The relatively low rate of COVID-19 work safety lawsuits is not surprising while we are in the midst of the pandemic. I expect an inevitable surge in personal injury advertisements after we have an effective treatment or vaccine. “Were you or a loved one infected at work? Let the tough, smart lawyers at Acme Firm fight for your fair compensation!” I am not saying [...]
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 [...]
I was reading a well researched news story in the aftermath of the Fort Lauderdale protests that turned into a violent confrontation between police and protesters. Several items caught my attention that could have impact on events that result in litigation/discovery during this time of discord. Body Worn Cameras (BWC) and video surveillance are more commonplace now than ever. Many of my industrial clients require that certain employees wear BWCs or have vehicle/facility cameras that operate on similar technologies. I intend to stay away from politics on essays in the eDiscovery Journal. As a former police criminalist I am very interested in evolving technologies to record and reconstruct incidents. In this and many other recent confrontations, police departments state that BWC footage is not available because the cameras were not turned on. Let’s discuss what data is available to an investigator or requesting party.
Stephen E. Arnold’s latest blog on flaky enterprise search reports resonated with my own frustration at the steady stream of eDiscovery market reports press releases showing up in my daily search feeds. I have followed Arnold’s blog for years because of his deep understanding of the enterprise search market. He bluntly calls out the lack of attribution or substance in the reports hidden behind the paywall. I ran down one of the recent eDiscovery Market Forecast 2020-2025 reports blasted out by something called Aeresearch, ‘Powered by Market Study Report, LLC.’ Sounds like another Gartner/Forrester wanna-be, right? Not hardly.
If you are anything like me, you get 10-100 emails per day with eDiscovery press announcements, marketing blasts, webinars and more. Back in 2008 I built a Google CSE to manage the firehose of information and make sure that I kept up with the market. The original eDiscoveryJournal.com used that search engine to create a feed that we culled, curated, classified and commented on. [...]
Since March, most corporate counsel and discovery response teams have been working remotely. The global pandemic may have paused or slowed many civil courts, regulators and auditors, but not all. Many of my long term corporate clients issued work stoppage orders to control costs and gather information on the potential impact of the pandemic. It is now clear that social distancing and travel restrictions [...]
Over the decades I have worked with the Big Four Accounting firms in a variety of roles. Heck, some folks in the firms used to refer me to their audit clients that needed eDiscovery/IG process and system consulting. The line between auditor, accountant and other professional services was simpler before the firms started buying or building eDiscovery service bureaus. Given the volume based industry [...]
Back at LTNY in February I put the word out that I was going to relaunch eDiscoveryJournal.com. I pushed back briefings, webinars and interview requests with the “when it is live” excuse. When Joe Bartolo and Bard Schaffel asked to interview me for their EDRM podcast series, I ‘thought’ that surely I would have the new site live by then. So most of you [...]