eDJ Migrated

I’m happy to announce that a new report I authored with Kevin Esposito is now available on our site: Managing eDiscovery As a Repeatable Business Process. It’s been a hot topic lately as corporations seek to control costs and get out of the vicious cycle of reactive collections. Today, most organizations manage eDiscovery on a matter-by-matter basis, stuck in a reactive nightmare that plays over and over. This approach is both costly and risk-laden. Organizations do not have the time, internal skills or tools required to cull down collected data sets. This results in unnecessarily expensive third-party data processing and legal review. The matter-by-matter approach also leads to inconsistencies in how the same data is treated across matters. Multiple handoffs and increased movement of data from application to application and vendor to vendor raises the chances for spoliation and the potential for negative repercussions such as sanctions.

On its first day, the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat has been a refreshing change of pace from most of the other legal technology shows. The location is both beautiful and serene; it’s most certainly not frenetic like LegalTech. The mix of attendees is a nice one – there are corporate folks, law firm partners and associates, vendors, and independent consultants. That mix provides for lively debate and a rich variety of perspectives.

It seemed like every single presentation I was in at the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat last week contained the term “reasonable.” Most speakers, myself included, had to position responses to questions as “do what is reasonable for your organization.” As a consultant, it feels like a cop-out to say something like that because it’s essentially saying, “it depends,” and that’s just such a typical consultant thing to say. Reasonableness, though, truly does depend. It depends on the organization and it depends on the matter.

Is information governance on your radar screen? It’s certainly on ours. For the past several months, eDJ has been conducting an information governance survey with Barclay Blair of ViaLumina, Ltd. Analysis of the results is ongoing – the first report will be out in September and we’ll have a webinar on the topic September 15, 2011 at 1pm ET / 10am PT. The data is teaching us a lot about the topic; we’ll use the data to put some definition around the term and provide some recommendations on how to gain real value through information governance.

Wrapping up my coverage of the first Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat, it seems strange that almost a month has flown by. Then again, we have been in serious growth mode at eDJ now that Jason Velasco has come on board. As I am working on my ILTA 2011 sessions on Predictive Coding/Remote Collection and the Cloud for Firms, it becomes clear that my sessions in Carmel have changed my expectations of audience participation and content quality for conferences. I put a lot of thought into how to prevent the two classic conference panel killers, ‘Death by Powerpoint’ and the ‘Charlie Brown Speaker’. The informal setting and intimate audience gave me the freedom to take risks that might not have flown as well in the packed, stifling rooms of LTNY.

Legal hold initiatives have dominated my corporate consulting engagements for the last year, especially implementing holds across enterprise archives such as Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, EMC’s SourceOne (EmailXtender) or Commvault’s Simpana (although rumors indicate that Commvault is discontinuing their discovery templates). It makes sense that corporate legal departments tend to start by tackling the greatest risk that they are responsible for, preservation of all potentially relevant ESI – especially email. Acquiring an enterprise archive allowed them to capture (journal) all communications, thus providing immediate ongoing preservation. Now that the immediate risk has been mitigated, corporate IT has begun to scream about the rapidly growing corporate digital landfill. I have corporate clients who are accumulating 5-7 TB of email per year at an escalating pace. That explains my backlog of clients wanting to protect potential evidence within their archives so that they can expire (delete) all non-records according to their retention schedule. Sounds easy, but having done a lot of these has taught me that there are frequently land mines buried just under your communication trash. This inspired me to write a report detailing the common issues, solutions and best practices around implementing legal holds on enterprise archives.

A year after the flooding, the ILTA rev-elation conference finally made it to the Gaylord Opryland Resort this week. I heard that member attendance hit 1500, but the increased provider presence raised the total attendees to almost 2500. As an acquaintance remarked, “The resort is like a casino, but all the slot machines have been replaced by plants.” Yes, it was that hard to find your way out. Luckily the conference and networking proved sufficiently distracting. The friendly atmosphere and grass-roots networking have always differentiated ILTA from the commercial bustle of Legal Tech. The exhibitor labyrinth was much larger than the last show in Las Vegas, which I have mixed feelings about. Overall, the mood was upbeat and almost everyone I queried has had a record year. Litigation and discovery readiness spending seems to have recovered from the 2008-2009 lull.

Now that I have had a couple days to digest my whirlwind of Nashville ILTA 2011 press briefings, I wanted to get you my impressions on the memorable highlights. My first impression was, “OMG everyone has an iPad!” Really. Given the amazing prevalence of the tablets in the audiences of my sessions, I was not surprised that Recommind has just released an optimized mobile interface for their Axcelerate product. Howard Sklar (Recommind) says that they wanted to get ahead of the blurring the line between personal and professional lives. The service providers seem to be feeling the pressure from corporations to mitigate rollercoaster discovery costs with fixed fee and managed service offerings. Just as legal hold features were the hot add-on at LTNY in February, flexible work flows seemed to be the hot feature as providers are gearing up for the end of year release cycle.

In looking through the data from our information governance survey, I sometimes find results that don’t necessarily match the reality of what goes on in practice. That is not necessarily surprising given the challenges of info governance, but it’s certainly interesting. One such data point from this survey is the fact that an overwhelming number of respondents – 83% - believe that the primary focus of information governance is the management of both unstructured content (e.g. Word processing documents) and structured data (e.g. databases). Seems like a “duh” finding, right?

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2011-08-18 05:43:28Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. My last two posts about our information governance survey results hit on some positive trends – information governance is a defined model for managing information that many organizations are executing on and it encompasses the management of both structured and unstructured data.  I’ve also argued that we are [...]