With Microsoft retiring their Advanced eDiscovery v.1, some related PowerShell cmdlets and soon the Core eDiscovery interface, I asked the Relativity team for a briefing on how these changes might affect my clients using RelativityOne for in-place holds and collections. Overall I am happy to understand that the Microsoft-Relativity relationship is active and strong. The Relativity Legal Holds team has been aware of Microsoft’s [...]
Several headlines and familiar names caught my eye as I skimmed my weekend feed. The founder of Vista Equity Partners (Robert F. Smith) announced a $140M settlement with the DOJ and the IRS while his long term Texas business partner Robert T. Brockman was charged with evading $2 billion in taxes, the ‘largest-ever’ tax fraud case to date. Vista’s co-founder Brian Sheth is said [...]
Having been off the ‘speaker circuit’ for the last couple years, I have had a hard time prioritizing virtual conferences while focused on relaunching the eDiscovery Journal. Logikcull asked for me to cover their InHouse 2020 virtual networking event and frankly some of the corporate focused sessions looked interesting. Between accepting their invitation and the event my clients and a research engagement consumed that [...]
Many years ago as a product manager at Symantec (now Veritas again), I advocated for the acquisition of Globanet because they were a key partner in so many of our compliance-eDiscovery deals. The Veritas Compliance Portfolio covers the core enterprise unstructured data sources (file shares, Office365, Box, Exchange, SharePoint and many more) with a variety of solutions. Their eDiscovery Platform even does remote laptop [...]
Many corporations and smaller businesses took COVID-19 stimulus funds that prevented them from mass furloughs or layoffs until October. That employee protection is about to run out. Hundreds of thousands of workers will log off after receiving the bad news by email or phone. Many of them will walk away with thumb drives full of customer lists, contacts, competitive pricing and other sensitive corporate [...]
Sanctions and adverse inference rulings are far too rare in my opinion. That is because far too often opposing productions are not scrutinized and compared against your own collections. Too few counsel run the metrics of key witnesses and wonder why their email counts suddenly dropped or vanished during the critical time frame. Lawyers should practice law and stay focused on evidence and merits [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Excel tool for corporate legal departments considering adding an on-premise or cloud based eDiscovery platform that covers legal holds through review and production. This tool is derived from the eDiscovery Matrix and is a fairly narrowly focused version of broader RFP tools used for eDJ Group clients over the last decade. eDiscovery Journal members are welcome to use and modify this tool with attribution [...]