Essays

As legal technology migrates from external service providers to inside the firewall, it is more important than ever to test and understand your rates of collection, processing, loading, reviewing and producing ESI. Litigation support is a deadline driven business. Counsel will wait as long as possible before pulling the trigger on discovery in the hope and expectation of resolving the matter without having to incur further costs. Successfully adapting to this pressure cooker lifestyle requires that you construct a ‘burst capacity’ workflow as opposed to a normal ‘continuous capacity’ model.

The final result was an initial list of 543 sites that met my fairly strict requirements. That means that almost 95% of sites were only vaguely related to our industry or practice. No wonder webinars, conferences and training organizations are getting decent attendance. If you do not already know what you are looking for, your odds of finding it are pretty slim or you are in for a lot of surfing.

“What positive impact?” you ask. It seems that when times get tough, good companies get busy and the others go out of business. Every booth that I visited trotted out new features, licensing options and a better overall understanding of the customer’s needs. The economic pressure cooker seems to have sounded the wake up call to service and technology providers alike. What impressed me the most was that everyone was able to express a consistent value proposition message. Many still have technology flaws and poor usability, but they are becoming aware of the user’s context and can present their offerings within some kind of usage scenario.

Barry Murphy called out 2010 as “the year of ECA”. Certainly those three letters were found on almost every booth, even if the exhibitors did not exactly agree on what that entails. The majority of the processing players seem to consider canned reports and inventory functionality to provide ECA support. But the important trend is that everyone is looking to provide upstream decision support.

This year I tried an experiment in my continual quest to gather as much information from the Discovery Maze (LNTY Exhibit Halls) as possible. The experiment was a bust, but there were lessons in why and how it failed. The idea was to recruit corporate and firm managers and specialists with 5+ years experience to be ‘Secret Shoppers’ on the Exhibit Hall. This way I could try to reach more of the floor and everyone in the network would share their feedback on a set of secured web pages.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-02-16 04:00:27Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.                 As corporate legal departments struggle to control costs, they are often shocked at the lack of transparency and standardization in eDiscovery software and service purchasing. Public corporations have long since created structured procurement processes managed by IT departments and business units. Because the legal service industry evolved [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-26 18:07:42Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. If the term Early Case Assessment (ECA) causes you to roll your eyes and reach for a copy of your JD/MBA buzzword bingo sheet, you’re not alone. ECA is a term thrown around by technology providers ranging from email archiving vendors to actual document review vendors.  But, just [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-30 08:01:03Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Much to my surprise, there are many who believe that the email archiving market is dying fast.  As evidence, they point to:The introduction of Microsoft Exchange 2010 with native archiving capabilitiesThe struggles of pure-play archiving vendors to compete with larger vendors like Symantec and the aforementioned Exchange 2010The [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-02-02 01:39:40Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. LegalTech New York is appropriately scheduled early in the year.  Optimism is high, marketing budgets flush, and sales plans are bullish.  In the past, LegalTech has tended to be blustery.  Too many vendors put out meaningless press releases in an effort to drum up buzz.  Too much of [...]

As a result of the potential for significant sanctions, one of the first information governance initiatives organizations seek to implement is legal hold – or litigation hold (yet another example of how much confusing industry jargon is out there). Implemented well, legal hold can help an organization avoid sanctions and improve both the efficacy and efficiency of downstream eDiscovery activities – collection, processing, and review.