Essays

While moderating CLE sessions at the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat this week, I received multiple emails from clients and contemporaries drawing my attention to the breaking scandal around the erroneous web cache forensic reports in the Casey Anthony trial. As it happens, one of my sessions with Herb Roitblat and Jason Velasco was “Validation Testing - Defending Your eDiscovery Process”. I have not been able to get a more detailed analysis of the exact issue with the CacheBack software used by John Bradley (the designer) as yet. The primary problem was that his initial analysis showed that someone on the Anthony residence computer had run searches for “Chloroform” 84 times when it was later determined that this had happened only one time. This is a good example of how even the best intentioned and experienced user can come up with erroneous results in unusual or unanticipated circumstances.

Although none of the principals involved want to speak on the record, I managed to get some detailed information on the technical issues. Consider this a Part 2 to my blog on the discrepancies raised by the defense between the initial police report using Digital Detective’s NetAnalysis of 1 visit and the subsequent SiQuest CacheBack report of 84 visits related to chloroform from the Anthony family computer. The NY Times article does a good job of the event timeline, so I am just going to focus on the deep geek details. All of this centers around the parsing and extraction of Google searches and site visitations from the Firefox 2 browser history. Firefox Versions 1 & 2 used a rather unique and problematic database file coined “Mork” after the quirky TV alien ‘Morky & Mindy’ TV show.

It seemed like every single presentation I was in at the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat last week contained the term “reasonable.” Most speakers, myself included, had to position responses to questions as “do what is reasonable for your organization.” As a consultant, it feels like a cop-out to say something like that because it’s essentially saying, “it depends,” and that’s just such a typical consultant thing to say. Reasonableness, though, truly does depend. It depends on the organization and it depends on the matter.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-07-28 15:07:48  We had an amazing week time last week at the Carmel Valley Retreat.  Chris LaCour did an excellent job of putting together a program that was both relaxing as well as informative.  I’m looking forward to watching this program evolve over the coming years.Now that we are past that event, we are now in the swing [...]

The breaking Casey Anthony forensic story has delayed my recap of the first Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat last week. Luckily, Barry Murphy managed a good post on day one. Chris LaCour, the event organizer, deserves congratulations for breaking the LTNY event mold. He dared to plan a small scale interactive format heavy with experts in a beautiful venue that encouraged open social dialogue. He recruited Browning Marean, George Socha, Barry Murphy and myself to create focus tracks featuring cutting edge topics for the panelists to debate. This was not the typical sponsor driven marketing messages, but real discussion that actively engaged the audience. I moderated three of my CLE sessions and passed the microphone to Kevin Stehr of Lexis Nexis for the “Defining the eDiscovery Platform” session. The participating providers generally limited themselves to sponsoring meals and social events, which kept the event relatively free of the marketing madness that has dominated the big NY show. I hope that this retreat signals that the eDiscovery market is willing to consider alternative academic, market and social events.

Is information governance on your radar screen? It’s certainly on ours. For the past several months, eDJ has been conducting an information governance survey with Barclay Blair of ViaLumina, Ltd. Analysis of the results is ongoing – the first report will be out in September and we’ll have a webinar on the topic September 15, 2011 at 1pm ET / 10am PT. The data is teaching us a lot about the topic; we’ll use the data to put some definition around the term and provide some recommendations on how to gain real value through information governance.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-08-09 10:35:21  Greg is very excited about attending ILTA coming up in a few weeks...that's all he's talking about right now.  Nashville this...Nashville that.  One would think that he never had BBQ before.  In fact, he recently added a panel on Wednesday, August 24 at 1:30pm CST on Keep Your Eyes on Firm Goals When Your Head Is [...]

In looking through the data from our information governance survey, I sometimes find results that don’t necessarily match the reality of what goes on in practice. That is not necessarily surprising given the challenges of info governance, but it’s certainly interesting. One such data point from this survey is the fact that an overwhelming number of respondents – 83% - believe that the primary focus of information governance is the management of both unstructured content (e.g. Word processing documents) and structured data (e.g. databases). Seems like a “duh” finding, right?

Wrapping up my coverage of the first Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat, it seems strange that almost a month has flown by. Then again, we have been in serious growth mode at eDJ now that Jason Velasco has come on board. As I am working on my ILTA 2011 sessions on Predictive Coding/Remote Collection and the Cloud for Firms, it becomes clear that my sessions in Carmel have changed my expectations of audience participation and content quality for conferences. I put a lot of thought into how to prevent the two classic conference panel killers, ‘Death by Powerpoint’ and the ‘Charlie Brown Speaker’. The informal setting and intimate audience gave me the freedom to take risks that might not have flown as well in the packed, stifling rooms of LTNY.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-08-16 13:41:45  As CEO of a media company, I thought it would be a good idea to learn more about social media and how to utilize it.  I’m not an old fogey by any stretch of the imagination, but I really didn’t fully embrace the Twitter community or blogosphere until recently.  This is surprising because I always considered myself [...]