Search results for: simple

Information Governance (IG) is an incredibly complex task thanks to the distributed ways in which companies create and store information. The holy grail of IG is centralized management of distributed information assets. Much like the King Arthur’s grail, this IG grail is difficult, if not impossible, to find. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) approaches have not worked and enterprise search has not proven to impact the high costs associated with such activities as eDiscovery. That doesn’t stop vendors from trying to create solutions that will get us closer to finding that holy grail, as I was reminded of during a recent vendor briefing.

It has been a topic du jour, but social media discovery does not seem to be gaining the mindshare one might expect given the explosion in usage of social media. Almost 65% of respondents in eDJ’s social experience survey indicate using external social networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) at work. I will not go into the litany of case law regarding the discoverability of social media in criminal and civil litigation. There are many JDs out there more qualified to dig into precedents and what they mean. Suffice it to say that social media is potentially discoverable and ignoring it could lead to sanctions, adverse inferences, and higher than expected eDiscovery costs.

Many of the articles and blogs concerning the ruling in GlaxoSmithKline LLC v. Discovery Works Legal Inc., et al., Case No. 650210/2013 will try to tell you that these kinds of alleged provider misconduct are rare and isolated incidents. Indeed, attorney Michael G. Van Arsdall’s January article asserts, “Of course, there is a very low likelihood such a hostage situation would ever arise with the larg number of reputable vendors that occupy the e-discovery space.” I found Mr. Arsdall’s excellent recommendations for handling providers recycled through numerous blogs/articles without anyone questioning his basic assumption that you should not have issues with ‘reputable vendors’. I wish that business practices in our industry were somehow special, different or above the basic conflicts in the global consumer-provider market that litigation thrives on. We all make our livelihood on bad business deals. So why should eDiscovery providers be any different? Buy any experienced litigation support manager a few libations and then ask them about the ‘bad’ vendors. Then do the same thing with any eDiscovery sales rep and compare the stories. The eDiscovery market is still a relatively immature industry founded on emergency, reactive services purchased with someone else’s money under adversarial conditions.

The EDRM Midyear Meeting press release included the usual project updates and an important announcement regarding George Socha and Tom Gelbmann passing the leadership baton to convert EDRM into a true non-profit standards organization. This transformation raises many questions about the organization’s goals and has some analysts challenging the use (or misuse) of the seven year old lifecycle model by product marketing and management teams. First let’s take a look at these titles, “Is the EDRM a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None?” and “Abandoning the EDRM assembly line: a legal-regulatory technology market ripe for change.” While these rather evocative titles could lead you to believe that the EDRM is to blame for software companies that have built ‘Frankenstacks’, products that attempt to support too many divergent business tasks. I am not exactly sure what specific products were being lumped into this category. Most providers chasing the ‘eDiscovery Platform’ market have added legal hold notification, project workflows and some matter management modules to either collection or review foundations, but these are all supporting related tasks.

My definition of Dark Data differs from Wikipedia:“Data relevant to a discovery request that is either never disclosed or is produced without contextual information that could affect the interpretation of that data.” My first interview on cloud sources as discovery targets turned up surprising frustration from the savvy eDiscovery Counsel for a national plaintiffs firm. I expected to hear about immature collection capabilities and defendant’s who struggled to preserve or collect from Office 365, SalesForce or other cloud systems. I did not expect that requesting parties might be completely in the dark about where a production comes from or how it was collected. eDJ’s consultants have had too many recent engagements supporting the evaluation or migration of email and files to the cloud to doubt the trend. Microsoft has been touting the rapid adoption of Office 365 with corporate and public sector verticals. Many corporations seem to have moved critical ESI to the cloud without a clear plan to meet eDiscovery and Information Governance requirements.

Businesses go through natural evolutionary periods, growing and changing over time – sometimes minor incremental changes, and sometimes more radical changes. Since we started eDiscoveryJournal almost four years ago, the company has gone through a series of minor incremental changes, all leading up to the more radical change that we would like to announce today: it has come time to retire eDiscoveryjournal.com and replace it with a more unified website at http://edjgroupinc.com.

Indications are that eDiscovery solution purchases are about to become more strategic in nature. A decade ago, it was not uncommon to see non-competitive bids for eDiscovery business because so many purchases were reactive and made under intense time pressure. In the past several months, however, the inquiries from clients have become more intelligent and more specific – a sure sign that folks are getting ready to make more strategic investments in software and services.

eDJ’s new report, “Predictive Information Governance: The Time Has Come,” looks at how Predictive IG works and how it can positively impact multiple use-cases.

Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog on managing the balancing act between eDiscovery and business requirements. The blog identified the differing perspectives of key stakeholders in supporting corporate business goals while maintaining compliance with legal hold and discovery response activities, records and information management compliance, and IT goals and objectives. It also examined three relevant topic areas for corporations where differing perspectives were ripe for analysis. Interestingly, the challenges haven’t changed. Nor have the relevant topics used for example. However, advances in technology have altered the landscape.

My regular readers know that I have spent a lot of time evaluating Microsoft’s initial discovery tools for SharePoint and Exchange. With so many of our clients contemplating enterprise wide migrations of unstructured data to on-premise or Office 365 SharePoint, I have been scrambling to keep up with all of the eDiscovery offerings that have built connectors to support business requirements such as retention categorization, legal holds, investigations, collections and even review on in-place data. Up to this point, our knowledge of the new SharePoint eDiscovery Center has been based on our briefings, demonstrations and meetings with the Microsoft (MSFT) team and client POC environments. eDJ uses Office 365 for our email and SharePoint sites, including our development cycles tracking goals, requirements and bugs. Since we upgraded our SharePoint sites to the 2013 infrastructure, I decided to upload my validation test data sets and some known test data to a secured email mailbox and to a SharePoint document folder to run some initial hands on tests. The MSFT product management team had assured me that there were major upgrades to the 2013 FAST index that addressed many of the search issues that I found in my Exchange 2010 testing. I took an attitude of ‘believe it when I see it’ in those early briefings and was pleasantly surprised with my initial tests of known file types and search terms when compared to dtSearch, X1 and Symantec’s Enterprise Vault/Discovery Accelerator. That’s right, the 2013 FAST search may be good enough for selective preservation or collection.