Search results for: simple

As inside and outside counsel struggle with ever larger ESI collections, the question of appropriate sample sizes for quality assurance pops up on the national lists, conference panels and in social gatherings of law geeks. There are many different statistical theories that can be used to calculate the relative probability that the results of a sample set can be extrapolated against the total collection. In simpler terms, sampling is used to define how confident we are in an assertion when we have not or cannot review every single item due to scale, availability, cost or time. This is expressed as the Confidence Interval or Confidence Range. Do not worry, I am not a statistician and have no intention of even trying to translate significance levels, variability parameters or estimation errors. Instead, I will talk about how sampling can apply to the discovery process.

Any organization that ignores information lifecycle management from this point forward is stupid – plain and simple. To argue that eDiscovery is not a concern only categorizes an organization into the ostrich category. It’s time to get the heads out of the sand and start building out an infrastructure that supports finding and collecting potentially relevant information quickly and to manage the process for retaining and preserving this information.

As IT becomes more and more involved in eDiscovery software purchasing, the scalability and performance of tools will be important decision criteria. But, when every vendor claims to be the most scalable on the market, what should buyers do?

In Part 1, we explored changing face of internet and intranet collaborative communication platforms and the increased risks posed by outdated policies and technologies. My main concern over these systems is the unreasonable expectation that a typical corporate custodian could preserve relevant ESI stored in Sharepoint or another cloud based system. Despite recent rulings emphasizing written Hold Notification, most users simply do not have the tech savvy, rights or proper tools to either make a complete preservation copy or secure the items in place against expiry or accidents. That shifts the onus back onto Legal to effectively preserve these dynamic data sources.

In several recent posts, Barry and I have called out the challenges of collecting dynamic content from web based collaboration platforms, focusing on Sharepoint as the market leading platform. It is definitely on the minds of corporate legal departments and providers alike. Our articles prompted the team at Kiersted Systems to request a demo and briefing on their newest Sharepoint collection and review offering. Although we do not do classic product ‘reviews’ at eDiscoveryJournal, I do like to explore the implications of new methodologies and technologies. Sharepoint 2010 itself is new to the market and brings new capabilities to manage legal holds on records as well as more robust search and export features. The new ability to make a ‘preservation copy’ within Sharepoint is probably the highlight feature to take note of. They have wrapped a bit more workflow and specific action templates around holds, search and export, but the basic item level functionality seems unchanged.

I had a chance to speak with Lance Sloves, a Director at Computer Forensic Services, Inc. about forensic collection. He points out that, first, it’s fairly rare for any organization to have well-rounded or proper policies and processes in place for good, defensible collection – that is just the way it is. Second, few organizations possess the expertise in proper data and forensic collection that is required in today’s eDiscovery market. The fact is that many litigators are getting smarter and smarter about collection – and some can smell blood when something has not been properly vetted. And I’ve yet to meet an IT manager who relishes the thought of being an expert witness.

In Part 1, I outlined the typical litigation profile questions that would support a realistic needs assessment for a solo attorney or small firm. From a the set of requirements, we explored the basic software packages through the EDRM lifecycle while calling out small firm perspectives. In the intervening weeks, I have tried to track down and get hands on new applications and SaaS offerings that might meet my challenge criteria. The nice folks at QD Documents got me a trial license for their $500 package. The product definitely gives a solo attorney the basic organizational space to code in documents, exhibits, transcripts, filings and all the other working pieces of a matter. Unfortunately, it is really just a nice, clean document tracking and management space, rather than an eDiscovery processing platform. I suppose that you could put URL links in field for native files, but that just feels too much like Concordance. So a good, cost-effective case management tool, but not an answer to my challenge.

During a recent software testing engagement, I ran into an interesting issue with date based searches that could impact your discovery search results. The root of the issue is based in the different ways of representing communication attachments or other multipart items such as Sharepoint/wiki page attachments. In the dark ages of eDiscovery, our software was designed to simulate the myriad physical attachment levels of scanned paper documents. I am not ashamed to recall coding levels of staple, clip and binder groupings back in IPRO ver. 1.5. The system enabled an attorney to determine the exact hierarchical relationship of that individual document to all the others scanned from that box retrieved from Iron Mountain. Newcomers to our field cannot imagine the labor required to manually code in Author, Recipients, Subject and other fields that are now extracted from ESI during processing.

The management and review of native files (ESI) generally requires the extraction of internal/external metadata and the readable text to be indexed for search. Most types of container or multipart files such as ZIP or PST containers must be broken out into individual files for this step and subsequent productions. This is the foundation of what our industry calls Processing. Most counsel, corporate IT and judiciary seem to operate under a presumption of magical perfection in these software and services of specialized eDiscovery providers. Most of these ‘built for purpose’ applications manage to avoid the basic MS Windows issues that drop or alter date fields, but the infinite variables associated with ESI formats and contents make it nearly impossible for any system to automatically get everything right, even if we could agree on what ‘right’ is. Although I had heard about Planet Data’s acquisition of the Cerulean Engine™, the time at the AIIM 360 Expo gave me an opportunity to understand the deep processing experience that accompanied the software.

My first article on corporate data collections focused on preserving the content, container and context of native files as found on network shares and desktop folders. Discovery requests are increasingly targeting email archives, content management systems and other semi-structured data sources. Most of these sources include search and retrieval features, so one could assume that this makes them a safer candidate for in-house collections. This is not automatically true and is definitely worth talking through some of the common problems that can lead to incomplete or altered retrievals. The first thing to realize is that these systems were not designed to comply with legal discovery requests as found in the United States. The search and retrieval functionality was added to support a business user seeking to find a few specific email or an IT administrator restoring a larger set of items that were either lost or need to be transferred to a new user. Both of these scenarios stress quick, simple search without needing to verify the accuracy or integrity of the search or restoration.