When my old friend Michael Lappin took a role at Ligl (formerly Vertical Discovery) I knew that I needed to see what had lured him there. Ligl is providing what they call an ‘orchestration hub’ for corporate and firm eDiscovery teams. Despite MSFT’s efforts and the ongoing eDiscovery market consolidation, most of these teams are still cobbling together ‘Frankentech’ to track and manage their [...]
The Obscenity list was one of the first automatic classification lists my team built into our Summation databases back in the bad old Enron days. We were one of the first defendants forced to search and review native raw email from the Exchange journal. Energy traders had filthy mouths and it was an easy way to spot heightened emotions. We also learned to route [...]
Microsoft and Google are busy re-inventing how knowledge workers collaborate. Many of us have stumbled onto complex sets of interdependent Excel workbooks being shared by accounting, sales and other teams. With good chain-of-custody procedures, I have reconfigured environments so that counsel or experts could manually review these ‘semi-structured’ file sets to extract potentially relevant snapshots. The breadth of sources simultaneously touched by Teams and [...]
Apple plans to start scanning all U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse using a tool called “neuralMatch” or “NeuralHash” against a database of known images. Womble Dickinson’s JDSupra article covers many of the high-level privacy concerns and explores Apple’s plans for a service that will scan encrypted messages for sexually explicit content to provide parental notice. Using a generated hash to check [...]
Just a quick update as MSFT continues to consolidate storage architectures and change defaults. Per Roadmap 84580 this change will be rolled out next month. I rarely see legal holds issued for meetings that occurred within the last 2 months, so conservative or regulated companies should extend the default retention period for TMRs to match your current base retention period. I am sure that [...]
Charles Chaffin’s Numb: How the Information Age Dulls Our Senses and How We Can Get them Back on confirmation bias got me thinking about our new generation A.I. review systems. Legal practitioners have long known about the dangers of confirmation bias blinding them to key facts adverse to their client’s positions. I am not an attorney and will not opine on counsel’s duties or [...]
The recent raft of spoliation sanctions like Iacovacci v. Brevet Holdings, LLC seem to share fundamental misunderstandings around where key decision communications resided and how to preserve them. Broadly worded legal hold notices do indeed usually cover text and chat messages. Rarely do they convey practical instructions on preservation. In my opinion, these informal communication channels were once viewed as ‘non-records’ and avoided by [...]
Lost in all the hype around market consolidation and IPOs is the sad truth that the vast majority of legal technology is destined to end up in the digital dust bin. Thompson Reuters announced the retirement of eDiscovery Point by June 2022. Launched in 2016 and fueled by the CaseLogistix IP/talent TR acquired in 2010, eDiscovery Point never seemed to gain market traction against [...]
I am generally bullish on what I consider to be the undersized eDiscovery market. The $44 stock price spike after the CS Disco’s IPO equates to a $2.5B market capitalization. That is a 36X MULTIPLE of CS Disco’ s reported $68.4M 2020 revenue. Red flags pop up for me considering that CS Disco lost $29.8M in 2020 and $22.8M in 2019. According to the [...]
Yet another acquisition in the accelerating consolidation of the eDiscovery market space. In this case there is some functional overlap offset by clear differentiation in solution strengths. In my opinion, both players peaked early in the eDiscovery market and were being left behind until recently. Maybe the ParkerGale Capital money and guidance will forge a real competitor to the evolving Relativity-Reveal-Exterro battle royal. For [...]