Author Archives: Chris Dale

An article called Managing E-Discovery Costs with Managed Review by Rachel Teisch on the Xerox Litigation Services blog shows that the subject of managing eDiscovery costs played as big a part at the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat as it did at the Information Governance and eDiscovery Strategy Exchange which I attended in San Diego. Continue reading →

Bring your own device (BYOD) was one of the many subjects covered at the Information Governance and eDiscovery Strategy Exchange in San Diego where we heard from two corporations who are developing policies aimed at reconciling the benefits of allowing employees to use their own devices with the security, eDiscovery and other risks which that brings. Continue reading →

I have written more than once about Proof Finder, the version of the Nuix processing technology which can still be bought for $100, all of which goes to a charity involved in child literacy. Continue reading →

UK eDisclosure consultant Andrew Haslam of Allvision has published version 1.2 of his eDisclosure Systems Buyers Guide in conjunction with Charles Christian’s Legal IT Insider. It is available to download here. Continue reading →

I took part in a webinar yesterday organised by Consilio whose theme was the metrics of eDisclosure / eDiscovery with particular reference to the budgets and cost estimates now required in UK civil litigation. The star turn in the webinar was Marla Bergman of Goldman Sachs whom I came across whilst moderating a panel in Washington last year. Continue reading →

Apersee, run by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, has updated its list of forthcoming webinars. These include one on 28 May called Don’t Get Left Behind – eDiscovery is for Everyone, with Martin Audet of Nuix and William Hamilton, a partner at Quarles and Brady and Dean of the Department of eDiscovery at Bryan University. Continue reading →

I recently recorded a podcast with Rachel Teisch of Xerox Litigation Services whose purpose was to describe briefly the recent changes to the UK Civil Procedure Rules as they relate to case management and eDisclosure. Continue reading →

By chance, I was on my way to Bury, near Manchester, to visit digital investigations and eDisclosure company CY4OR when the news broke of its partnership with Nuix. The press release is here. Continue reading →

A webinar which I am doing with Consilio on 24 April will focus on some of the positive aspects of the new UK Civil Procedure Rules relating to case management and disclosure. The panel includes Marla Bergman, VP, Assistant General Counsel, Legal and Internal Audit at Goldman Sachs and the moderator is Garry Bernstein, Director of Consilio in London. Continue reading →

One of the more interesting conferences which I attended last year was LawTech Europe Congress in Prague. It was the first eDiscovery conference organised in the region, and was exciting as much as for its potential as for its content. Continue reading →

I am taking part in a webinar with ZyLAB on 10 April. The title is Bridging the gap between legal and IT: working together in eDiscovery. I will be there to talk about increased efficiency and reduced organisational risk, and will throw in my corollary message – that there are benefits here as well, both for organisations and for the individuals who grab the chance to focus the attention on the uses and value of data as well as its risks and costs. Continue reading →

The first case management conferences affected by the new eDisclosure obligations will take place on 16 April. Lawyers will have had the required discussions with opponents and will have filed reports about the anticipated scope of and cost electronic disclosure. Continue reading →

Here’s a reminder of a seminar to be given by Recommind at St Paul’s Cathedral on 27 March – next Wednesday – at 8.30am. Speakers include Senior Master Whitaker, Mark Surguy of Eversheds and Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy, as well as me. I wrote about it here and registration is here. Continue reading →

The full title of this webinar is Protecting Your ESI Blindside: Why a “Defensible Deletion” Offense is the Best Information Governance Defense. It is a deliberately paradoxical title, implying that a positive and proactive attack on useless data is your best defence against eDiscovery sanctions, eDiscovery failures and excessive eDiscovery expense. Continue reading →

One of the easy predictions for 2013 was that we would begin to see case studies, or at least anecdotes, about the use of technology assisted review. These are, of course, more valuable than any number of assertions in marketing department brochures. Continue reading →

I gave a talk in Manchester last year in the company of Terry Harrison of Hobs Legal Docs. Our subject then was the pending Jackson reforms, and we got a good audience both for the seminar and for a rather good post-event gathering in a nearby pub. Continue reading →

Epiq Systems brought out Epiq Portal 2.0 as LegalTech began. There is a lot of noise around then, however, and I generally prefer to let the dust settle before picking up on announcements. The press release is here. Continue reading →

The agenda has now been published for CEIC 2013, the conference for cyber security, eDiscovery and digital investigations led by Guidance Software, which this year takes place in Orlando between 19 and 22 May. Continue reading →

Collecting data in multiple jurisdictions is hard enough anyway for all sorts of practical reasons. One of the most expensive implications arises from the privacy and data protection rules which, despite common principles, can raise different issues in each jurisdiction. Continue reading →

eDiscovery provider UBIC has announced a strategic alliance with NextGen for the joint development of audio analytics solutions for forensic investigations and eDiscovery. Continue reading →

My involvement with Huron Consulting is mainly with Huron Legal’s eDiscovery practice. As a group, of course, Huron Consulting gives advice on a wide range of matters to professional firms. One of those is the use by law firms of social … Continue reading →

Guidance Software is giving a webinar on 19 March at 11am PDT with the title Top Advantages of Integrated Legal Review. Corporations and law firms cannot complain about the range of choices which they face job by job and as a matter of policy across all jobs. Continue reading →

A quick reminder that Recommind invites law firm associates and litigation support people to their city club drinks, pool and networking party tonight. Continue reading →

Nuix joins forces with Apersee to give a webinar called Unlocking Predictive Coding to Find Facts Fast on 21 March at 1:00pm Central. The subject is the use of analytical tools and techniques to find facts from documents by first defensively reducing the number of documents requiring manual review. Continue reading →

Compliance with the Civil Procedure Rules, old or new, is the least which should be expected of those who practice litigation. The new CPR regime of eDisclosure reports, active management and penalties for non-compliance brings implications which extend beyond mere compliance and into the management of law firm litigation departments and their relationship with their clients, not least as to fee arrangements. Continue reading →

An article on eDiscovery Journal by Barry Murphy called A Real Experience With Social Media Archiving draws attention to the difficulty of finding empirical evidence about social media collection and preservation. There is not much of it about, although pretty well everyone seems to agree that this is the next source of information which is not only potentially discoverable but which holds risk and benefit in equal measure. Continue reading →

Recommind has organised a networking and social event for law firm associates and litigation support teams. It is advertised as “a night of pool, drinks and fun!” and takes place at Eight Bank, Change Alley, London EC3V, 3ND, starting at 6pm. Continue reading →

An article called The Power of Sound by Martin Bonney and Deborah Blaxell of Epiq Systems, and published in The Lawyer (it is at page 26 here), makes it clear both that sound recordings have moved to the mainstream in eDiscovery / eDisclosure and that technology is evolving rapidly to deal with them. Continue reading →

AccessData, provider of solutions for digital forensics, litigation support, eDiscovery and cyber security, is holding its big annual AccessData User Conference in Las Vegas from 23 to 25 April. The venue is the Aria, and those who have stayed there before will know that the technology tone is set even in the bedrooms, where curtains, blinds, audio and everything else is controlled from a tablet-type device on the wall. Continue reading →

The fact that I rather liked its old website does not prevent me from appreciating iCONECT’s smart new site which launched this week. There is a reason why most websites follow a common form, to do with intuitive navigation, and it is quite difficult to come up with something which is attractive and different whilst still making it easy for the user to get to the parts you want them to see. iCONECT has managed it – an extension, perhaps, of the navigation expertise which it bring to its XERA platform. Continue reading →

eDiscovery and litigation support are largely reactive disciplines, providing firefighting solutions to problems which have been triggered by a dispute or by alleged non-compliance with regulatory duties. We are beginning to see a focus on information governance, part of which is designed to anticipate and minimise potential eDiscovery problems (I say “part” because information governance has wider ambitions than this). Continue reading →

eDiscovery and predictive coding software provider Recommind is giving a seminar with the title 360 degrees on the Jackson Reforms on 27 March at 8:30am in St Paul’s Cathedral. Continue reading →

Lord Justice Jackson’s review of litigation costs covered very much more than the case management and eDisclosure components which are, inevitably, my primary focus. As with any major reforms, there are winners and losers or those who see themselves as such. The range of the reforms is immensely wide and one can accept some parts while rejecting others. Continue reading →

Doug Austin has been interviewing various eDiscovery / eDisclosure industry leaders for his eDiscovery Daily Blog. The most recent interview is with Nigel Murray, managing director at Huron Legal in London. Continue reading →

Michael Becker of Consilio is taking part in a workshop called Best practice 2013 – Anti corruption / compliance taking place at the Charles Hotel in Munich on 5 and 6 March. Continue reading →

UK eDisclosure/eDiscovery consultant Andrew Haslam of Allvision annually produces a report on LegalTech drawing on the views of a wide range of people to supplement his own reactions. Continue reading →

Consilio, until recently called First Advantage Litigation Consulting, is taking part in ACEDS’ Third Annual eDiscovery Conference and Exhibition between 28 February and 2 March in Hollywood, FL. Continue reading →

EDiscovery and information management technology provider ZyLAB has announced the appointment of Simon Maguire as Sales Director for ZyLAB UK. The press release is here. Continue reading →

This is a reminder of the webinar to be presented by kCura on 28 February at 11 AM CST at which Dr David Grossman, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, will conduct an interactive discussion on the statistical validation of relativity assisted review and on the statistics involved in a computer-assisted review workflow. Continue reading →

kCura’s annual user conference, Relativity Fest, offers hands-on labs, breakout sessions and practical knowledge which delegates can use immediately. Continue reading →

The use of predictive coding and other machine learning algorithms in eDiscovery is a very practical and commercial application of advanced and sophisticated search technology whose use requires the development of best practice standards. Continue reading →

Guidance Software is presenting a webinar on 26 February with the title EnCase Forensic v7: the Best Practice in Digital Investigations. Continue reading →

I have learned by now that there is no point in attempting a wide-ranging summary of the themes and players at LegalTech because Gary MacFadden will do a much more comprehensive job of it than the rest of us put together. I bumped into him ten yards into my first foray into the exhibit hall and decided I would learn much more by talking to him than by any amount of wandering the floors. Continue reading →

I wrote recently (see FTI Report – Advice from Counsel by Ari Kaplan: Trends that will change E-Discovery) about the Advice from Counsel study written by Ari Kaplan in conjunction with FTI Technology whose strength is to bring qualitative and anecdotal views to supplement the mere numbers which one gets from many reports. Continue reading →

Every organisation ought to have a cloud strategy, even if that strategy is to (try and) ignore the promise and the challenges of the cloud. One ought to have some idea of the differences between a public and a private cloud, and to understand the main legal considerations of moving to the cloud, including data privacy, secure access and who is responsible for your ESI. Continue reading →

Anyone at a law firm can apply for a free delegate ticket to the LegalTech Asia Technology Summit, taking place in Hong Kong on March 4–5. If you work in legal technology anywhere in the Asia-Pacific then you will want to be there. Continue reading →

Equivio is well known for its analytical solutions for eDiscovery. Its overarching product, Equivio Zoom, bundles together tools for near-duplicate detection, e-mail threading and predictive coding, together with its new product, Equivio Themes, which allows identification of thematic links between documents. Continue reading →

AccessData’s Mobile Phone Examiner Plus (MPE+) is designed to help lawyers and investigators recover evidence from mobile devices such as iPhones and iPods and from Android devices, and it enables the recovery of data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and many other sources of critical evidence. Continue reading →

One of the more encouraging trends during 2012 was the growing focus on getting to the root of the data problem instead of merely addressing eDiscovery / eDisclosure problems as they arose. Continue reading →

The eDiscovery software and services company formerly known as First Advantage Litigation Consulting is now called Consilio, the culmination of a year of acquisition, growth, senior appointments, technology developments and brand presence. There is more information about the change of name here. Continue reading →

This is my third start at writing about the launch of the Nuix information governance platform Luminate. The results of the first two attempts may turn up in due course in an essay on good marketing or on the importance of information governance or, perhaps, both at once. The role of this site is to give short factual accounts of things of interest in eDiscovery / eDisclosure – a subject, verb, object approach instead of elegantly-turned sentences conveying thoughtful commentary. Continue reading →

My recent article Applying science to the validation of technology assisted review attracted a gratifying amount of attention. It was based around a paper called Measuring and Validating the Effectiveness of Relativity Assisted Review by Dr David Grossman, an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Continue reading →