I do a lot of acceptance and QC testing for clients as their designated 30(b)(6) witness of their discovery systems. In fact, I like to find hidden gotchas and exceptions that I can take back to providers to fix. In over 30 years I have never found a ‘bad’ analytic system. Instead I frequently encounter users who do not ‘trust but verify’ before they [...]
This week Microsoft added an automated transcription feature to their online Word. It is easy to use and renders a surprisingly accurate transcript that differentiates between speakers and keeps the times of the conversation segments. This is great from a user perspective. Why bother to keep meeting notes when you have a free transcript of everything said? It does present some challenges to your [...]
KLDiscovery Inc.’s announcement of a roughly 18% drop in revenue for Q2 2020 is actually less than I expected. They also managed to cut operating expenses by 15.8% (which translates to a loss of people and office space). There are few publicly owned eDiscovery corporations. The majority privately owned companies tend to conceal their financial health unless they are actively soliciting a round of [...]
We are living in an age of unprecedented layoffs, work stoppages, downsizing, and general unemployment. I frequently call out weak corporate termination policies/protocols during discovery health assessments. It is a complicated process with many players, data sources and heightened emotions. Most people hate confrontations or making a scene. Any fuzziness in your separation protocols may result in former employees walking away with corporate data [...]
How long should you keep ad hoc internal communications? That is the question that bubbled up while listening to the four Big Tech CEO’s trying to explain a few of their 1.3 million emails and internal documents obtained by the House Antitrust Subcommittee's investigation that kicked off June 2019. The vast majority of those exhibits dated from 2010-2012 M&A strategy discussions. We have no [...]
As I listened to an interview with Mary Trump about how she turned over financial documents to the New York Times it got me thinking about all the incredibly sensitive information just parked at firms world wide for inactive/settled matters. Fred Trump’s contested will was settled in 2001. Those 19 boxes of documents sat at her law firm for roughly 17 YEARS before she [...]
My philosophy is once a client, always a client. Got what seemed to be a typical referral request from a counsel I had recently supported on a corporate client matter. The classic, “Who do you recommend for Relativity hosting?” quickly went down a rabbit hole of new generation data sources, foreign language docs and such that wrote off any of the new self-service providers/platforms. [...]
Many of my engagements result in supporting client RFP’s for eDiscovery hosting, collection or ECM services/systems. A lot of that support is translating or analyzing pricing models so that client’s can make strategic vs. tactical buying decisions. Traditional eDiscovery providers consider their large enterprise proposals and pricing confidential. The newer generation of self-service cloud hosting players like Lexbe after the SMB market openly advertise [...]
The Covid-19 pandemic has made remote work and home offices the new normal. Many corporations have already consolidated large corporate headquarter leases to the minimum footprint. The migration of large corporate data centers to Amazon S3 or Azure cloud servers has been going on for the last decade. So where does your critical ESI under hold live now? The reality is that your custodian’s [...]
An old client gave me a good karma call (otherwise known as free consulting). She wanted my thoughts on how they could minimize the potential litigation and discovery cost of the inevitable workers comp and personal injury claims after employees contracted Covid-19 after returning to in person work. The best safety, sanitation and social distancing work practices will only minimize how rapidly or widely [...]