Essays

Today, Guidance Software announced the acquisition of CaseCentral, a provider of EDD processing and review. According the press release, “under the terms of the agreement, Guidance Software will acquire CaseCentral for upfront consideration of approximately $17.1 million, consisting of $8.3 million in cash, $8.3 million in Guidance Software common stock, and the assumption of $0.5 million of debt, net of cash. Depending on CaseCentral’s SaaS revenue growth, Guidance Software may pay up to an additional $33 million in cash over the next three years.”

This was my first LegalTech where I could put on my analyst hat without needing to manage corporate clients or speaking panels. It brought home to me just how hard it was to switch mindsets and reminded me of the 2010 PBS special, “Digital Nation” that shattered my personal myth of multitasking. It is safe to say that I brought more to my hectic briefing schedule this year and took a lot more out of them as well. The other new element was taking digital notes on the iPad. Barry liked the Penultimate app, while I finally settled on PhatPad with the hope that I could leverage it’s handwriting recognition, photo and audio recording features.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Lynn Frances Jae. Published: 2012-02-09 07:00:01  Predictive Coding, or Technology Assisted Review (TAR) was the subject of five sessions at LegalTech. Even when it wasn’t the focus of a session, it was often mentioned. Why? Probably because so many of the eDiscovery experts have been busy reminding us of how ineffective our traditional means of identifying relevant documents actually are. [...]

It has been stated over and over in discussions around PC-TAR, that it is imperative to have a well-defined workflow that includes solid processes for purposes of defensibility (e.g., sampling, documentation). In Part One I pointed out that we had these same conversations around acceptable, defensible practices when using key terms and all human review. Yet, there are still a number of practitioners that are not making use of solid, defensible practices. For example, I continue to see attorneys blindly selecting key terms and proceed directly to process, review, and production with no sampling and minimal documentation along the way. My question, then, remains whether the discussions surrounding PC-TAR will prompt practitioners to employ better practices no matter what method of collection/search/review is. Or, will we maintain the status quo: those that understand the need for and importance of solid processes and project management, and those that don’t?

Behind our firewall, eDJ has a custom Google search engine based on the top 1,000+ eDiscovery related sites and search terms. I was ‘working’ on this engine over the weekend, as we all know that relevance is a moving target and searches must be optimized to stay relevant. A strange headline from my local paper caught my eye, “Falkenberg: Housing authority’s snoop had eye on others” from the Houston Chronicle. A quick scan revealed that the local county housing authority hired an eDiscovery service provider, Pathway Forensics, to make an open records request for emails, phone records and credit card statements of the local county judge and his staff. That same county judge has questioned recent large salary adjustments and pet projects of the housing authority’s top officials. The short article explains the almost comic plot to get some kind of dirt on an elected official who is trying to mind the public coffers. More relevant to our eDiscovery community is the questionable role that an eDiscovery service provider plays in this comedy of errors.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2012-02-13 18:06:26  The eDiscoveryJournal has been growing in both readership and content over the past few months (thank you to all of our wonderful readers).  Our goal is to provide as much possible insight on the issues and trends related to the eDiscovery and Information Governance spaces.  In order to expand that insight, we have three more independent [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Amber Scorah. Published: 2012-02-14 12:32:56  Policies are like laws… we need them, they give structure.  But policies tend to be reactive, just like law enforcement.Take, for example, the war on drugs.  Passing drug laws alone isn’t enough – we have programs in schools to teach kids, communities offer programs to help people get off drugs.  This is, of course, because [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Mikki Tomlinson. Published: 2012-02-15 08:55:34  As hinted to be forthcoming during the LTNY Man vs. Machine: The Promise/Challenge of Predictive Coding & Other Disruptive Technologies session, The Honorable Andrew J. Peck, United States Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of New York, is now on record on the topic of Predictive Coding – Technology Assisted Review (“PC-TAR”) in the Da [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2012-02-17 09:08:26  Most of the conversation these days in the eDiscovery arena has been around Predictive Coding, the Cloud, and Big Data topics, so I wanted to bring us back to one of the basic issues in the eDiscovery marketplace…pricing.The Predictive Coding/Technology Assisted Review (PC-TAR) makes the world a bit fuzzier as it blends the processing and review [...]

With budget constraints and reduced internal staffing putting pressure on in-house corporate departments that analyze and make decisions on an ever-increasing pool of potentially discoverable material, creating a solid in-house eDiscovery team is a big challenge.Even so, there are ways to leverage your current corporate organization structure to create a solid in-house eDiscovery team. In part one of this two part article, we offer some good strategies for getting multi-department collaboration, and advice on how to determine which eDiscovery procedures are more effectively and economically handled internally.