Reveal keeps making the eDiscovery news, so I did a briefing with Jay Leib and George Socha to get up to speed on their overall go to market strategy. Most eDiscovery providers fall into a couple well known buckets that force them to grow, evolve or fade away. Like most players, Reveal started as a service provider focused on hosting large litigation matters.(see Reveal [...]
If you somehow missed the September 11, 2020 announcement (MC223426) or January’s (MC199461) admin message, Microsoft has now effectively disabled any legal matters you have in the original Advanced eDiscovery (designated v1.0). You can manually export the data, but I have yet to find any reports or convenience features that would enable a lonely litsupport manager to dump out a list of matters, custodians, [...]
My peer Tom O’Connor spotted this post Ignite 2020 Microsoft announcement of upcoming new Teams functionality. These remind me of the recent online Word transcript feature, useful for end users and a potential headache for eDiscovery practitioners. Despite O365’s Advanced eDiscovery module, Microsoft has always focused first on end user functionality over compliance, security or legal discovery requirements. There is little doubt that the [...]
Normally I dig through the actual ruling language for new eDiscovery caselaw. In this case my former Symantec alumni has written a great summary of the contested discovery protocols. I refrained from quoting his closing four take-aways, but they are worth a read. What caught my interest here was the defendant’s original strategy to use its “Microsoft Tool” (I bet O365 Advanced eDiscovery) to [...]
The article is a long and rather scholarly coverage of the evolution of the communication privilege. It brings up a couple interesting issues for retention policies and classification systems. First is the need to retain the actual communication wrapper for legal work product to preserve privilege. The proliferation of online meetings, chat and collaboration channels are generally considered informal communications and not addressed by [...]
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 [...]
I try to read provider marketing papers when they are not hidden behind the contact collection wall, especially when they promise lists of cost saving tips. In this case, the list of ten tips seems to boil down to in-sourcing your ediscovery and buy Zapproved’s products. The overall principals behind the ‘tips’ are sound if rather obvious. Unfortunately, my PDF copy was missing all [...]
I am not recommending that you read this draft academic paper. It is pretty dry and focused mainly on societal trust of A. I. systems. Rob Robinson quotes the full introduction section that details the above four principals before diving into academic jargon. Lack of trust and ‘explanation accuracy’ seem to be the primary adoption barriers to PC/TAR relevance determination scenarios. Counsel is fine [...]
Most eDiscovery M&A is all about consolidating customer bases or creating a more exciting technology solution. Press releases focus on the ‘better together’ story and frequently skip hard details like potential redundancies or layoffs. The snippet above about a ‘dedicated RelativityOne environment in Canada’ caught my attention. Legility has not yet responded to my questions about whether this instance is Legility owned, hosted and [...]