Essays

Greetings to all of the readers of the eDiscoveryJournal. I’m pleased to join you as the newest correspondent and hope that you will find that what l share in this forum is useful. Now that I’m here, I’m sure some of you are wondering, “Just what is an independent consultant going to share?" Some may suspect that there will be a dry recitation of product reviews and hardware specs. Some may worry that I’m going to belabor yet again subjects such as “Are instant messages ‘records’?” And some that have heard me speak in public worry that I might just take off all the safeties and satirize what I see out there in the eDiscovery business world. While the last is the most tempting, I personally hate when the Internet is used to push personal agendas. No dear friends, I intend to do the practical thing and provide you with the “One Thousand Foot View”.

I recently finished a research paper that takes an overview of Enterprise Search for Discovery. My intent was to aggregate, organize and condense corporate client discussions around this area over the last year. Enterprise search and preservation collection platforms are the second most frequent technology RFP engagement for my corporate clients after archiving systems. The technology providers have many different approaches, architectures and features that can confuse the prospective buyer. After having the same discussion so many times, I decided to put together a low cost ($29) overview report to at least define the options, potential benefits, costs and things to consider before investing in enterprise search. Enterprise search tends to fall into two main indexing camps, selective vs. enterprise wide. One element from the report is the potential index size, as indexes like to live on Tier 1 class storage (SAN, Direct Attached or other top class storage).

After watching the IBM Watson debut on Jeopardy, I got to thinking more and more about computer intelligence. I’ve been watching the content analytics space for a long time and have seen up close both the potential for analytics to change the world and the skepticism with which many humans view analytics. When I began covering eDiscovery, it seemed to me that there was finally a market in which content analytics could make a real impact and find some traction. This is especially true in Early Case Assessment (ECA).

I cannot count the times I have heard something along the lines of, “I just want to wave a magic wand and make all those bloody PSTs go away.” I heard it again just last week. At least this time the speaker was well along the actual process of migrating the email so that the PSTs could be disabled and done away with. You could use an email archive platform, Sharepoint, ECM system or even Exchange 2010 (just watch out for the storage balloon!) to manage and expire email designated as corporate records. Pick your poison, but you still have to deal with the years of accumulated email that your users have stashed in all those handy Personal Stores (.PST and .OST files). Many categorization technologies have promised to magically designate items as records and cull out all the dross. I have yet to see one deliver on real, heterogeneous legacy email outside of very structured environments where users already have to manage communications and documents. Typical corporate goals include the defensible destruction of non-essential email, central management/search of designated records and minimization of eDiscovery/infrastructure costs. I wanted to share some of my lessons learned from past PST elimination projects, both successful and the rescue attempts.

A recent New York Times article gave eDiscovery some primetime coverage. The focus of the article was more macro-level: given the software tools to automate aspects of document review, are we ultimately creating less high-paying jobs for lawyers? As expected of a mainstream press article on eDiscovery, only broad strokes were sketched. The article does propose a very good and timely question. The elimination of high-paying jobs could have a potentially devastating impact on our economy. From my perspective, what was missing from the article was the potential for software tools that replace document reviewers to create another wave of high-paying jobs (that are different because they aren’t “lawyer” jobs).

The phrase ‘digital landfill’ seems to resonate with clients. Most have been in a state of analysis paralysis concerning email and native file destruction since the 2003 Zubalake decision. Many have never had any kind of real retention policy or workflow that would enable or encourage users to clean up their digital trash. Yep, I just called all those spreadsheets, presentations, reports and other ESI flotsam and jetsam cluttering up your NAS trash. The combination of the 2002 criminal Enron investigations and Judge Scheindlin’s decision effectively froze record destruction in energy trading companies. At the time, I thought that the combination of plummeting storage costs and the potential of criminal charges from the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act meant infinite retention for public corporations. Time and common sense disproved that notion, but I am now seeing corporations flinching from the last decade’s worth of digital debris littering their enterprise landscape. The user’s capability to create ESI far exceeds our ability to effectively categorize, manage and expire.

A common theme through products making the jump from processing engine to eDiscovery platform is the bolting on of a legal hold notice module or wizard. Hold notices are the official kick off of the eDiscovery tailgate party. When I created the first incarnation of the eDJ Tech Matrix back in 2009, only Atlas (now acquired by IBM) and Exterro offered a full featured workflow with a database back end. Some of the matter management players could send emails, but none had any market recognition for that limited functionality. I had many corporate clients consider these relatively high priced specialty applications, but only those with relatively heavy litigation/regulatory profiles or very low risk tolerance implemented them. Many of my corporate clients created home grown workflows with a single web, Sharepoint or SAP-type developer. Still, these two specialty players both gained steady market share and added rich features to support corporate legal management of preservation efforts. Just in time for Legal Tech NY 2011, I saw the basic hold notice workflow show up in AD eDiscovery, kCura Method, StoredIQ, Guidance EnCase eDiscovery and many more. A quick check of the eDJ Tech Matrix shows 25 products with legal hold notice functionality today and I will bet that this blog reminds several more to update their listings.

According to Wikipedia, a seanchaí is a traditional Irish storyteller/historian. A commonly encountered English spelling of the Irish word is shanachie. All lawyers need to be able to tell stories to convey facts and explain concepts. They do this for judges, to juries and occasionally among clients. For such a task, there’s no better preparation than kissing the Blarney Stone.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Kevin Esposito. Published: 2011-03-21 12:00:14  The children’s song “Do Re Mi” starts with the line “Let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start”.  What seems like a standard concept even for children is anything but when operating in the world of eDiscovery.  In many engagements, we’re brought into the mix long after work has started [...]

Greg Buckles’ recent post on legal hold notices reaching eDiscovery platforms hinted at something that I believe many organizations will be doing this year – connecting legal hold process management with execution of collection and preservation activities. While this would seem an obvious and not-so-revolutionary next step, it’s one that is not easy to implement and not necessarily specifically called for in any rules governing the practice of eDiscovery. Thus, I sense hesitation on the part of some practitioners. But, I believe the process management and IT benefits of making the connection will ultimately start to win out this year.