Essays

Earlier this month, I had a chance to participate in the panel, “Cloud, SharePoint, and Social Media: Discovery on the Next Data Frontier” at the LitCon 2011 show. My fellow panelists were Larry Briggi of FTI Consulting, Leigh Isaacs of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and James Zucker, Esq. of Hogan Lovells. We’ve done this panel several times at conferences and on webinars and I learn something new every time. At the LitCon show, it was clear that social media is quickly becoming one of the biggest issues in eDiscovery. Mr. Zucker’s list of cases where social media is involved keeps growing.

I had a great session with one of the top eDiscovery law firms this week. We spend time on their pain points and discussing the ownership ESI collections as they progress through the firm. One of the things that hit me was the realization that as eDiscovery has consumed more and more of the actual discovery lifecycle, we may be unintentionally taking the traditional gatekeepers out of the loop. When I reflect on the print/copy days of discovery, paralegals always owned the boxes. When a partner went looking for a critical document, the paralegal knew exactly where it hid and could reconstruct how it got into evidence. Paralegals still coordinate with the corporate clients on collections and overall management of deadlines, but it feels like initial collections now vanish into litsupport or service provider shops to emerge transformed into review sets. The problem is that this metamorphosis is generally a black box process (yes, I like the phrase because it evokes the abracadabra moment).

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the EDRM Mid Year Meeting in St.Paul, Minnesota. The midyear meeting is a great opportunity for all of the individual project groups to come together and evaluate the progress made on key projects for the year. Although a midyear review may be standard operating procedure for large corporations, few industry groups that I’ve been exposed to have the discipline to insist on such a midyear checkpoint.

That there is a dearth of standardized best practices for eDiscovery is an understatement. The corporate world is still fairly immature in its approach to information governance and eDiscovery. Thus, it is refreshing to see the recently published New York State Bar Association’s “Best Practices in eDiscovery in New York State and Federal Courts.” This publication is not necessarily the eDiscovery bible, but it does present some common sense, easy-to-follow guidelines for beginning to get one’s eDiscovery house in order.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-11-03 18:13:43  I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the IQPC 6th Annual eDiscovery for Pharma, Biotech, and Medical Devices in Philadelphia last week (October 24-26, 2011).  I have been to several IQPC eDiscovery events in the past and this one was very much on par with the others I’ve seen over the years.IQPC events typically [...]

A sharp client recently said, “Let’s wrestle the alligator in the boat before we tackle the rest of them.” That pithy statement allowed the rest of his team to let go of the ancillary challenges that kept distracting everyone from the immediate goal that we were there to resolve. Face it, enterprise information governance or true discovery maturity is an unattainable goal. That does not mean that we should give up. Instead it means that we must strive to identify and prioritize the initiatives that we CAN attain so that we stay within the corporations idea of acceptable risk, cost and capabilities. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ definition of litigation readiness. For unregulated corporations with a minimal litigation profile, solid preservation and a proven mix of firm and providers may give them everything they need. Serial litigants may require a full litigation support department with processing, hosted review and production capabilities to control ESI and costs. You cannot create and implement enterprise wide systems in the blink of an eye, no matter what that rep assured you over the second bottle of Zinfandel.

Cloud computing is a hot topic. The cloud’s ability to provide solutions that are lower cost and simpler to manage just cannot be ignored. Our recent SaaS survey showed that approximately 75% of respondents are leaning toward SaaS or hybrid on-premise/SaaS solutions for eDiscovery. Craig Ball recently put out a very interesting article about how running eDiscovery technology in the cloud will be more efficient. Craig goes so far as to say, “cloud computing makes collection unnecessary.”

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s webinar on using legal holds to start expiring ever-growing archives. I wanted to thank my panelists: Kyle McClain (Monsanto), Allison Walton Esq (Symantec) and Mikki Tomlinson. Mikki was Chesapeake Energy’s eDiscovery Advisor when we asked her to participate in the webinar, but the eDJ Group was fortunate enough to steal her away to become our new Director of Consulting. We have been growing out our strategic services group based on my Reason-eD client base to meet the demand for independent eDiscovery expertise. Now back to the webinar. This webinar and the eDJ research report, “Legal Holds for Enterprise Archives” were inspired by the sudden upsurge in interest we have seen in corporations wanting to finally start shrinking the archives that they implemented to manage email and legal preservation requirements. Thanks to Symantec for sponsoring complimentary copies of the research report for all attendees.

It would be naïve to think that eDiscovery could knock the train that is “the cloud” off its rails. However, the stringent rules that companies are under to produce information in a timely manner for litigation or compliance purposes could be a thorn in the side for both companies and cloud providers a alike. eDJ is currently running a survey on eDiscovery and the cloud (take it and you could win a Kindle Fire). Analysis of the data is ongoing and the findings are both interesting and a bit scary for anyone responsible for information management.

This is my first entry as a contributor to the eDiscoveryJournal so I wanted to make it special with an announcement about a new initiative I’m leading with the eDJ Group. While you and I may not have met yet and we may not have met the other professionals that are reading this blog at the very same time, we are all bonded by this special community of eDiscovery and information governance professionals. Wouldn’t you agree that we could all grow from each other’s knowledge? Of course we could!The ability to share knowledge, pain points, successes and challenges, and state of the market with peers is invaluable. The challenges, however, include: opportunity, confidentiality, competition and facilitation. In recognizing both the need for knowledge sharing in our industry and the challenges associated therewith, eDiscovery Journal and eDJ Group have created the “eDJ Peer Group” and I am proud to lead its launch.