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Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s first opinion and while it first appears to be a simple procedural issue, it may have far reaching consequences with counsel making risk vs. cost decisions around their discovery efforts. The case involves a dispute over whether privilege waiver and other discovery related district court orders can be appealed during or after the case, whether it qualifies for an interlocutory appeal in lawyer speak. The unanimous opinion found that with some exceptions discovery decisions could only be appealed after the final judgment was rendered.

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.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-26 23:07:42  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 [...]

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.

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.

While utility computing holds much promise, there are also examples of SaaS being used effectively in the eDiscovery market. EDD processors offer a web-based interface to case data. These interfaces provide varying levels of review functionality. When you think about it, hosted review has long been a staple of this market and the review platforms of vendors like CaseCentral, Kroll Ontrack, and Iron Mountain / Stratify are really SaaS applications.

Several recent blog posts and discussions on various industry listservs have raised interesting issues about the potential problems and benefits of consultants working for and with software and service providers. See John Heckman’s post ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway?’ as well as Seth Rowland’s ‘Sales vs Consulting – The Cost of Independence’ for some well developed criticisms of consultant’s who are compensated by the seller instead of the buyers. Steve Miller’s ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway? My Two Cents’ provides some counterpoints supporting vendor relationships for consultants. These opinions seem to originate from the software sales area instead of actual consulting on cases.

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 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.

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?