At Relativity Fest 2018, I interviewed Relativity’s Jordan Domash about the then-nascent product Relativity Trace. Twelve months later, I interviewed him again at Relativity Fest 2019, asking him what had changed since we last met.
Jordan Domash said that much had happened in three areas: one was about customers; another was about the progress on the product; the third was to do with the team responsible for Relativity Trace. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Megan Rowland of Inventus. Since the interview, Legility and Inventus have come together under the name Legility. Megan Rowland is Team Lead, Project Management at Legility.
I asked her what makes a good project manager. You take it for granted that they are knowledgeable, but they must also have good communication skills, be flexible, approachable and personable. It seemed worth asking the reciprocal question – what makes a good client? Continue reading
Since it was taken over by Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad last year, EDRM has become a really useful source of information and guidance on a range of subjects.
Most of those are necessarily about the subject implied by EDRM’s name – the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. One coming up next week, however, is about a yet more topical subject – remote working. Suddenly, everyone is being told to work from home, raising issues for some which extend well beyond the mechanics of getting the actual work done.
I am one of the speakers, presumably because I have been working from home since the days of faxes and ISDN (that dates me, and perhaps dates you if you don’t know what ‘ISDN’ was). The other speakers are Eric P. Mandel of Driven, Inc., Debbie Reynolds of DR Consulting, Jonathan Hiroshi Rossi of The CJK Group, Saya University, together with Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad of EDRM.
My tips will include conventional ones like being at your desk for much the same hours as you would in the office, and involving those you live with instead of shouting at them to be quiet, as well as others with a technology implication. Continue reading
I write and speak quite often about photographs as evidence. This is perhaps partly because I take a lot of pictures and use their EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format – a specific type of extended metadata) to find and categorise them. It is partly because pictures are inherently more interesting than Word files or spreadsheets, so that their hidden data makes for better stories. It is partly, perhaps mainly, because very many people take a lot of photographs every day, unconsciously pinning their devices (and therefore generally themselves) to identifiable places.
They also pin themselves to other people, that is, can inadvertently show that two or more people were in the same place at the same time if the EXIF data from two cameras are matched thanks to pictures taken at the time. The individuals don’t need pictures of each other if they both took pictures of the same view at the same moment, and an investigator who has both pictures, and perhaps the devices which were used to take them, might get a starting-point in showing a conspiracy or some kind of joint endeavour. Continue reading
It is 27 years since I started working from home. It is hard now to remember how isolating that felt before advances in technology like email and broadband brought the world to my desk. It has become respectable since then, and coronavirus is making it almost obligatory. Do I still have reasons to go out? What about the video interviews which form so much of my output?
Although much of my output is written, here on this blog, the highest-value and most interesting parts (to me, anyway) are those which are delivered in person or by video. For many years, I have happily travelled to anywhere in the world with an audience, to moderate or participate in panels and to interview people involved in eDiscovery. For the interviews, I have taken one or two of my sons, Will and Charlie, together with a pile of cameras, lights, tripods and audio equipment.
The aim was to maintain the output quality wherever we went, buying and carrying ever better (and usually heavier) equipment. It has been harder in the last couple of years thanks to my failing hip joint, which made travel tiresome, but that is now fixed and will be as good as new in a month or so.
Other things, however, have developed which prompt a fresh look at how we do these videos, with their current premise that I travel to distant lands with equipment and technicians. The most recent is the coronavirus, which is emptying planes and prompting interesting (and sometimes positive) discussions about ways of working which don’t involve everyone converging on the same place. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Stephanie Clerkin of Korein Tillery who had just won the Stellar Women in eDiscovery award. Stephanie Clerkin was particularly pleased that the award was based on the votes of the eDiscovery community and not just a committee.
I asked Stephanie Clerkin how she had become involved in eDiscovery. She said that she had worked in finance accounting consulting. There was a logic, she said, in moving from the expert side into legal. Continue reading
It’s been a good week for those of us who like to see discovery / disclosure stories in the mainstream media. Less so, perhaps, for the chap convicted of murder thanks to technology (my article is here) and for Johnny Depp’s former lawyers in his libel case against the Sun.
I have only a Guardian story to go on. Behind the headline ‘Let’s burn Amber’: texts allegedly sent by Johnny Depp about ex read in court is this:
Depp’s previous legal team accidentally shared an archive of 70,000 messages with the Sun’s lawyers.
I don’t know who the lawyers were, and I don’t know what lies behind the journalist’s choice of the word “accidentally”. Depp’s text messages must have been thought to have some bearing on the issues to have been collected at all. The story now said to be libellous is about an alleged assault by Depp on his former wife, so their content as reported (“Let’s drown her before we burn her!!!”) is not wholly irrelevant to the allegation. It is hard to see what privilege would attach to them if they were otherwise disclosable. I have no idea whether they should have been disclosed or not (and you can’t overdo the words “alleged” and “allegation” in stories like this). Continue reading
A decent bloke with no known enemies dies after being shot with a crossbow. How did technology lead to the killer? And what else might that technology be used for?
I wrote last year about a motor insurance case called Wise v Hegarty & Alpha Insurance under the headline When the car sneaks on you and your social media betrays you.
It was about an alleged motor accident which had caused insurers to investigate the telematics data in one of the cars. Telematics embraces vehicle movements and telecommunications and it lies behind the “black box” devices which insurers use primarily to evaluate the driving skills of insured drivers. It can do much more than that, however, including keeping records of the times of engines starting and stopping, the opening and closing of doors, and the history of speeds and locations. It doesn’t just record these things, but transmits them for immediate analysis. In the car accident case, the telematics data showed no relevant activity of time, place and movement. Once the court accepted that the equipment was capable of making such records and had done so, that sufficed to damn both the vehicle owners.
Similar equipment and deductions have now helped convict a man for shooting another man with a crossbow. When I say “helped” I mean that without it, the police would have had a problem converting their initial lead into hard evidence.
I think that few of my readers are likely to come across car insurance fraud or crossbow murders. My purpose in pointing you to the stories is the increasing prevalence of electronic data quietly reporting on your every move. And by “your”, I mean every move made by clients, their opponents, the witnesses, and every other participant in a crime or civil dispute. Continue reading
It is worth mentioning, again, that fines from regulators are not the only cost consequence of a cybersecurity breach.
The point is well made in an article on the Nuix blog called Insider threat: not just a cybersecurity issue. Its unspoken context is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It barely mentions fines, focussing instead on the many other expenses which may follow from a cybersecurity breach, especially if the breach goes unnoticed for weeks or months.
Although both the incidence and level of fines seems to be increasing, the knock-on consequences can cost more. The Nuix article concentrates largely on the time and expense of enabling recovery and moving on to the steps needed to prevent a recurrence. The most benevolent regulator is unlikely to forgive a second incident which might have been prevented by remedying the causes of a first breach. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest every year, I get the opportunity to interview the winners of the Relativity Innovation Awards, whose purpose is to “recognize organizations and individuals who build innovative solutions, break down barriers for technology in the practice of law, move e-discovery forward, and take Relativity to the next level.”
Among the 2019 Innovation Award winners was Tony Chan, Director, Development Solutions at iCourts in Sydney. His role at iCourts involves talking to clients to identify their pain points and develop solutions to fix them. I asked him about the award – what it was for and what it meant to him and to iCourts.
As a customer or client, does it matter if you like the companies you work with? If they get the job done and the price is right, do you care very much if you like the people? Looked at from the point of view of that company, do you care if your customers like your business and its people as long as they send the work along and pay the bills? It is not much of a spoiler to say that I think it does matter.
The subject comes up because of a profile in Modern Counsel about NightOwl Global and its CEO Andrea Wallack. Called NightOwl Global Is Dedicated to Discovery, it describes NightOwl’s business and the principles which drive its approach to getting the work done for clients.
Much of that is common to any successful provider of eDiscovery services – skills in industry-leading platforms, the ability to develop proprietary software to improve workflows, a clear business offering which solves real problems, and a global presence, are all required components for success as an eDiscovery provider. You need more than that, however, in an industry where clients are particularly demanding (a GC facing a powerful regulator, for example, is always a demanding client), and where consolidation has lined up some very big players as competitors. You have to be more than just good at the job to be thriving after 30 years in discovery. Continue reading
I recall being invited to a meeting at a US conference, I suppose about three years ago. In the room were senior marketing people from Relativity and FTI Consulting. As always on these occasions, I tried to guess what announcement might be coming. I didn’t anticipate a partnership between FTI and Relativity.
Three years on, it seems obvious that FTI and Relativity would make a successful partnership around the use of RelativityOne. One reason why this seemed less obvious then was that no-one then anticipated the success of RelativityOne and the opportunities it would open up for consulting businesses like FTI.
At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Andrew Szwez, Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting about FTI’s use of RelativityOne over the time since that announcement.
I recently saw a police tweet which expressed almost admiration for the speed with which some car thieves had stripped down a couple of cars, neatly packaging the components for re-use elsewhere.
Gordon Exall, author of the Civil Litigation Brief, does much the same with judgments. Have a judgment delivered on, say, 14 February, and Gordon will have stripped it down to its essentials by 16 February, ready for re-use in your pleadings, submissions or (in my case) articles, by 17 February.
That’s what he has done with the judgment of Sir Geoffrey Vos in McParland & Partners Ltd & Anor v Whitehead [2020] EWHC 298 (Ch) (14 February 2020) in a blog post called The Disclosure Pilot: guidance given as to how it should work: not a stick with which to beat your opponent. The post also covers another judgment, on second applications for disclosure, but I am going to leave that on one side for the moment.
Neither the McParland judgment nor Gordon’s summary of it is very long. My purpose is to pick out a couple of points, provide links to their source in the Practice Direction, and hammer them, leaving you to read more if you want to. Continue reading
At RelativityFest in Chicago, I interviewed Marc Zamsky of Compliance Discovery Solutions. I asked him why Compliance had moved to RelativityOne and about the benefits which RelativityOne brings to Compliance and its clients.
Marc Zamsky said that Relativity’s future lay with RelativityOne and that the future of eDiscovery lay in the cloud. The ability to run multiple processes at the click of a button was important on its own, even before looking at the processes themselves. It altered the whole approach to discovery, moving it towards the point where one can get quickly to looking at data and drawing conclusions from it.
For the clients, the main attraction was the security given by Azure in the cloud. It also helps them to build truly end-to-end processes, particularly with the arrival of Relativity Collect. Continue reading
The assembly of detail needed for a complex film scene is similar to that required for running litigation. FTI Technology has Story Development services to help get all the elements into place.
I recently watched the film 1917, notable for the fact that it was shot in as few takes as possible. Characters moved from point to point, followed, preceded or accompanied by one or more cameras which were passed from hand to truck to wire and back to hand to match what the actors were doing or seeing. Technology undoubtedly played a big part in the success of this approach – high-quality cameras are light and portable for one thing – but technology alone is no substitute for the success of the continuous narrative which unfolds.
Think how much scripting, planning and rehearsal went into those continuous shots, with no chance to stop or to consider a different angle, and with the normal infrastructure of filming – lighting, sound, people – out of sight from every usable angle. Thousands of elements, animate and inanimate, seen and unseen, all come together to create a credible narrative.
Managing litigation has similar components. People, facts, words, and pictures all contribute to the story which must impress an opponent and the court. Some matter more than others. Some may have significance greater than first appears. Some, whether supportive or unhelpful, may slip by unnoticed until too late. A competent assembly of the story in advance is a prerequisite for delivering the case, in the same way that pre-assembly of a complex film scene is essential to its smooth delivery when the director shouts “Action”. Continue reading
Many factors influence software buying decisions. You hear of organisations buying a particular product for the sake of one feature which it considers important. People buy software after long and detailed comparison or on the strength of what someone said in the pub. They buy because everyone else is, or because they want to be different. They buy because they like the person doing the selling, or because they didn’t take to the rival demonstrator. They buy because they understand the technology or because they don’t want to have to understand it.
Two factors are always relevant to a software purchasing decision. What does it look like? And what does it cost? These factors may influence different constituencies – the person who sits looking at the interface all day may have a different view from the one who signs the purchase order, but the one doing the authorisation will be influenced if the user interface will increase productivity and reduce errors.
Relativity has addressed both these things recently, with the launch of a new pricing model on top of its recent publicity for its new Aero UI. Both are covered in this article by Relativity’s chief product officer, Chris Brown. The context is both what Chris Brown calls “empowerment” (a theme at last year’s Relativity Fest), and the more mundane-sounding (but important) ambition to “make it easier for everyone to use” RelativityOne. Continue reading
I have known Craig Carpenter, CEO of data collection company X1, for almost as long as I have been in eDiscovery. At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I at last had the opportunity to interview him. The context was a newly-announced partnership between X1 and Relativity. Why, I asked, should users be excited about this?
Craig Carpenter said that the most obvious benefit lies in the ease with which users can now get data into RelativityOne. The workflow is now seamless. RelativityOne already collects data from e.g. OneDrive and O365, making use of its cloud presence to make these collections from anywhere. X1 adds the ability to collect from sources which RelativityOne does not handle natively, including social media and the ever-widening range of tools by which users communicate with each other. Continue reading
In which I belatedly (after 42 years of work) consider the value of just switching off occasionally and, as a side-note, observe that while you won’t necessarily get opportunities by being there, you certainly won’t get them if you are not. These two things may conflict with each other.
I have always rather under-estimated the value of rest. It is not the same as relaxation. A hearty walk, or mountaineering, or digging the garden, may be relaxing, depending on your personal taste, in that they take your mind and body away from the business of working, but they are not restful.
I realise, a few decades late, that I have conflated the two things. I have also seen rest as an army commander might see it on a route march – just enough to get soldiers back on their feet for the next stage (or, in my case, enough to keep my eyes open while I write the next article).
The subject comes up because I am (as most of you know by now) stuck at home with a new hip when I should be at Legalweek in New York. I am not sure I would have been up to the rigours of Legalweek this year on the old hip, but the prospect of an imminent operation date was enough on its own to keep me at home. I was offered a date last week on three days notice, and I am glad I stayed at home for it. Continue reading
EDRM is hosting a webinar tomorrow, 29 January, at 12:00pm CT / 6:00pm GMT called What to do at Legalweek. The speakers are Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad of EDRM, Ian Campbell of iCONECT and me.
Although I will not be there this year, I have been going to Legaltech since 2007. Ian Campbell has been going for 25 years. The webinar’s advertised subjects are “What to do, what to see, what’s hot and what’s not”.
That “hot and what’s not” expression is meant to refer to the topics of the moment, but it also literally identifies one very practical point – the streets are very cold, the Hilton is very hot, and the coat-check queues are often long. If you are not staying at the Hilton, you have to decide whether to freeze without a coat on the way there, boil in your coat while you are there, or join the queue. One year, crampons and waders would have been helpful, as piles of snow alternated with deep pools of murky water in the gutters. Continue reading
As you may have seen in my recent article, I am not going to Legalweek in New York this year, missing it for the first time since 2007.
One of the many things I will most regret is the brunch jointly organised by Consilio, Nuix and APT Search, taking place on Sunday at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park between 11:00am and 1:00pm.
The brunch was founded by the late Nigel Murray. The photograph below, taken at the 2008 Brunch, shows a fairly small gathering. Nigel Murray is in the red pullover. My son Will, attending his first Legalweek, is in the dark top at front right. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest, I interviewed Antonia Karlan, Head of Project Management at Control Risks. I asked her why Control Risks had committed to RelativityOne.
The aim of Control Risks, Antonia Karlan said, was to provide the best solutions for its end clients. RelativityOne allowed Control Risks to integrate its own complex workflows with Relativity’s analytical tools. Continue reading
I have been going to Legalweek in New York every year since 2007. I am finally forced to accept that I will not make it there this year. The short version is that I was due to have a hip replaced in November, the date being chosen (to the extent that you can choose these things) very much with Legalweek in mind. With that interval, I should have been able not only to attend Legalweek but to walk around there without pain for the first time in years.
The operation was pulled at the last minute because a test which should have been done had not been done. As things stand, I do not have the new date, and nor do I know the outcome of the test in question. Put as shortly as possible a) I don’t want to miss an operation date if one is offered, b) I don’t fancy telling travel insurers that I have both a pending operation and a test whose result I cannot describe, and c) nine hours on a plane followed by a week of rushing around Manhattan doesn’t seem to make much sense in the circumstances.
That’s the nutshell version. The rest is of interest only to those who want to know about osteoarthritis or would like a copybook example of how the best-laid plans can fall to pieces. Continue reading
I recently published an interview with Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad, the new owners of EDRM (the Electronic Discovery Reference Model). They had taken over EDRM only days before, and it was clear that they had plans to make EDRM a significant force in eDiscovery.
This week EDRM announced the formation of its 2020 global advisory council, chaired by Robert Keeling, partner at Sidley Austin. EDRM founders George Socha and Tom Gelbmann have roles as founder advisers. David Greetham of Ricoh USA is executive advisor and Craig Ball will serve as general counsel.
The list of members of the advisory council shows that EDRM is reaching widely and deeply into the eDiscovery world for collaboration and support (I should add diffidently that my name isn’t there because I was slow to reply to and accept EDRM’s kind invitation – a complete list will be published shortly). Continue reading
I have interviewed Kelly Atherton, Director of Analytics and Managed Review at NightOwl Global, several times over the years, mainly about the use of Relativity’s analytics tools. She speaks with the authority of one who uses these tools every day, and the interviews act as a record of the development of technology-assisted review.
NightOwl Global has always shown a deep commitment to the use of new software tools as they develop. I last interviewed Kelly Atherton when she and NightOwl were first starting to use Relativity’s Active Learning, and I wanted to find out how that use had developed. Continue reading
Technologists and lawyers are two groups of people who have their own arcane terminology, and it is perhaps unsurprising that they often miss each other in the dark.
I am fond of analogies and examples drawn from elsewhere – one of my favourite posts over the years was one in which I compared technology explanations to cooking, using it to urge technologists to accept that what seems simple to them may seem complex to others.
It can be helpful to tap into popular culture in giving such explanations. Consilio has done just that with a downloadable webinar called Validating analytics with magic and dragons. The Presenters are Sarah Cole, Julia Helmer, and Susan Stone, all of Consilio. Their aim is to explain how stories are made out of many small pieces of information which can be pulled together with the use of conceptual analytical tools. They use examples from Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings to illustrate this. Continue reading
At a Legaltech of long ago, I was given a demonstration of the discovery software of the company then called eDiscovery Tools. I asked if the software included a particular feature, and the demonstrator thought for a while and said “We don’t have that yet. Ask me again in two weeks”. I was rather impressed by this reply from what was then a small software company, with the ability to assess a suggestion and implement it quickly.
That company, now called EDT, is no longer so small. As founder and CEO Jo Sherman says in this video, the company has grown considerably over the last two years. I asked Jo Sherman to tell me what EDT is working on now.
A new article from Integreon brings us a new year reminder of the importance of looking after personal data. Called Sound governance for personal data, it is written by Clare Chalkley and Claire Frazer of Integreon’s London office.
The article’s focus is on two things. One is the power of the Data Subject Access Request, that is, the right given by the GDPR (though it builds on much older rights) to control what data is kept about them. The other is the ever-present risk of data breaches. These come in many forms, but the one which most closely affects individuals is the exfiltration of their personal data from a company which knows a lot about them. Continue reading
2020 kicks off with another piece of consolidation in the legal services / eDiscovery market, as Legility and Inventus combine. Legility is the acquiring company but its CEO, Barry Dark, says that it sees “the end-result as a merger between two market leaders”. An article by Sarah Brown of Inventus tells the story here.
The combined company, to be called Legility, brings skills and markets which both overlap and are complementary. The clients of 2020 work in global markets – Gartner’s prediction of about five years ago was that non-US markets for discovery-related products and services would grow at a faster rate than the US market, partly because they started relatively late, and partly because the economies of non-US regions would accelerate more quickly. That led Inventus to its close focus on the UK and Europe and on AsiaPac as well as the US, with its CEO, Paul Mankoo, based in London. Continue reading
FTI Consulting has marked the new year by entering into a partnership with analytics software company Brainspace.
The start of the new decade offers an opportunity to look back at the progress made in the past 10 years. You will be glad to know that I have no such ambitions, being more interested in the next decade than the last.
There are a couple of elements, however, that are worth mentioning in this context. One is that FTI Consulting’s technology segment was a big player in eDiscovery at the beginning of the decade and remains so now, while Brainspace barely existed 10 years ago. FTI Technology was and is a consulting company which, until recently, owned its own first-rate discovery software, Ringtail. That perhaps obscured the fact that FTI Technology was always willing to use the best tools for the job in hand. Brainspace’s claim to rank among the best tools is justified by the number and quality of those who work with it. Continue reading
Cristin Traylor is Discovery Counsel at McGuireWoods. She was the winner of the Relativity Fest 2019 award for Attorney Tech Evangelist of the Year, and I interviewed her shortly after the awards ceremony.
Cristin Traylor said that her interests lie at the intersection between legal and technology. Her role comes under two broad headings – advising clients on discovery, information governance, privacy etc, and managing the firm’s document review centre and discovery projects. As a result, she said, she spends a lot of time in Relativity. Continue reading
I have known Scott Gillard of FTI Consulting for many years, mainly from brief annual conversations at Legaltech in New York. At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I had the opportunity to talk to him properly about electronic discovery in Australia and FTI’s role in it.
The investigatory and regulatory market in Australia is very busy, Scott Gillard says. The banking Royal Commission and its aftermath have consumed the entire market, with newly-invigorated regulators going after the banks, and considerable knock-on litigation. Continue reading
It has become a habit at Relativity Fest that my last interview is reserved for David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel & Legal Education Director at Relativity.
One of the reasons for leaving it until the end is that David Horrigan is involved in so many panels that it is hard to catch him until the show is nearly over. This year he took part in ten different sessions over three days.
The best of those, he said, were the two which involved judges. One of those was the traditional judicial panel, now in its sixth year, at which judges survey the eDiscovery cases which have implications for litigators. You can find Relativity’s account of the judicial panel, written by Sam Bock, here. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest I interviewed Cameron Tschannen of NightOwl Discovery about the use of email threading and textual near-duplicate identification in eDiscovery.
These tools, Cameron Tschannen said, are always used by default at NightOwl. They group documents together for organisational purposes and searches, and enable the safe removal of documents from review. This simultaneously reduces volume and increases quality.
When I interviewed Andy Macdonald, CEO of Consilio, after one of Consilio’s acquisitions, he was keen to emphasise that buying successful companies was not the only way to expand a business. Certainly, buying the right company will usually bring a wave of good new people into the business, but it also encouraged applications from elsewhere. As Andy Macdonald put it, companies which are seen to be successful attract successful staff.
Consilio always has a list of open opportunities on its careers page. Two in particular caught my eye. One is for an eDiscovery Project Manager in Hong Kong. The other is for the Head of UK Client Experience for Consilio’s Self-Service Business Units based in London.
Consilio has expanded its Hong Kong presence considerably since I was last there, consistent with Consilio’s quest, led by client demand, to be able to provide a full service across the AsiaPac region. The requirements include a willingness to travel both domestically and internationally. The London role is primarily to serve UK clients, but extends to supporting non-UK clients as required. Continue reading
Pavan Kotha is a manager at Deloitte. I met him at Relativity Fest in Chicago where he won Relativity’s Lit Support All-Star Award.
Pavan Kotha is clearly a man who loves his job. He says that he likes to share his knowledge with the discovery community, and that the recognition given by the All-Star Award encourages this approach. He appreciates the support which Deloitte gives to its staff
I asked him what he found most exciting among the new Relativity functions. Like several others to whom I spoke, he most values the new ability to handle short message formats. Exchanges between people may take many forms – perhaps originating with an email, transferring to WhatsApp, and ending in a phone call. The result is complex to review and it is very difficult for reviewers to get a sense of the story if they work only with email. Relativity’s storyboard approach, Pavan Kotha said, gives reviewers an ‘eagle’s eye’ overview. Continue reading
Wendy King of FTI Consulting is an interviewer’s delight, giving crisp answers which tell us all we need to know in as few words as possible. I took the opportunity to talk to her at Relativity Fest in Chicago.
I asked her first about the Relativity migration service which FTI announced at ILTA (and which I wrote about here). The migration of data can be complex and time-consuming. It needs considerable skill, not least on project management, and it is helpful to involve a company like FTI who knows what to prepare for and what to look for afterwards. Continue reading
It is only a couple of weeks since I last wrote about the importance of social media in eDiscovery / eDisclosure (When the car sneaks on you and your social media betrays you).
I come back to it so quickly, partly because its importance cannot be overemphasised, but mainly to give you links to two articles which both emphasise the point and give practical examples of its application.
The first is (another) article by UK civil procedure expert Gordon Exall, whose Civil Litigation Brief gave me the opening for my last article.
Gordon Exall’s newer article is called Civil procedure back to basics 69: social media and the litigator: a recap. It is a summary (and not a short one because there is a lot to say) of recent cases in which social media has featured, with pointers to other sources. It includes examples from other jurisdictions (the US and Canada, for example), and the points emerging from the cases are applicable in most jurisdictions where discovery is required. Continue reading
Like many people, I constantly need to improve my knowledge of the software I use. I am teaching myself video editing at the moment, and frequently need help either on very specific things (“Where is the menu option for this function?”) or for more general (“How do I get the best results when trying to do this or achieve that?”).
I sometimes use the manual. More usually, I put a query into Google and almost invariably find that someone else has posed the same question and that it has been answered, perhaps by more than one person and with more than one suggestion. I ought perhaps to get some formal training as well, but for now this reliance on a shared community of interest is enough for my purposes.
The same applies to professional software used for discovery or business purposes. New users of software like Nuix will want training, but it is helpful also to be able to call on others who have been there before and who have worked out ways – new ways or just different ways – of using functions or achieving objectives. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest, I interviewed Ben Sexton of JND about JND’s use of Relativity One. What led to that decision, I asked, and what were the perceived benefits?
Ben Sexton said that JND’s primary focus was on serving clients. Before the move to RelativityOne, they had had to be half focused on IT and half on being solutions providers. RelativityOne allows JND to concentrate on being a solutions provider without having to worry about the server going down and other aspects of infrastructure support. Continue reading
I wrote recently about how Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad had turned ACEDS into “an educational force to be reckoned with”. In the same article, I reported that they had acquired EDRM (the Electronic Discovery Reference Model). I had to wait until I saw them at Relativity Fest to find out what their plans are for EDRM.
EDRM is, as Mary Mack makes clear, much more than the model. It runs projects, including a GDPR project, and will be considering whether changes to the model itself are necessary or desirable. Another project is a community-sourced stop-words list.
EDRM crosses borders, both geographical borders and functional borders. One can join in from any jurisdiction, and from legal, IT, security or any other related discipline. Continue reading
The drafts of the 23 video interviews recorded at Relativity Fest have landed on my desktop for comment, for sending back for any amendment, and for sending out for approval.
I may be some time….
Normal service will be resumed shortly.
English barrister Gordon Exall, he of the Civil Litigation Brief who is constantly informative as @CivilLitTweet on Twitter, reports on an interesting finding of fundamental dishonesty in a claim about an alleged motor accident. The judgment is Wise -v- Hegarty & Alpha Insurance (9th July 2019) and Gordon Exall’s blog post is here.
Craig Ball, former trial lawyer and doyen of US forensic experts, is rightly fond of saying that this is the “greatest time ever to be a litigator” in terms of the evidence which modern devices bring us. I interviewed him here on how mobile data increases lawyers’ ability to uncover the truth. By “mobile data” one generally means data created, collected and disseminated by the kind of mobile devices which most of us carry around with us. Years ago, however, I did a panel with Craig Ball on this subject in the US, and he gave us an illustration of a motor accident represented by two moving dots on a map. The data in the car (whether it was a property of the car or its passengers) would, he said, provide evidence about accidents and their causes. Continue reading
For some years, ILTA (the International Legal Technology Association) has had an event in London every November. Previously a one-day event called INSIGHT, it has been renamed ILTACON Europe and extended to two days. The website is here and the programme is here.
Disclosure has been given proper attention, with a panel on Thursday at 11:30 called The Disclosure Pilot: The Disclosure Review Document and Technology. The Big Questions! The panel members are Vince Neicho, Vice President-Legal Services at Integreon, Jeff Shapiro, eDiscovery Support Manager at Clifford Chance LLP, Andrew Haslam, eDisclosure Project Manager at Squire Patton Boggs, and Clare Chalkley, Vice President Legal Services at Integreon. I am the moderator. Continue reading
At Legaltech in New York, I interviewed Justin Tebbe who is Senior Director, Technical Solutions at Inventus. I was interested to know how he and his colleagues in other parts of Inventus work together for the benefit of the clients.
Justin Tebbe said that he is responsible for the US operation of Inventus, for hosting, and for working with development partners using specialised tools. He also gets involved in global initiatives, liaising with his counterparts in other jurisdictions as well as other departments.
Justin Tebbe gave a practical example of the benefits of working like this. A project which started in the US, with processing and review already well underway, had to be rolled out in Germany. The transfer was seamless, with the new team using the same templates and the same fields, and getting exactly the same experience as their US counterparts (who remained involved in the project).
Inventus tracks projects with its own ticketing system and workflow management system holding all the information about the project, including the individual tasks which need to be done. If one person deals with some stages, the next one can pick up where the last one left off.
It is also business intelligence software, with real-time data on how much has been reviewed and where it has got to.
Justin Tebbe said the clients are more global. Inventus is a global business with offices around the world but it offers a single experience to its users everywhere.
This blog falls silent when I go to foreign conferences – packing, panel preparation, travelling and the event itself push aside other things, and the post-event catch-up is inevitably tiresome. Some announcements are worth capturing now that I have settled back in.
ACEDS
Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad, as the ACEDS Executive Director and VP Client Engagement respectively, have together turned ACEDS (the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists) into an educational force to be reckoned with, within and beyond the US. The announcement (reported here by Bob Ambrogi) that they were leaving ACEDS, came freighted with strong hints (“We’re not going away”) that a new venture was being planned. But what would that be?
While we pondered that, it was announced that Mike Quartararo would become the new Executive Director of ACEDS. The ACEDS announcement is here. Ari Kaplan will help build and chair a new ACEDS Global Advisory Board. I saw Mike Quartararo last week and it was clear that he is full of ideas for carrying on Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad’s work. His Open letter to the ACEDS membership pays tribute to Mary and Kaylee and sets out his initial plans for ACEDS. Continue reading
I am told that we recorded 23 video interviews over the three days of Relativity Fest – I lost count, but the indefatigable Taylor Laabs of Relativity, who ran the schedule, says that that was the final total. My son Charlie set up the equipment each morning and I talked to a stream of interesting, knowledgeable and personable people all day, with gaps for copying data (we came back with almost 1.5TB of video), recharging batteries, and recharging me. You will forgive me in the circumstances if my account of Relativity Fest is rather short on reports of keynotes, panels and all the other things which comprised the packed formal agenda. I saw the beginning of the opening keynote, and I turned up to moderate my own International Panel, but I am dependent for the rest on the reports of others.
You might, for example, like to read Empowering the e-Discovery Community Today and Tomorrow by Chris Brown, Relativity’s Chief Product Officer, which summarises the opening keynote with a focus on product development which is unsurprising given Chris Brown’s role, two articles by Zach Warren of Legaltech News, always a source of timely and helpful reports (for which you may need to register) A New UI is Coming: 5 Things to Know From Relativity Fest 2019’s Keynote and, on the Judicial Panel 4 E-Discovery (Adjacent) Cases Judges Are Watching This Year plus a summary by Sarah Brown of Inventus called Relativity Fest 2019: Top Buzzed-About eDiscovery and Legal Trends
My own observations, drawn from my interviews, from what I saw of the opening keynote, from the reports of others, and from such opportunities as I had for discussions, include the following: Continue reading
I am often asked which conferences are worth attending on this side of the Atlantic. There used to be several to choose from, but they have been supplanted by the events like Relativity Fest London and the Nuix Insider Conference which, although primarily dedicated to specific software solutions, have always made a good job of covering topics broader than their own solutions.
ILTA has an event in November, this year extended to two days. ACEDS supports first-rate evening events which attract good audiences. The best broadly-based, product-neutral event in the calendar is, however, held in Dublin every November.
The eDiscovery and Legal Technology Conference 2019 is run by La Touche Training in Dublin on 29 November. I have been to all but one of the previous five such events, generally moderating the closing discussion panel. I was booked to go this year, but now cannot go, my wife having been offered a long-awaited knee operation shortly before that date. Continue reading
The Sedona Conference is organising a webinar on 6 November called US – UK – EU cross-border data transfers after Brexit.
As I write, it is far from clear what will happen on or before 31 October. Will there be a deal? Will UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson be forced to request an extension? If Brexit has not happened by 31 October, we can be reasonably sure that Johnson’s promise to be dead in a ditch will go the way of all his other promises. Merely to recite that he said this illustrates the absurdity of the whole business.
Whatever happens, it is important to consider what impact Brexit will have on day-to-day cross-border data transfers, and this is the subject of the webinar. What will be the impact of Brexit on day-to-day cross-border data transfers, on data protection regulation and enforcement, and on cross-border collection, processing, and transfer of data to meet litigation and regulatory requirements? Continue reading
A year rolls by very quickly, and it is time for Relativity Fest in Chicago once more. It runs from 20 to 23 October and the agenda, as always, is packed with sessions, panels, workshops and social events. It grows every year, but somehow manages to remain, if not exactly intimate, still friendly and welcoming.
My purpose in going, as always, is twofold. First, I am moderating a panel on Tuesday morning. Called simply the 2019 International Panel, it aims to cover the latest developments in cross-border e-Discovery, conflict of laws, and data privacy and protection.
The speakers are Meribeth Banaschik of EY GmbH, Kelly Friedman of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, and Manfred Gabriel of Holland & Knight. Continue reading
I was not at the Nuix User Exchange this year, the first one I have missed for some time. I am therefore dependent on a blog post by Corey Tomlinson of Nuix who summarised the event for us.
I will pick one point from Corey Tomlinson’s report. What is the purpose of discovery or, as he puts it:
Why is it important to make connections between phone numbers, email addresses, and the people who use them? What does it mean to help speed legal discovery with technology like continuous active learning? Is there a reason to be so fixated on processing so many terabytes in a given hour, day, or longer?
All this obviously applies to conventional discovery requirements, to meeting the demands of regulators, and to investigating the actions of bad actors, whether they come from outside an organisation or from within.
There is a wider purpose, however, to do with journalistic and other work with a public interest as well as a private and corporate one. The Panama Papers is the most obvious example. Continue reading
FTI Technology and Relativity have joined forces with Ari Kaplan Advisors to ask chief legal officers about the future of the legal industry and about what skills and expertise will be needed by the next generation of lawyers.
Ari Kaplan is very good at this, conducting personal interviews with senior people to get their views and to draw conclusions from them.
The key issues which arose from the interviews inevitably include risk, privacy, security and new technology. Reputational risk often follows from failure in any of these areas. Continue reading
I had some interesting interviews earlier this year with Paul Mankoo, CEO of Inventus. In one of them, he talked about the benefits of a UK base for a multinational eDiscovery and legal services company.
My write-up of the interview includes this:
Paul Mankoo said that more of Inventus’s business is outside the US than is inside it, and it offers more services in, and derives more revenue from, non-US locations. With two German offices (in Frankfurt and Berlin) it has a strong presence in mainland EU. This growth is greater in Asia than in the US.
It is important, Paul Mankoo said, to understand the markets and to emphasise that Inventus is not merely a US-centric business. Internally, having a UK CEO avoids giving the impression that one jurisdiction is more important than another. He might have added that London is more convenient in time zone terms for a business which operates at the outer limits of both East and West. Continue reading
I wrote last week about the session run by ACEDS and sponsored by Integreon on the first 10 months of the disclosure pilot. Vince Neicho of Integreon has also now written about it (see What We Learnt About the Disclosure Pilot 10 Months In) and I draw your attention to his article for its emphasis on one particular point.
That is the minimal take-up of the new Disclosure Guidance Hearings which, as Vince Neicho puts it, are “hearings designed to facilitate a discussion between the parties and the judge where agreement has not been possible on aspects of the disclosure process”. The emphasis, as Vince Neicho points out, is practical rather than legal. The court needs to hear from the “legal representative with direct responsibility for the conduct of the disclosure process”.
Vince Neicho suggests that we might separate legal questions (such as the list of disclosure issues) from arguments about getting the job done, and (as Vince puts it) “disputes on scope, accessibility and formats of data”. Continue reading
The practice of law and the practice of information technology have at least two things in common: both use terminology which is meaningful to insiders and incomprehensible to others; both have experts constantly reiterating concerns which audiences ought to deal with.
The combination often results in a blizzard of awful warnings couched in terms which dull the senses and provoke torpor rather than action. When you see your fortieth earnest warning urging you to take steps or refrain from doing something, you switch off. This is exacerbated by the fact that most of these subjects have a finite vocabulary, much of it technical in nature.
OpenText is refreshingly free from the worst aspects of this, producing articles which do more than reiterate awful warnings in quasi-mystical terms. Their blog posts identify risks and benefits in terms which are comprehensible, with meaningful examples. Continue reading
I went this week to an evening session organised by ACEDS and sponsored by Integreon whose purpose was to review the progress of the disclosure pilot in the 10 months since it began.
The speakers were Ed Crosse of Simmons & Simmons, Charlotte Hill of the Junior London Solicitors Association, Chief Master Marsh, and Lucinda Orr of Enyo Law. The moderator was the always-excellent Vince Neicho of Integreon.
They packed a lot into an hour. I serve you best, I think, if I set down the main points in a fairly short form:
Despite an intense campaign of information sessions and publicity, to say nothing of a general obligation to keep up with the rules, not everyone had got the message that the pilot existed, still less what its implications are. “Pilot? What pilot?” does not really seem an adequate response. Continue reading
Erin Plante is responsible for financial crime investigations and cross-border compliance at Inventus. I interviewed her in New York in January and asked her about the development of investigations around the world and, in particular, the role Inventus plays in conducting them. This is the first part of a two-part interview.
Investigations, and the triggers for them, take place in multiple jurisdictions and Inventus people work as a team all over the world to manage this. Inventus has data centres in many places and can set up collection and processing systems anywhere – this is particularly helpful in areas where it is difficult to move data around either because of deficiencies in communications or because of regulatory restraints. Continue reading
FTI Consulting is producing some interesting articles in conjunction with Corporate Disputes Magazine. A recent one is called Building a global information governance initiative and discovery programme – predictive analytics. Its contributors are Glenn Barden and Sonia Cheng of FTI Consulting and Patrick Oot of Shook, Hardy and Bacon LLP, all names well-known to those who follow this subject.
The interesting thing about this article is that despite its title’s emphasis on the role of technology – the “predictive analytics” reference – almost everything in the article is about the role of people – the people with the relevant skills and the people who make the corporate decisions.
Glenn Barden opens, for example, by observing that there is too much data to review manually and says:
The use of statistical modelling maximises the value of the data that is already available – meaning that the experts are able to spend more time deriving insights, rather than locating the patterns.
So – the technology does the tiresome stuff and humans can spend more time drawing conclusions from the resulting information. Continue reading
The UK disclosure pilot enters its tenth month in October. We now have practical experience to add to the text of the practice direction and to the many talks and articles which heralded its arrival. It is time for a review.
The UK Chapter of ACEDS is presenting a discussion in London on 2 October in association with Integreon. The speakers are Ed Crosse of Simmons & Simmons, Charlotte Hill of the Junior London Solicitors Association, Chief Master Marsh, and Lucinda Orr of Enyo Law.
The moderator is Vince Neicho of Integreon.
In formal terms, these months have seemed fairly quiet, with few published judgments about disclosure. I take that to suggest that the new procedures have settled in without too much disturbance, and that parties and judges have just got on with it. Continue reading
This is the third and last part of my interview with Brendan Sullivan of SullivanStrickler and Fred Moore of Horison Information Systems about the increasing value of tape as an archive medium. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
This section first focuses on the security benefits of tape archives and then looks at the way the market is likely to develop.
Security issues and cybercrime have been steadily increasing over the last few years, and are among the primary concerns of most organisations and their IT departments. I asked Brendan Sullivan and Fred Moore if tape archives offered any help with security.
A tape archive is off-site and, except when it is actually being used, is off-line. The media is usually on a shelf, giving what is known as the “tape air gap”. Most cybercrime is effected on an online storage device; someone would have to break into SullivanStrickler’s vault and steal a tape in order to get access to its contents. Continue reading
OpenText’s Enfuse 2019 takes place in Las Vegas between 11 and 14 November. Adam Kuhn, Director of Product Marketing at OpenText Discovery, has written a preview of Enfuse called Chart your eDiscovery path at Enfuse 2019 which makes it clear that eDiscovery will be a major component of the panels and discussions at the event.
I attended this event for many years in its earlier incarnation as Guidance Software’s CEIC. While eDiscovery was always important there, the event’s primary focus then was on the identification, preservation and collection of data for a range of purposes including law enforcement and criminal and civil discovery. The pure eDiscovery component was relatively small – my role from year to year was to talk about eDiscovery in non-US jurisdictions and about privacy and data protection, at a time when these were seen as eccentric fringe subjects. Later, the focus moved to cybersecurity as that became the dominant concern of organisations and their IT departments. Continue reading
Most of what one reads about the use of forensic tracing of fraud is about the technology. This is neither surprising nor wrong in a world where crime investigators are constantly trying to catch up with technologically-skilled criminals.
There is more to it, however, than merely applying the latest technological tools to electronic evidence. What investigators are aiming for is a story to which the technology evidence is the underpinning.
The building of this narrative is the subject of a webinar produced by ACEDS and sponsored by Ricoh called To catch a thief: using forensics to track the money.
The speakers are David Greetham of Ricoh USA, Inc and Mary Mack of ACEDS. Together they will give an explanation as to how forensic techniques were used to uncover the facts and identity of both the perpetrators and the money. Continue reading
The eDiscovery software and services market has developed in ways which few of us predicted. Three broad lines were, however, discernible a while back – that consolidation would reduce the number of players in the market, that the market would grow, and that the fastest growth would be outside the US.
It was always predicted that Relativity would continue to grow, and that part of that growth would come from partnerships with other established players. The most interesting of those relationships is the one with FTI Consulting, a partnership which has taken FTI to new and different heights as it combines its global technology consulting strength with Relativity’s software. Continue reading
Earlier this year, I took part in a discussion panel in Bristol hosted by Integreon. The panel members were Mark Brannigan of Aon, Nicola Woodfall of Travers Smith, Emily Wyllie-Ballard of RPC, Vince Neicho of Integreon, and Clare Chalkley of Integreon. I was the moderator.
I have not written this up hitherto because I knew that Integreon was doing its own summary. That has now been published with the heading When legal meets technology: exploring the future of eDiscovery.
The discussion in Bristol centred around a presentation given by many of the same people to the Judicial College. Their focus on that occasion was a practical consideration of the disclosure pilot, and that was the jumping-off point for a wide consideration of the factors to be considered in any discovery exercise. Continue reading
Her Majesty’s Government has been giving us some object lessons in discovery and data protection recently. We have had documents missing at court, reluctance to swear affidavits about documents, and curious redactions. Now we have been offered spurious GDPR / personal information reasons for withholding messages about government business, and a threat of tracking and data-harvesting on government websites in a way which suggests that Facebook’s morals and business methods have been imported into government. The whole thing stinks.
Look away now if you wish to be spared the political context in which all these things have become normalised. The context, of course, is Brexit, which began with a referendum won by fraud, by foreign interference, and by the skilful collection and use of data to target undecided voters. That has brought us Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, a man whose every word is a lie, an exaggeration or a distortion. He is in hock (political hock, I mean – I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that money has changed hands) to a group of far-right extremists and vulture capitalists who will benefit from a no-deal Brexit first by shorting the crashing Pound, second by picking over the carcass of British business and industry, third by the removal of regulatory protection for workers, food and other essentials, and last by US trade deals in which we will necessarily be the weaker partner. Continue reading
This is the second part of an extended interview which I did with Brendan Sullivan of SullivanStrickler and Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies, Inc. in which we discussed the revival of tape as an archive medium. The first part is here and the third part will be published shortly.
The subject of this part is the reasons why tape declined as a popular archive until about 2000 and then revived. The technical deficiencies of tape proved inadequate for the changing demands – not just increased volumes but changed purposes and pressures. Since 2000, the technology of tape has advanced to meet the demands. This, coupled with two decades of experience, makes tape a valuable, yet still under-appreciated, means of archiving data.
Part of the problem derived from issues with the tape medium itself – there were multiple differing formats, tapes were easily damaged, and the material of which they were made was susceptible to decline over time. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in London, I spoke to James MacGregor, Managing Director at Consilio in London, about Consilio’s ambitions in the worldwide market for eDiscovery and related services. There seems to be no end to Consilio’s global ambitions and every year bring at least one significant acquisition or extension of the Consilio empire.
James MacGregor said that the market is getting smaller in the sense that there are fewer companies doing what Consilio does, as a result of the consolidation in the market. The important thing to focus on was differentiation, meaning, in this context, why clients should choose Consilio from among the other big players.
As a specific example, James MacGregor pointed to Consilio’s data centre in France. That came with its own established business – a major client sensitive on the subject of data protection – but also brings in new business because Consilio faces little competition in that respect. Continue reading
FTI Consulting has been one of the Relativity’s most active partners in the use of Relativity’s SaaS platform RelativityOne. Some of the benefits of that are described in my most recent interview with Wendy King of FTI on the subject.
It is, perhaps, relatively straightforward to open a new project in RelativityOne. What, however, if your data and all its applications, scripts and workspaces sit in a different platform? To meet this challenge, FTI Consulting has launched a new set of services to help with RelativityOne data migration. The services include migration planning, data and workspace migration, application and script transfer, and post-migration evaluation.
AccessData is giving a webinar on 22 August called Accelerate incident response through automation. Its subject is the need to react very quickly to data breaches, and the ability to do so by the automation of incident response using AccessData’s new RESTful API.
The API alerts the AD Enterprise agent and initiates an immediate collection, preserving data related to the cause of the breach.
There is more information about this webinar here, together with a registration form.
iCONECT has been developing document review software for 20 years. Its iCONECT-XERA document review platform gives clients access to a secure central repository, giving worldwide access to very large volumes of documents through an interface consciously designed to make life easy for users.
The last few years have seen significant consolidation in the eDiscovery market, both in software and in support providers. The market has also seen considerable investment, a recognition of the fact that the demand for document management tools is predicted to grow.
iCONECT has seen an opportunity to fund its next phase of growth and new development by a strategic partnership with Newfield Capital Partners, announced here. Continue reading
This is the first part of an extended interview which I did with Brendan Sullivan, CEO of archiving specialist SullivanStrickler and Fred Moore, President of Horison Information Strategies, Inc.
SullivanStrickler’s tagline is “Providing access to the world’s legacy data”. Over the course of three interviews, we cover the growing problem of legacy data – not just the growing volumes, but the increasing expectation that organisations know what data they have and can find what matters – and the solutions offered by SullivanStrickler.
I open by summarising the problem: data is kept for good reasons (such as pending litigation or regulatory requirements), and bad reasons (no-one is responsible for managing it and the lawyers have said “Keep everything” without thought as to the implications). Old formats and redundant systems make it near-impossible to comply with obligations which increasingly bring financial penalties and corporate embarrassment. How can you say you have found everything relevant when you don’t know what you have? If you can’t assess the risk, how do you know what resources to apply to that risk? Continue reading
Nearly a year has passed since Nuix acquired Ringtail from FTI. The development and marketing focus since then has, rightly, been on continuity and on expansion – continuity in the sense that development continued without a break, and expansion in the sense that Nuix has been astute in introducing its new discovery capabilities to its markets around the world.
Nuix has now announced that the newly integrated software is to be called Nuix Discover. I am not the only one who will be sorry to see the departure of the Ringtail name (but then I still remember Attenex with affection), but the renaming makes sense in overall branding terms.
Here is the Nuix press release. An article by JR Jenkins called Discovering more than just a new name is a punchy summary of the benefits of the transition and integration work, including new capabilities and the programme of user meetings which Nuix has held around the world. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in London I interviewed Christina Zachariasen of Allen & Overy. What benefits, I asked, do A&O and its clients and get from using Relativity and RelativityOne?
Christina Zachariasen said that Relativity was a leading review platform.
The decision to use it goes back more than 18 months as part of a significant transformation of both technology and people. Continue reading
A recent article in Corporate Disputes Magazine looks at some of the factors – notably leadership and strategy – involved in building a global information governance and discovery programme. It includes input from Craig Earnshaw and Sonia Cheng of FTI Consulting in London, and Daniel Lim of Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP in the US.
Two key things appear from the title alone – that information governance and discovery are interlinked and that, for many organisations, the implications are global. In the old days (about four years ago) the focus of most organisations, especially US ones, was the ability to find documents and information relevant to actual litigation or regulatory investigations. The concept of information governance to pre-empt or head off problems, not merely reduce their impact, is relatively new.
This basic idea was slow to take off because organisations failed to spot what now seems obvious – that control of information, including knowing where it is and disposing of useless information – reduces the time scale and cost of reaction to discovery requests. Continue reading
“Did you know that, until about 1990, time didn’t run for pleadings from 1 August to 1 September?”
This tweet from a barrister prompted this reply from me:
Note: Generally, the English don’t have “vacations”, but holidays. This use is an odd exception. The RCJ is the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, daunting when buzzing with life, haunting when empty.
In practice, it wasn’t just pleadings time limits which went to sleep in August – most deadlines in court orders took de facto account of the assumption that no one would be working. I loved it, in the days before I was concerned about school holidays, and would make sure that I took my holidays while everyone else was at work. It seemed almost incredible that they paid us the same in August as they did for the rest of the year (not that that was very much at the time). Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in London, I spoke to Wendy King of FTI Consulting’s Technology segment about FTI’s use of RelativityOne.
FTI is a global consultancy, offering Relativity across four continents. Most of its matters span multiple jurisdictions, Wendy King said, and FTI needed something scalable so they could focus on what they needed to do without worrying about limits on infrastructure. Continue reading
It has been quite difficult to keep up with the spate of announcements and other output from OpenText. It is a big company, which reaches into almost every corner of Enterprise Information Management (a subtle but important change from the old label, Enterprise Content Management) and its sub-classes, notably (for my purposes) eDiscovery.
I was away during Enterprise World 2019 in Toronto but caught the flavour of it from the many tweets, press releases, blogs and LinkedIn posts from and about OpenText. It has one of the best and most industrious marketing departments in the business, and one needs to concentrate to keep up.
This post is selective, pointing briefly to a handful of the things which matter most in my corner of the information world. Continue reading
Jon Chan is Director of Technical Services at Anexsys. I spoke to him at Relativity Fest in London about Anexsys’s partnership with Relativity and specifically in relation to its use of Relativity’s SaaS product, RelativityOne.
Jon Chan said that Anexsys had recently made a significant investment in RelativityOne. This was originally driven by a major government client with whom Anexsys has been working for some time. Like other government departments, it has a “cloud first” strategy, and it was their idea to make use of RelativityOne in a manner consistent with that strategy. Continue reading
The UK chapter of ACEDS (the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists) is running an event in London on 2 October called Disclosure pilot – 10 months in.
The title is self-explanatory – by the beginning of October, the disclosure pilot will be in its tenth month of operation in the Business and Property Courts of England and Wales. There is, as yet, little published case law on its operation, but those who engage in these courts will have had the opportunity to see how it works, both in their dealings with each other and in their dealings with the court.
More details will be published shortly, but these ACEDS events are always very good, and it is worth marking the date in your calendar. There is more information here. Continue reading
As Relativity Fest in London drew to a close, I interviewed David Horrigan, eDiscovery Counsel and Legal Education Director at Relativity, about the event. Writing up that interview gives me an excuse to summarise some of the points which seemed important from the day. I have already published some of my photographs of the day.
As always, Relativity Fest London involved a packed agenda mixing company news in the form of Andrew Sieja’s opening keynote, technical sessions about the use of Relativity’s technology, and educational sessions devoted to the legal and regulatory context in which Relativity is used. The latter are David Horrigan’s responsibility and he was justifiably pleased with how they had gone.
They had included one on mobile data, a 15 minute primer on the new England and Wales disclosure rule with Ed Crosse of Simmons & Simmons, and two on data privacy. One of the latter, David Horrigan said, had been a general one on corporate compliance, with a focus on the concerns of those responsible for compliance in organisations. Continue reading
Ed Crosse of Simmons & Simmons is one of the members of the working party which drafted the draft eDisclosure rule now being piloted. At Relativity Fest in London in May, he gave a lively interview on stage with David Horrigan of Relativity. Afterwards, I took the opportunity to ask him some questions of my own.
Appropriately for a technology conference, I focused first on those parts of the new rule which involved the use of technology. The Disclosure Review Document seems central to how the new rule will operate. I asked Ed Crosse how that was going.
Ed Crosse said that it was too early for more than anecdote about the operation of the DRD, but it had been road-tested by various firms during the consultation. They were asked to apply it to their existing cases and to report on how it worked for them.
The chief message from the consultation was that the new rule should not overcomplicate matters before the first case management conference, and that is reflected in the pilot version. It looks daunting at first sight, I suggested, but it is well broken down when you focus on it. Continue reading
Susanna Blancke is Associate Director, Litigation and Client Services at NightOwl Discovery. At Relativity Fest in London I talked to her about different types of eDiscovery projects and, in particular, about multilingual eDiscovery.
There is, Susanna Blancke said, no such thing as a standard eDiscovery project. Investigations and litigation (one of which may lead to the other) vary in a number of ways. One of those is whether or not they include documents of various languages.
It is not enough, Susanna Blancke said, merely to have skilled linguists. They also need subject matter expertise – in finance or life science or whatever the case was about – with the language skills on top. The staffing might therefore be completely different between two projects. Continue reading
Brian Tuemmler is Information Governance Solution Manager at Nuix. He and I recently recorded a webinar called 9 ways to comply and get ahead. Its theme is that organisations face increasing requirements from all sides and in all jurisdictions, with new regulations defining appropriate ways to conduct business and not just in financial and health-related activities.
Our over-arching point was that the technology and the skills developed to face eDiscovery challenges are now required for proactive identification of data. Where once the requirement was a retrospective search for data which was “relevant” to the dispute, we now need to identify data before it became a problem. The once unfashionable concept of information governance is now having its day. The speed of technology (like the Nuix engine) is important not just for speeding up a retrospective investigation but for identifying current risk and alerting relevant people. Continue reading
Technology-assisted review is by now established as an appropriate way to meet discovery requirements for litigation and regulatory purposes in most jurisdictions. As with predecessor technologies, TAR has incited debate, filled conference schedules, and appeared in court judgments and opinions. The eDisclosure pilot in England and Wales refers expressly to technology-assisted review and, although the rule’s wording may need a little tidying up, it is clear that the concept is accepted there.
That does not mean that it is easy to make choices. The market has been confused by competing terminology, by rival solutions and, not least, by the development of a second phase of TAR technology called TAR 2.0. Continue reading
The Inventus website shows 11 US office locations, plus one in the UK, two in Germany, one in Japan and one in Taiwan. Judging solely by the preponderance of US offices, one might expect it to have a US CEO or, at least, one who is based in the US.
Paul Mankoo is CEO of Inventus. He is English, and based in England. When interviewing him about Inventus’s international business, I began by asking him about this expectation.
Paul Mankoo said that more of Inventus’s business is outside the US than is inside it, and it offers more services in, and derives more revenue from, non-US locations. With two German offices (in Frankfurt and Berlin) it has a strong presence in mainland EU. This growth is greater in Asia than in the US. Continue reading
The annual Nuix User Exchange takes place at Huntington Beach in California from 15 to 17 September. In a blog post called 2019 Nuix User Exchange – Focus on Community and Growing Together, Andrew Nester of Nuix writes about the reasons for attending this event and about the communal emphasis in the programme for this year.
The conference is called an “Exchange” for a reason – the word connotes learning from each other rather than merely being told things, which is the formula which has made ILTACON so successful over the years. The trick is to strike a balance between having a full programme and leaving enough time for people (whether actual users or potential users) to talk among themselves, to share experiences and to trade ideas. Continue reading
At Relativity Fest in London, I spoke to Brian Stuart and Glenn Barden of FTI Consulting about FTI’s use of Relativity Trace on behalf of clients. I began by asking what Relativity Trace is.
Brian Stuart said that Relativity Trace is a communications monitoring tool used, for example, for the surveillance of traders and others whose actions and behaviours can influence markets, for example by insider trading. Relativity Trace gives real-time insight into such manipulation. Continue reading
I am very lucky in the panels I am asked to moderate. The speakers are either people I know already, or are experts whose reputation has gone before them so that I know to expect interesting things from them. Dera J Nevin was known to me by reputation and from her very useful Twitter feed, but it was not until this year that we presented anything together.
Dera Nevin is a lawyer and legal technologist. At Legaltech in New York she was an articulate speaker on a panel which I moderated for Relativity called Discovery, security, and business considerations.
One of her subjects on the panel was the questions lawyers should ask and have answered before moving to the cloud. Afterwards, I interviewed her about wider subjects arising in her work helping lawyers to choose and use legal technology.
Dera Nevin said that implementation runs more smoothly when the lawyers have been involved in its selection and understood why it was to be used. It works best if they have been involved in articulating the need for a technology solution, and see some examples. Continue reading
At Legaltech in New York, I interviewed Al Park, Global Technology Consulting Leader at Control Risks. Control Risks is a major Relativity partner and, Al Park said, often has several investigations running concurrently. It needs the stability and security which RelativityOne can bring it.
It is not uncommon for a regulatory investigation and an internal investigation (and perhaps also litigation) to be running at the same time about the same facts or events. Relativity’s analytics and data visualisation help users to get to the facts more quickly. Continue reading
I was away speaking at a discovery event when the news broke that Relativity has appointed a new CEO and that Andrew Sieja is moving up to be executive chairman. Since I have no aspirations to be a first-with-the-news journalist, I can be content that others had the splash, and can look at a couple of aspects of the story which seem important to me.
The facts are set out in the Relativity press release. Mike Gamson comes to Relativity from LinkedIn where his most recent post was Senior Vice President of Global Solutions, and brings deep experience of setting up and managing products at LinkedIn, which had not defined a monetisation strategy when he joined it.
It is no small thing to step into the shoes of a company founder who brought the business from nothing to global dominance, and who has been its public face for so long.
The questions which interested me at a press call earlier this week were firstly why Mike Gamson and secondly what will Andrew Sieja do next? Continue reading
As I have reported more than once (most recently here), I am taking part in a panel in Bristol with Integreon on Wednesday called eDiscovery, technology and the judiciary.
Its theme may be deduced from the title. Those responsible for drafting the new disclosure rule referred expressly to past judicial failures as a reason for beefing up disclosure obligations. The new rule has been accompanied by a determined attempt to make judges play their part in reducing the expense of disclosure. If there are few published judgments as yet, anecdote suggests that the judges are doing just that.
Integreon’s Vince Neicho has written an article called Innovation, destruction and frustration: breaking the vicious cycle, a follow-up to an earlier article which I wrote about here.
Vince Neicho begins by identifying some of the reasons why lawyers are willing to change the way they work. It is, he says, because the court requires it, because the client requires it, or because the competition is already doing it. Continue reading
AccessData has been collecting data for criminal and civil purposes for decades. A lot has changed over that time – not just volumes, and the types and sources of data, but the urgency with which it must be collected and analysed.
Data used to be reasonably predictable – it was generated on static computers, stored in predefined places, and consisted of a limited range of data types. Today, the urgent need to collect data may spring up from anywhere at any time, not least as a result of some criminal or terrorist activity. It is recorded in multiple formats by law enforcement, by CCTV, or by any passer-by with a smartphone. Its volumes can be enormous, and the need to analyse it may be extremely urgent where, for example, it may help prevent a further incident.
These things are the subject of two recent blog posts by AccessData. One is called Access data is assisting law enforcement with deployment of massive investigation capabilities in the face of evolving terror and critical incidents. The other is called Could we be more proactive with the cloud for a “hot” crime scene? Both deal with slightly different aspects of the same thing. Continue reading
Inventus is producing a webinar on 16 July called Accelerating International eDiscovery: The Challenges of Multilingual Litigation. The speakers are Dominic Piernot, eDiscovery Consultant Germany/France at Inventus, John Tinsley, CEO of Iconic Translation Machines, and Jérôme Torres-Lozano, Director of Professional Services at Inventus. The moderator is Sarah Brown, eDiscovery expert at Inventus.
There is information about this, and a registration form here.
To supplement the webinar, Inventus has published a two-part article on multilingual edisclosure by Jérôme Torres-Lozano called It’s all Belgian fries to me: the art of multilingual disclosure. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.
Jérôme Torres-Lozano was brought up bilingual, and his first job was working with a major translation corporation. He now brings specialist language skills to electronic disclosure / eDiscovery at Inventus. Continue reading
Rishi Khullar is Director of Product Management at Heretik. I interviewed him at Relativity Fest in London about Heretik’s new product, Heretik Forge, because Heretik Forge uses RelativityOne.
Rishi Khullar said that Heretik Forge is the first solution for running data science experiments in a Relativity instance, allowing customers to build custom machine learning models. Uses include contract review, M&A, regulatory response, and vendor management.
The customer is able to build machine learning models which are theirs and which stay with them. By allowing customers to tailor analysis models to suit their business, they enable competitor differentiation. Continue reading
I wrote recently about a discussion panel which Integreon is putting on in Bristol on 26 June. That is now just over a week away.
Although we will be looking at the new discovery rule, the focus is much more on the practical aspects of dealing with electronic documents and data in any context, and on the feedback from judges gleaned when Integreon’s Vince Neicho spoke at the Judicial College.
There will also be a demonstration of Brainspace, showing how visual analytics plays a part in preparing to give (or receive) discovery / disclosure in any context.
Our aim is to bring together the problems and the solutions, to look at what is new and what is not, and to suggest how a good understanding of technology enables the required discussions with the other side and with the court. Continue reading
eDiscovery, originally the main focus of this blog, has properly become seen as a subset of wider document management functions. OpenText’s roots lie in document management, and it has met the changing market by acquiring eDiscovery and forensics companies (notably Recommind and Guidance Software) to bring those specialist activities to its corporate clients while continuing to develop its broader document management and information governance tools and skills.
eDiscovery itself has broadened, its remit extending beyond disputes to other areas of corporate activity (such as M&A) which require the collection and searching of large bodies of data. At the same time, security concerns have risen to the top of the list of risks which concern lawyers and their clients. The risks are both external and internal – third party actors intending loss or harm to a company, or insiders, perhaps abusing privileged access to data.
OpenText eDocs is designed to deal with threats like data breaches and insider risk threats – see this OpenText web page Organizations require additional security layers and this one about the latest release of eDocs which summarises the threats and the solutions, not least encryption of documents at rest, which OpenText eDocs brings. Continue reading
At Legaltech in New York I spoke to Sean Lynch, who is is Director, Review Services, at Ricoh eDiscovery in Canada. One of the most discussed topics at Legaltech was artificial intelligence, and I asked Sean Lynch what was happening with AI and what was useful.
Sean Lynch said that AI had perhaps been overhyped and given more importance than it currently had in practical terms. The term “AI” covers a lot of sophisticated software, used by sophisticated people, which produces data models of enormous value to lawyers.
The software itself doesn’t know anything, Sean Lynch said. This kind of software is good at learning that this type of document is good and that one is not, and can amplify that conclusion across very large datasets. It will, however, never replace lawyers. It can make their lives easier and less complex, and enable them to take on more diverse matters. This makes it of particular value to smaller firms. Continue reading
Julia Helmer is eDiscovery Director, Discovery Solutions at Consilio. I spoke to her at Relativity Fest in Chicago and asked her what developments she was seeing in the discovery of mobile data.
Julia Helmer said that Consilio has been doing a great deal of work on mobile data recently. It was, she said, similar to email in the 1990s, meaning that it is created in ever-increasing volumes while the lawyers and the technologies try to keep up. Continue reading
Integreon has assembled a panel to visit Bristol on 26 June to talk about technology and effective resourcing, primarily in the context of the disclosure pilot scheme.
The focus will be on practical things – on getting the disclosure job done within the rules, and done on time and at the lowest realistic cost. The principles set out in the pilot scheme, not least the obligations to plan ahead and to cooperate, are equally applicable to other forms of document management, including investigations and arbitrations.
The subjects also include training, and particularly training for the judges who have the task of managing disclosure. Vince Neicho of Integreon spoke about this at the Judicial College a few months ago, and he will cover that and some of the feedback he got from the judicial delegates.
The speakers come from industry, from law firms and from Integreon. They are:
Mark Brannigan – Vice President, EMEA – Cybersecurity at AON
Emily Wyllie Ballard – eDiscovery Manager at RPC
Nicola Woodfall – eDiscovery Manager at Travers Smith
Vince Neicho – Vice President, Legal Services at Integreon
Clare Chalkley – Vice President, Legal Services at Integreon
I am to have the pleasure of moderating the discussion. Continue reading
Ricoh is running a set of webinars in June under the general title Techtalks Webinar Series on the theme Intelligent Information Management.
This consists of four one-hour webinars about solutions for managing unstructured data, contract analysis, compliance and digital transaction management. Each of them will be done in conjunction with one of Ricoh’s partners.
There is a website here about the series which includes registration links for each webinar. The first one is called Take control of your data and will be presented in conjunction with Active Navigation. Its main message is that management of data is more than just questions of control and compliance, important though they are; there is also valuable business intelligence and insight to be extracted from properly-managed data. Continue reading
