in [...]
When my old friend Michael Lappin took a role at Ligl (formerly Vertical Discovery) I knew that I needed to see what had lured him there. Ligl is providing what they call an ‘orchestration hub’ for corporate and firm eDiscovery teams. Despite MSFT’s efforts and the ongoing eDiscovery market consolidation, most of these teams are still cobbling together ‘Frankentech’ to track and manage their [...]
The Obscenity list was one of the first automatic classification lists my team built into our Summation databases back in the bad old Enron days. We were one of the first defendants forced to search and review native raw email from the Exchange journal. Energy traders had filthy mouths and it was an easy way to spot heightened emotions. We also learned to route [...]