Are you Ready for the October Wave of Pandemic Layoffs?
Many corporations and smaller businesses took COVID-19 stimulus funds that prevented them from mass furloughs or layoffs until October. That employee protection is about to run out. Hundreds of thousands of workers will log off after receiving the bad news by email or phone. Many of them will walk away with thumb drives full of customer lists, contacts, competitive pricing and other sensitive corporate data. [...]
eDJ Brief: Relativity Aero UI
I finally got the bandwidth to be briefed on the new Aero UI for RelativityOne that was announced last Relativity Fest. For years I have not-so-gently pushed the kCura/Relativity PM team to create a user interface that was more approachable. Andrew Sieja’s ‘expert platform for experts’ pleased power users while generating adoption resistance from corporate and retained counsel who just wanted to dive into their [...]
eDJ COVID-19 Guideline Challenge: Preserving Ephemeral CDC Guidance
The Wayback machine has taken 2,073 snapshots of the CDC’s COVID-19 Business Guidance webpage since it was launched March 6, 2020. Why would it make >11 snapshots per day (74 on August 17th)? This CDC page is the primary national level guidance for businesses that want to reopen safely. The nifty Changes tool (beta screenshot below) shows that page could have changed 2-3 times in [...]
A.I. Liability: Tools No Better Than Trainers
I do a lot of acceptance and QC testing for clients as their designated 30(b)(6) witness of their discovery systems. In fact, I like to find hidden gotchas and exceptions that I can take back to providers to fix. In over 30 years I have never found a ‘bad’ analytic system. Instead I frequently encounter users who do not ‘trust but verify’ before they rely [...]
Are You Ready for Thousands of Zoom-Teams Transcripts?
This week Microsoft added an automated transcription feature to their online Word. It is easy to use and renders a surprisingly accurate transcript that differentiates between speakers and keeps the times of the conversation segments. This is great from a user perspective. Why bother to keep meeting notes when you have a free transcript of everything said? It does present some challenges to your retention [...]
How Will the Pandemic Change the Legal Tech Market?
KLDiscovery Inc.’s announcement of a roughly 18% drop in revenue for Q2 2020 is actually less than I expected. They also managed to cut operating expenses by 15.8% (which translates to a loss of people and office space). There are few publicly owned eDiscovery corporations. The majority privately owned companies tend to conceal their financial health unless they are actively soliciting a round of investment [...]
Minimizing Risk in Separation of Employment
We are living in an age of unprecedented layoffs, work stoppages, downsizing, and general unemployment. I frequently call out weak corporate termination policies/protocols during discovery health assessments. It is a complicated process with many players, data sources and heightened emotions. Most people hate confrontations or making a scene. Any fuzziness in your separation protocols may result in former employees walking away with corporate data on [...]
Are You an ESI Hoarder? Discovery Lessons from the Big Tech Hearings
How long should you keep ad hoc internal communications? That is the question that bubbled up while listening to the four Big Tech CEO’s trying to explain a few of their 1.3 million emails and internal documents obtained by the House Antitrust Subcommittee's investigation that kicked off June 2019. The vast majority of those exhibits dated from 2010-2012 M&A strategy discussions. We have no idea [...]
Trump’s Litigation Skeletons Refused to Stay In the Closet, How About Yours?
As I listened to an interview with Mary Trump about how she turned over financial documents to the New York Times it got me thinking about all the incredibly sensitive information just parked at firms world wide for inactive/settled matters. Fred Trump’s contested will was settled in 2001. Those 19 boxes of documents sat at her law firm for roughly 17 YEARS before she had [...]
Best Hosted Analytics Options for Non-Litigation Discovery?
My philosophy is once a client, always a client. Got what seemed to be a typical referral request from a counsel I had recently supported on a corporate client matter. The classic, “Who do you recommend for Relativity hosting?” quickly went down a rabbit hole of new generation data sources, foreign language docs and such that wrote off any of the new self-service providers/platforms. All [...]
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