Essays

I spoke at a session of the AccessData user conference in Las Vegas recently. The trip was great, with the exception of losing $500 at the craps table. I love going to user conferences because I get a chance to chat with real folks practicing real corporate eDiscovery. Most can’t talk on the record, but I get a chance to hear the things they are really trying to do – real-life stuff. I was able to have some good chats after my session on eDiscovery trends. Interestingly, I heard some very similar themes from some very diverse users.

One of the first questions from Jason Velasco, the new eDJ CEO, was, “Any particular reason that eDJ is still on POP3/IMAP for email?” This may sound like techno-jargon, but he was asking why we were still thinking like solo practitioners in this age of cloud based solutions. Traditionally, running a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino server has not been worth the time and expense for most small businesses when most web hosting companies will route your email for free. As an old developer with half a dozen domains still hanging around, this free email routing via POP3 or IMAP protocol made sense. For a growing business with geographically remote users, it does not support our requirements for shared calendars and other collaboration tools. More importantly, my recent hardware loss was a personal wake up call to the fact that even solo practitioners should consider moving to synchronized cloud storage to enable universal search, access and security. I cannot count the times that I have had to send damaged attorney drives to Kroll or a friend with a clean room.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-06-07 09:30:24  Well it’s a fine day for me. I’ve started a new role at a new and growing company.  There is great technology and a changing legal landscape.  It’s still the same story that we’ve been saying for years.  But now I get to look at the industry from a different perspective.Yes, I admit it.  I’ve been [...]

No sooner did Recommind announce that it had patented predictive coding was there an article in law.com about the unhappy reaction of Recommind’s competitors. With the blogosphere chirping, I thought it a good idea to weigh in on this news. I read the Recommind press release, which states that the patent covers “systems and methods for iterative computer-assisted document analysis and review. This patent gives Recommind, its customers and its partners exclusive rights to use, host and sell systems and processes for iterative, computer-expedited document review.” It is not hard to see why competitors are reacting defensively to this release – it would appear at first glance that Recommind would be the only company allowed to provide predictive coding software.

A new eDiscovery malpractice lawsuit was filed this week, J-M Manufacturing v. McDermott Will & Emery. The central issue is the production of 3,900 privileged documents in a 250,000 document qui-tam investigation. Nate Raymond at Law.com/LTN gives a good summary here. This case was definitely the hot topic at last night’s Houston b-Discovery social meeting. In reading the complaint, a couple things jumped out at me.

Twice in the last month, I have monitored client enterprise system issues that were caused by ever-expanding back-up time. Now generally I am not down in the pits with the admins wrestling to keep massive communication, archiving, etc systems stable any more. However, I have recently been asked to serve as the corporate 30(b)(6) witness on enterprise systems. That means I need to understand their history, architecture and to monitor their ongoing health. Back-up windows have always been a necessary evil for enterprise systems that constantly ingest new documents. There are many replication and live fail-over systems that avoid taking systems off-line, but old fashioned tape back-up seems to dominate my client base. This means that legal searches, placing holds and retrievals are effectively stopped 4+ hours per day. The impact of a 15-25% productivity loss becomes all too clear when trying to give clients a realistic estimation for large PST migrations, archive conversions, legal hold initiatives and even critical case productions. Imagine telling the U.S. Attorney that their data will be another couple weeks just because we have to back up the system every night.

Microsoft’s SharePoint has achieved significant market traction over the past decade – various research studies show the level of organizations using SharePoint ranging from 50% - over 90%. Clearly, SharePoint is a force to be reckoned with. The eDiscovery market took notice of SharePoint in the last few years and we’ve seen archiving and collection solutions become available. While SharePoint has appeared in real cases, it has not reached critical mass as an eDiscovery issue just yet.

Things couldn’t be better for me these days at eDiscovery Journal. There is so much going on right now in the eDiscovery industry even with the annual “August Downtime” coming up in a few weeks. I have been on the phone every day since I started work speaking with eDJ’s clients and sponsors. The feedback on Barry and Greg has been exceptional (no surprise there) and I’m confident my move to the eDJ was a good one. One of the organizations that I’ve been working closely with over the past couple of weeks is IQPC. These are the folks that put on conferences around the globe on many different topics and industries. I have presented as well as attended quite a few of these events over the years, and have always enjoyed the curriculum and presenters. The good news is that eDJ and IQPC will be working together in the coming months on several of their programs.

I recently had the opportunity and privilege to give my perspective to the international working group of the Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2). The commission has a three month mandate to provide the Obama Administration with recommendations to support our growing cloud industry. Many of my global corporate clients have struggled to reconcile their eDiscovery, regulatory and storage requirements across their diverse business units in various countries. Preparing for my presentation brought me the realization that we really are moving to the cloud, dragging the luddites along kicking and screaming. I gave a bit of background on the challenges I saw facing global corporations and moved on to why even large enterprises are exploring migrating their systems and data to cloud or hosted services.

I had a chance to sit down last week with Johannes Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer at ZyLAB. I’ve followed ZyLAB for years now and was pleased to see the company so focused on the eDiscovery market. Too often, vendors in the information management world try to offer too much and solve too many problems. That leads to confusion on the part of prospects as to exactly what they need to buy. Now, ZyLAB is not abandoning the broader information management market, but the company is focusing its efforts around what it can sell today – eDiscovery applications.