Search results for: simple

In my consulting practice, I frequently work with corporate legal departments to select and prepare their designated ‘IT Custodians’ who will have to sign affidavits and may be deposed/testify as a Rule 30(b)(6) witness. Historically, these designated subject matter experts covered accounting systems, business practices and other complicated areas relevant to the issues at the heart of a matter. The enterprise ESI lifecycle itself has become so complicated that every preservation or collection request may now require a translator to effectively communicate all the implications of system configurations, user actions and discovery technologies on the scope and format of response efforts.

I have always contended that the estimates of the true volume and cost of eDiscovery compliance resembled the proverbial iceberg. The Socha-Gelbmann Survey, Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave only deal with the small minority of matters that rise above the waters because their particular size or risk forced the parties to treat them with due diligence. The recent run of judicial sanctions and caselaw have focused entirely on preservation and search criteria issues, but they have raised corporate awareness about the difficulties associated with desktop preservation and collection. I have seen this awareness translated into corporate clients exploring their options, if not actually conducting RFP exercises in search of a solution.

Howard Reissner, CEO of Planet Data, forwarded me new eDiscovery decision with best practice implications, Mt. Hawley Ins. Co. v. Felman Production, Inc., 2010 WL 1990555 (S.D. W. Va. May 18, 2010). Being elbow deep in an ugly client issue, I did not get around to digesting the case until well after Ralph Losey, Craig Ball and others have properly dissected it. So I missed the scoop and have to settle for chewing over some of the crumbs in one of the more interesting recent discovery decisions. Stepping aside from the legal wrangling about privilege waiver, I always enjoy getting insight into the raw metrics and burden of litigation that can be dissected publically. Start with the fact that 1,638 GB were collected via forensic imaging from 29 custodians. That means beginning with roughly 60 GB/user. Typical processing at $350-500/GB could have run the Feldman $500-750k just to get it ready to filter and search by their provider, Innovative Discovery. Although the actual file/email count was not given in the opinion, we can roughly guess that it was between 8 and 12 million individual ‘documents’. Even assuming that you can drop 50% in system files and the usual filters, Felman was still staring at a multimillion dollar manual review.

Since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) went into effect in December 2006, organizations have struggled to effectively manage information in a manner that makes eDiscovery efficient. There was an assumption at the time that we could just extend records management policies to the rest of our information and solve the problem that way. But, records management is complex; corporate file plans are often well over 1,000 categories deep – how can employees be expected to classify every single document, email, or other information asset into a file plan category? The key is to make reasonable efforts to set retention policies for all content, and let records be classified by the experts into the file plan.

Almost every new processing or review application that I have seen over the last year has featured a left hand navigation window that enables users to dynamically filter the collection by Author, Date, Type and more. You can call this faceted navigation, guided search or browsing navigation, but it boils down to the user’s ability to actively browse/filter the collection by metadata characteristics and categories that have been extracted from the index. Although this seems like just another way to construct a search, this feature offers a lot more to the discerning user. In older platforms, users had to run reports on their collections to extract the summary population metrics across different fields. The first one that I recall was the Tally function in Summation. This could only be done one field at a time, but unlike most static reports, you could generate the tally numbers on a set of search results instead of the entire collection. Current review, processing and even archiving products like Clearwell, Relativity, Introspect and Symantec’s Discovery Accelerator can generate these hierarchical ‘facets’ across multiple fields and display the total and item level counts dynamically in real time.

While there are some common trends, every company is different and the disconnect between legal and IT is so large that gauging eDiscovery purchasing habits is complex.

Here is the last batch of takeaways from my briefings at the recent ILTA 2010. I have been able to schedule deep dives on some of the new offerings, so I hope to bring you more details on the new toys.

Officially, the U.S. recession started in December 2007 and ‘ended’ last June. Unofficially, we all know of talented people who are still looking for work. Anecdotally, the eDiscovery market seemed to bottom out in the third quarter of last year. I know that I saw a lot more resumes floating around LegalTech 2010 than in previous years. That led me to wonder who had closed shop or been acquired in the last couple years. I figured that one of the better ways to chase this list down would be to compare the LTNY Exhibitor lists from year to year. This exercise turned up some interesting numbers and facts.

We all know that Office 2007 and later files are a different file format from your traditional DOC/XLS/PPT files, but I thought that it was worth exploring them with an eye on their potential impact in eDiscovery activities. First we need a simple explanation of what changed from Office 2003 to Office 2007 formats. Prior to 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files were each proprietary binary file formats that required the application or a viewer to open. Office 2007 adopted an XML-based file format called Office Open XML that uses a common set of XML files within a compressed Zip container. These Extensible Markup Language (XML) files are simple text files that resemble HTML. The files now have an X or M added to their traditional file extensions to indicate whether they are flat XML or if they have embedded macro content. So DOC, XLS and PPT have become DOCX/DOCM, XLSX/XLSM and PPTX/PPTM. There are many advantages to the open formats, but we will focus on the potential discovery impact.

While conducting my discovery scenario testing on Exchange 2010, I found that Microsoft had made two steps forward along with what seems like several strange steps back. In the early days of corporate networks, personal computers and enterprise software, administration was reserved for wizardly geeks who had mastered various esoteric command line languages. I recall the blessed feeling of relief when I stumbled through my first administrative GUI (Graphical User Interface). The admin GUI brought mastery of systems and applications into the realm of the merely mortal user. When evaluating software, I tend to view applications that force the user to learn command switches and syntax as immature. As a counterpoint, I acknowledge that the command line functionality is fantastic for an advanced user to run batch scripts or even automate functionality. When I first looked at Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta (only version available at the time), I was astounded to find that they had killed off ExMerge, the administrative utility used for years to import and export PST files from mailboxes.