eDisclosure Information Project

eDiscovery software companies are increasingly using video demonstrations to help users and potential users understand how their software works.

FTI Technology is good at this, and has a series of short videos on its website which simultaneously show off the Ringtail user interface and give an idea about how to use it.

These videos have a value which goes beyond short-term marketing. Those who new to the subject, or who think they ought to know more about it, can get an understanding from videos like this of the sort of functionality which is available from modern eDiscovery software tools.

Epiq Systems has conducted a survey of businesses in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands to identify trends relating to electronic disclosure and document review.

The survey reveals a gap between corporations’ confidence in their ability to find key data for litigation or investigations and their monitoring and updating practices. Put shortly, they are not as ready as they ought to be and less prepared than they think they are.

Martin Bonney, Director, International Consulting Services at Epiq said:

“The capture, storage and retrieval of data is a constantly evolving challenge, complicated by the sheer variety of connected and mobile devices that now generate data. Regulatory deadlines for document production can be as short as 14 days. If data is not continually assessed, the ability to respond to requests quickly, accurately and defensibly is severely tested.”

There is more information about the survey here and links to Epiq’s resources on information governance strategies and data mapping here.

Huron Consulting Group has announced the opening of Huron Legal’s new discovery centre in San Francisco to support law departments and law firms on the US West Coast and in Asia.

The new centre, Huron Legal’s tenth, offers a full range of services including discovery consulting, law department consulting, managed review, data analytics, project management, data collection and forensic services, as well as comprehensive discovery services from preservation and collection through production.

There is a press release here, with more information about both this new centre and Huron Legal’s eDiscovery work generally.

Part of Equivio’s strong commitment to education lies in its well-regarded webinar series called Predictive Coding Minus the Hype.

Many lawyers face a conflict when considering the use of analytical software. On the one hand, they seek evidence-based confirmation that analytic software tools are drawing the correct conclusions (and by “correct” they mean the same conclusions as they would themselves reach). On the other hand, many lawyers (including me) are daunted by the mathematical and statistical concepts which underpin these analytic tools.

Many lawyers take refuge in sneering at “black boxes”, and stick with the methods which served them well in the days when discovery consisted of a few folders of paper documents.

The one mathematical certainty, however, is that old methods are seriously inadequate for modern volumes, even before pressures of time and cost are taken into account.

Avi Elkoni of Equivio addresses this conflict in a repeat of his webinar Demystifying Statistics in Predictive Coding. The webinar aims to help lawyers and others understand:

• Statistical concepts used in predictive coding. What they are and why they’re important
• Statistical measures including richness, recall, precision and F-measure
• Basic concepts of statistical estimation including sample size and error margin

The webinar is at 1.00pm EDT on 11 August. There is more information and a registration form here.

You can find earlier webinars in the “Without the Hype” series on Equivio’s resources page here.

I do not usually turn to BuzzFeed as a source of eDiscovery learning, but I was interested to see a post about pictures posted to his Instagram account by a Russian soldier apparently operating in Ukraine. Its title Does This Soldier’s Instagram Account Prove Russia Is Covertly Operating In Ukraine? is slightly misleading – there is nothing “covert” about blasting your GPS information out into the Internet, though it appears that the soldier was unaware that he was doing that. Or indifferent about it. Or stupid. Or all of these things.

The picture here, incidentally, from the BuzzFeed page, shows the Ukraine-Russia border (the red lines) both above and below the apparent site of the pictures – this is a narrow part of Ukraine sticking eastwards into Russia.

However bullish Putin may be about the presence of his troops in Ukraine, it is unlikely that he will be thrilled to see that one of his soldiers has (presumably inadvertently) produced evidence which simultaneously shows him manning a missile launcher system and pins him to a location in Ukraine. Quite apart from matters of international comity (or at least the illusion of it), it is a weapon of this kind, from somewhere near this place, which blasted Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 out of the sky killing 298 people, including a large number of children.

That kind of crime outstrips any civil or criminal activity you can think of, but there are lessons here for more mundane offences. The eDiscovery lesson, in case that is not clear, is that all sorts of everyday devices capture, retain and publish evidence of time and place.

Apart from being a good illustration of something I bang on about a lot, it ties in with two other things I have seen this week. One is an article on Inside Counsel by David Freskos and Bryan Lee of FTI Technology called Using smart phone location services to help solve investigations.

It opens with a story of a defecting employee whose photographs of his former employer’s manufacturing plant carried GPS coordinates which were easily traced on Google Earth.

The article goes on to make suggestions both for investigators who may rely on such information (if they only remember to look for it) and on corporate policies about the use of such devices.

The second is the product description page for AccessData’s Mobile Phone Examiner PLUS which is in my recent electronic reading pile thanks to a recent tweet from AccessData which emphasises the ease and speed with which MPE+ supports eDiscovery with visualisation tools allowing you to see communication relationships among contacts and graphical data timelines. That page also has a link to an AccessData white paper called The Future of Mobile E-Discovery.

The third is a demonstration I saw this week of real-time collection of social media information – not just historic tweets or Facebook entries but those which are happening in real time. For myself, I don’t care who knows where I am and I am probably tweeting about it anyway. If you are spying on your employers’ warehouse or working on missile launches in occupied territory then you may have cause for concern.

Lawyers engaged in eDiscovery may think of this both positively and negatively – on the one hand, this is evidence which may make or break a case or, at least, bolster or undermine assertions made by a witness as to his or her activities. More negatively, it may be negligence or breach of duty to overlook the possibility of such data existing.

My thanks to tweeter @PME2014 for the pointer to the Ukraine article.

I had noticed a couple of well-written and interesting articles on the Iris Data Services blog which I did not link to at the time, in part because no author was identified and I prefer to know whose words I am passing on.

I now know that they are by Daniel Gold, who has recently joined Iris Data Services as Sales Engineer Director. Encouragingly (from my point of view at least) Daniel Gold began his career as a lawyer, which perhaps explains why his articles are not a mere recital of technology points but are rooted in what lawyers want (or should want) to know.

Take for example his article Ending the Era of the Cookie Monster eDiscovery Sales Reps, published on 16 June. Its message lies in the paragraph beginning “Where is the business conversation?” and in the list of high-sounding but essentially meaningless stock phrases from sales reps which precedes it.

I liked also his article of 2 June whose title, What I Love Lucy Can Teach Us about eDiscovery, was guaranteed to catch the eye. Its focus is on two things – the bottlenecks in business processes from chocolate manufacture to eDiscovery, and its emphasis on the role of litigation support staff as case managers and project managers who are “instrumental in advising you on the best course of action to take with the data and working with clients”.

Interestingly, barrister Damian Murphy drew a similar parallel recently when speaking at the IQPC Information Governance and eDiscovery Summit in London. Referring to jobs he had had before becoming a barrister, he said that involvement in ice cream production had been as important as any other experience in learning how to manage eDisclosure projects.

You won’t find many barristers talking like that, just as relatively few sales engineers have a focus on the wider objectives of law firms and their clients.

The UK Human Rights Blog is maintained by barristers at One Crown Office Row. I come across it through the tweets of Adam Wagner.

Many of us have a broadly vague notion that human rights are a good thing and are aware, again in general terms, that David Cameron’s Conservative government takes a different view; it is not clear whether that is an ideological position or merely one which taps into the half-formed prejudices of a sizeable number of voters.

This week’s reshuffle has disposed of Cabinet members who are thought of as “for” human rights and replaced them with those who are in some ways “against”. In the process, Cameron has ditched wise legal heads and filled up the ranks with people whose minimal legal experience and personal ambitions will keep them in line with the government (that is, the party) line.

The position is, of course, more nuanced than that, and there is no better guide to it all than the UK Human Rights Blog. Today’s article by Adam Wagner is called The Tory human rights “car crash”, which explains in clear terms what has happened this week and what its implications are.

Regardless of your view on the UK’s position vis-a-vis “Europe” (that catch-all word which sweeps up so many different things), you cannot but be appalled at a government which replaces senior law officers of the Crown with inexperienced but compliant ones. Adam Wagner compares this with CEOs who sacks the legal team because they did not like their advice.

If (like me) you are easily confused by the various courts and related institutions which lie across the Channel, this recent mea culpa by the Guardian may assist.

An article on Mail Online includes panoramic photographs taken by British cameramen during the Great War. Their primary purpose was to give both the staff and the front-line officers a broad picture of the positions opposite British trenches.

There are a couple of interesting before and after scenes, one showing the contemporary scene at two stages in the war and one comparing a wartime scene with the present-day view.

Information Governance has been defined by the Information Governance Initiative as:

the activities and technologies that organisations employ to maximise the value of their information while minimising associated risks and costs.

That much seems reasonably straightforward. What is rather harder is to articulate a business case for spending money on meeting risks and uncovering benefits which, however easily described, are difficult to calculate.

This is the purpose of a webinar organised by Nuix with the title Building the Business Case for Information Governance which takes place on 30 July at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 6 pm BST. This is part of a series of IG-related webinars which I have mentioned before.

Registration is here.

Cross-border discovery was a minority interest when I started talking about it several years ago. It has now become a dominant subject as ai growing number of jurisdictions adopt data protection and privacy laws, as international trade increases, as more and more companies have shared ownership across borders and as regulators increasingly look at the global picture, not least of fraud and corruption.

FTI Consulting has feet in all the relevant jurisdictions and has been producing good advisory material, both written and in webinar form in recent months.

One was published in November of last year with the title Lawyers Beware of China’s Thorny Privacy Laws. My original web link to this has expired, and it is good to have another opportunity to uncover it. Written by Richard Kershaw of FTI and Michael Vella of the Shanghai office of Jones Day, this article took us well beyond the easily-made observation that China is very protective of its state secrets.

It explores four different scenarios – personal data on company devices, case-sensitive data on personal devices, the export of financial data to the United States and only then the fact that case data may include state secrets. When collecting data in China, the article says,

nobody knows what the data include until they are reviewed. Thus, counsel needs to implement a due diligence protocol to mitigate the risk of unintentionally violating the State Secrets Law.

A more recent article by Richard Kershaw, published last month, expands on the difficulties in the region. This title is A Catch-22 in Asian eDiscovery which describes the central problem thus:

If organisations provide personal information in response to US and EU subpoenas, they could be confronted with fines and criminal prosecution in many Asian countries. If companies don’t, they could be subject to sanctions in the United States and Europe.

The problem is getting no easier, Richard Kershaw says:

The US government is quite unsympathetic to the bind its investigations can put companies in.

As the article goes on to make clear, the problem is not created solely by US regulators, still less by US litigation, plentiful though that may be. Regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore, the article says, are “becoming quite aggressive” whilst “the Chinese government also is flexing its regulatory muscle”.

Richard Kershaw puts the solutions under three main headings – know the laws, know the technology and be prepared. It is clear from the rest of his article that these steps are merely the starting point for understanding and dealing with Asian eDiscovery in a practical, as well as a lawful, way.

Lastly, for the moment at least, FTI has presented a Global eDiscovery Series of webinars which looked separately at cross-border issues in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I took part in two of them. If you want an easily accessible guide to cross-border eDiscovery issues around the world, this series is a convenient way of getting it.

Nick Patience of Recommind was kind enough to ask me to take part in a series of written Q&A posts on Recommind’s Mind Over Matters blog. They have recently published similar discussions with Patrick Oot of Shook, Hardy & Bacon and of the eDiscovery Institute, and with David Horrigan of 451 Research, so I am in good company. My piece appears here.

The questions reached me shortly after the Court of Appeal’s decision in Denton and two other cases known collectively as “Mitchell 2″. I was in slightly jaundiced mood as a result of all the time and money which has been wasted as a result of the original decision, and it shows in my answers. My own post about Denton and eDisclosure will appear in due course.

I was asked, amongst other things, if there are “any lessons from the US experience with eDiscovery that are instructive for UK lawyers? Yet more jaundice is evident from my reply which includes the comment that I launched the eDisclosure information Project, in part, “to correct the idea that eDiscovery must always be disproportionately expensive in the US style”

Nick Patience, Drew Lewis, Phil Favro and Jonathan Wiley of Recommind have kindly extracted sentences from the blog post which together provide a good summary of it. They are given in this Storify.

I wrote recently and at some length about the fact that corporations are increasingly deciding to take some or all of the eDiscovery function in-house.

Even as I was writing that article, AccessData announced the launch of two tiers of appliance designed to give companies a solution which can be brought in house at once, which is not dependent on the company’s own servers, and which comes with a support package which includes remote implementation, knowledge transfer and other elements needed to minimise the burden on the company’s own support staff.

The Summation Appliance brings the power and functionality of AccessData’s Summation in a ready-to-use package. Alternatively, AccessData offers the Managed, In-House eDiscovery Appliance, a customised and preconfigured server running AccessData’s eDiscovery solution, including legal hold management, data identification and preservation, collections of structured and unstructured sources and web-based early case assessment, as well as Summation for review.

Keith Schrodt of AccessData has described the rationale behind these tools, as well as the appliances themselves in an article called Bring eDiscovery Hardware In-House for More Control, Flexibility and Improved Results. In addition to its own full description, the article has links to product descriptions and some user quotations which serve as references for the product and the its solutions.

Equivio Zoom is a package of data tools which embraces several of Equivio’s free-standing technology tools. Near-duplicate detection, email threading and, not least, Equivio’s Relevance predictive coding tool are bundled together in a single suite whose purpose is to suppress redundant data and bring forward the things which matter.

Among many other features, Equivio Zoom has two particular design criteria relevant. One is simplicity of appearance and ease of use – an Equivio Zoom user screen is uncluttered, with the fewest possible options consistent with user control. The other is that predictive coding appears in its proper place as just another tool to be pulled down and used when it is appropriate to do so.

During 2013, Equivio started a programme of education which was designed to be product-neutral and to focus on the concepts, on the practical use and on the benefits of predictive coding / technology-assisted review. One limb of this educational initiative involved missionary initiatives, Equivio’s people going out into corporations and law firms to explain the subject. The other was a series of webinars called Predictive Coding Minus the Hype which broke the subject down into its components and explained them clearly.

Part of this series has been captured in an article by Barclay Blair of the Information Governance Initiative and of ViaLumina LLC and published by Metropolitan Corporate Counsel as an article called Success Stories from Three Years of Predictive Coding.

Barclay Blair took four cases managed over three years by eDiscovery service provider D4 who had rigourously tracked data from its predictive coding cases and refined its predictive coding workflow with each succeeding case. Barclay Blair’s article took four specific cases managed by D4, each slightly different and each illustrating statistically how the use of the predictive coding component of Equivio Zoom produced a good result for the clients.

The four specific cases were described by Barclay Blair as follows:

Case 1: “The Document Dump” (A large-volume, incoming production)

Case 2: “A Merger at Risk – When Speed Matters” (A large-volume, limited-time, second request)

Case 3: “High Cost/Low Merits” (Potentially high discovery costs and low merits)

Case 4: “The Pressure Cooker” (A discovery scope expansion with no change in production deadline)

As Barclay Blair says in his introduction, “these case studies not only tell the story of cost savings, but also the strategic value of getting to key data faster.” As always, Barclay Blair illustrates his article with crisp, instantly-comprehensible graphics.

Those who found the early marketing hype off-putting, incomprehensible or both will find in this article a lucid explanation as to how the proper use of this technology saved money.

If you want to read more about predictive coding retrospective case studies, I have written recently about a white paper by Winston & Strawn on the Equivio website called The Tested Effectiveness of Equivio Relevance in Technology Assisted Review which describes that most valuable of comparative studies – different approaches and tools applied to the same data set.

An article by Barclay Blair called Pulling out the red pencil: one more last time on the definition of Information Governance? links to various posts about what IG does and does not mean.

93% of those asked agreed on the definition put forward by the Information Governance Initiative, which was:

The activities and technologies that organisations employ to maximise the value of their information while minimising associated risks and costs.

None of us but Barclay is likely to read all the linked posts, but I particularly commend those by George Parapadakis which are referred to in Barclay’s article.

HP Autonomy is giving a web event on 23 July 9:30am PDT at which HP President and CEO Meg Whitman will lead a discussion and Q&A about how Big Data is changing the future of business.

The other speaker is Robert Youngjohns, Executive VP at HP software, and the theme will be how HP software can deliver “collective intelligence” which brings together human information, business data and machine data.

Further information and registration can be found here.

Guidance Software is presenting a webinar on 16 July which considers the balancing act between privacy, security and eDiscovery, not least because data breaches another security failures give rise to criminal sanctions and civil litigation.

There is a growing awareness of the importance of individual privacy, even in the US, at a time when security considerations often seem to trump privacy.

The speakers in this webinar are David Horrigan of 451 Research, an Analyst and Counsel who covers the Information Governance and Compliance aspects, Ed McAndrew, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Assistant U.S. Attorney and Cybercrime Coordinator, whose view is from the government side, and Judi Uttal, Senior Product Marketing Director at Guidance Software.

They will discuss:

• Historical, cultural and legal backgrounds of data privacy
• A Federal government perspective on current cybersecurity issues
• E-discovery in terms of laws, relevant court cases, pertinent security events, and government agency involvement

Registration is here.

However fast you think your litigation will move, an investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) will probably require even more urgent attention. It will also, potentially, have wider implications than civil litigation, and the penalties for getting it wrong can be severe.A recurring element in FCPA investigations is the need to deal with discovery in multiple jurisdictions, raising serious practical issues when the privacy and data protection regimes in other jurisdictions conflict with the FCPA demands.

To help with this, FTI Technology has assembled an FCPA Toolkit which covers, amongst other things, the best ways to handle discovery in an FCPA context including:

The evolving data privacy regulatory environment in Europe

Key “dos and don’ts” for maintaining data privacy compliance in response to an FCPA investigations

Case study examples shown best practices in international discovery.

You can find FTI’s FCPA Toolkit here.

Epiq Systems have a webinar on Wednesday 9 July at 10.00am PDT with the title Four steps to successfully migrating legal hold systems.

As with all software, legal hold systems have developed to meet new standards – standards set by court rules and cases, by greater volumes and higher demands for speed and defensibility. What happens when you have to migrate your legal hold systems to a new system?

The speakers are David Rohde, Senior Director, Consulting Services at Epiq Systems and James FitzGerald, Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships at Exterro. The moderator is Ed Burke, Senior Vice President, Document Review Services of Epiq Systems.

There is more information here, and Registration is here.

One of the sessions which stood out at the InnoXcell Legal Big Data Symposium 2014 in Hong Kong was a demonstration by Epiq Systems of its ability to handle audio eDiscovery in multiple languages.

With high-wire bravado, Epiq did this live, with passages read out in both English and Mandarin. It worked well, and was certainly different from the usual platform and podium sessions. There is no substitute for showing software in action, and audio is a little more dynamic than mere text.

Celeste Kemper, Director, Document Review Services Asia for Epiq Systems and Nick Rich, a consultant with Epiq in London, took the lead on this performance.

Afterwards, we took the opportunity to interview each of them. It seemed appropriate also to ask Epiq’s Jennifer Qian to explain the system in Mandarin.

The videos can be found here:

Celeste Kemper

Nick Rich

Jennifer Qian

The focus on eDiscovery process in recent years has somehow obscured the fact that the purpose of electronic discovery / eDisclosure is to find the facts which will determine the strategy and tactics of a case as well as its outcome.

That becomes increasingly expensive to do so using traditional methods, and recent years have seen the development of advanced analytics and workflows designed to find the evidence at proportionate cost.

This is the subject of a webinar by FTI called Find Facts Fast: a how-to guide for smarter eDdiscovery, which will be broadcast on 25 June at 2:00pm EDT.

The speakers are Gareth Evans of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, and David Grant and JR Jenkins of FTI technology.

You can find more information and registration details here.

The last time I wrote about Jonathan Maas, word came back to me that the only words missing were that “He was a devoted husband and father”; what was meant to be a set of compliments apparently read like an obituary. I also omitted that other staple of British obituary – “He did not suffer fools gladly” – which I suspect he would accept, at least in its literal meaning.

All this circumstantial stuff is by way of introduction to the fact that Jonathan Maas has been appointed Senior Director of UK Client Services for Huron Legal in London. At the same time, Serge Poldi has been appointed Director of UK Discovery Operations.

Serge Poldi’s role is the management of daily technology operations and technical leadership. Jonathan Maas will oversee discovery services in the UK and in Europe. The press release is here with further information about the roles.

These appointments show a serious commitment to expanding Huron Legal’s eDiscovery services on this side of the Atlantic. Jonathan has 30 years experience in an industry which is not much older than that and brings a combination of gravitas and a light touch to a business which he knows as well as anyone.

Those who know of Jonathan’s long-running Bong List will know that he has a wide range of interests not limited to those of his work and will be glad to note that he is continuing it at Huron Legal. Send him a message at jmaas@huronconsultinggroup.com to be put on the mailing list.

I don’t think it will be long before we start seeing the effect of these appointments, and I look forward to being part of the initiatives which will follow – I already have been, in fact, having taken part in a Jackson-related event which Huron Legal organised at the Law Society a few weeks ago. I will be writing about that shortly.

I am the moderator of a Guidance Software /  Inside Counsel webinar taking place today at 2.00pm ET / 11.00pm PT / 19.00 BST with the title International eDiscovery: data protection, privacy and cross-border issues.

I will be joined by Patrick Burke of Reed Smith, Scott Cohen of Winston & Strawn and Chad McManamy of Guidance Software. We will describe the basic elements of non-US data protection, explain how best to resolve the obvious conflict with US eDiscovery demands, and suggest practical ways of minimising the difficulties and the costs of dealing with cross-border eDiscovery.

My first ever cross-border eDiscovery session was done in the company of Patrick Burke many years ago, at a time when most US lawyers were still incredulous at the idea that foreign jurisdictions would not submit willingly to US eDiscovery demands. We have moved on a bit since then, evolving strategies both in-country and in the US courts. The starting point is to understand what the issues are.

The Inside Counsel registration page is here.

If lawyers need to understand the range of data (that is, potential evidence) which might be held in a mobile phone or similar device, forensic examiners need to know what tools are available to them to uncover that evidence.

That is the subject of a webinar to be given by AccessData today called MPE+ Overview. Kevin DeLong, Director of Computer Forensics Training at AccessData will demonstrate the latest and most popular features of Mobile Phone Examiner Plus from the basics through to the extreme.

Registration is here.

Much of the talk at Techno Security in Myrtle Beach was about the new Web Review and Analytics tool from Nuix which allows investigators, lawyers, subject matter experts and anyone else who needs it to have secure and compartmentalised access to case data through a web browser.

There is a product information page here which in turn gives access to the Nuix Web Review and Analytics fact sheet.

Nuix is running a webinar on 16 July at 10am PT / 1pm ET which covers Nuix 5.2 and specifically Nuix Director and the Web Review and Analytics. The speakers are Nuix engineers Simon Bayangos and Matthew Geaghan. Registration for the webinar is here.

While on the subject of Nuix, here is Nuix’s page about the Nuix User Exchange 2014 which will take place at Huntington Beach California from 14 to 16 September. This is a three-day educational event which aims to help users to increase their knowledge of Nuix’s software, and to talk to Nuix and to each other.

Two press releases from UBIC emphasise its commitment to easing the path of those engaged in US eDiscovery and investigations.

The first is aimed at law enforcement investigators in Japan and involves training in the use of UBIC’s Lit i View Xaminer software, a digital forensics tool used by law enforcement to identify and investigate cases of corporate fraud and other illegal activities. The press release about that is here.

The other is a broader training aimed at educating Japanese corporate officers in the practical aspects of dealing with US-style eDiscovery. Discovery is, of course, not exclusively US concept, and Japanese corporations are increasingly faced with it in other jurisdictions as well. Many of the concepts are similar across all common law countries, and Japanese corporations can be at a disadvantage if they do not understand it. That is described in a press release here.

Nuix is running a series of webinars about Information Governance.

The first was called The real story of what IG is and why you should be doing it which is now available for On-Demand viewing.

There are three more in the series, called respectively Breaking IG down to enable action, Building the case for IG and Operationalising IG, taking place during June, July and August.

There is more information here about these webinars, including the dates and registration details, here.

The presenters are Julie Colgan, Director of Information Governance Solutions at Nuix and Brian Tuemmier, Information Governance Program Architect at Nuix.

eDiscovery software providers are increasingly recognising, and publicly, the role which their partners play in giving technical support and other benefits to the users of their software.

I have mentioned Equivio and kCura recently in this context, both of whom have formal designations for those who work with them. iCONECT has a similar programme and has recently given a Platinum Partner award to Avansic and a Silver Partner award to DTI.

As I reported recently, iCONECT has a new version of its XERA review platform out, with enhancements designed to make it easier – and therefore quicker – for reviewers to understand what documents they have and what their significance is.

Companies with something new to sell will often labelled it “Pro” or “Advanced” in order to stress its sophistication and modernity.

In a shrewd move, Recommind describes its new Axcelerate 5 as having a “consumer grade interface” which neatly suggests the desirability of screen forms and workflows which are designed to help the everyday user – in this case the lawyer who just wants to get the eDiscovery job done.

Neil Etheridge and Hal Marcus of Recommind are giving a webinar on 19 June at 2:30pm BST / 3:30pm CEST called Power & Simplicity in Action with the tagline “Powerful technology is rarely that simple… Or is it?”.

Registration is here.

Recommind has a new blog as a home for the steady flow of interesting and well-written articles which come from its well-regarded writing team.

Dean Gonsowski, Philip Favro, Drew Lewis and Hal Marcus have been steady contributors. Nick Patience and Alexis Clark contribute from time to time, and the writing team has now been joined by Adam Kuhn.

Recent articles include Q&A discussions with David Horrigan of 451 Research and with Patrick Oot, now at Shook Hardy & Bacon. Other topics covered recently include the interplay between proportionality and predictive coding, the eDiscovery complexities of mobile devices, defensible deletion of useless information and the impact of California’s eDiscovery ethics opinion on in-house counsel.

The whole collection is called Mind over Matters and gives you thoughtful, nonpartisan food for thought in an attractive and readable format.

It would be good to keep up with IRIS Data Services, but they move faster than I can write about them.

Iris recently opened a client services office in Chicago offering project management, client support and sales operations for eDiscovery, managed litigation services and document review technologies, including kCura’s Relativity, Relativity Analytics and Relativity Assisted Review. The press release is here.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the country, Iris has announced that it has acquired Clarity Litigation Support, a litigation support company with offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The press release about this is here.

Iris has Relativity Orange Level Best in Service designation, awarded to them in April. The relationship with kCura puts in a good position to comment as users on kCura’s new Relativity 8.2. which it does in a helpful highlights guide on the Iris site.

UBIC has broadened its scope from its original specialist area of Asian language eDiscovery, expanding significantly into the use of behavioural analytics both to identify relevant documents for discovery purposes and to help the identification of conduct likely to give rise to a dispute or investigation.

That is the subject of a seminar in UBIC’s Signature Seminar series, to be held in Washington on 20 June. I enjoyed their one in December (I wrote about it here) and was asked to take part in this one. I am, unfortunately, already committed to an evening event in London on the previous day and it proved impossible to find flights which would allow me to do both.

The full title of the seminar is A Predictive Analytic Approach to Investigations and Regulatory Disputes through Artificial Intelligence – How Sophisticated Software Coupled with Proactive Risk Management Can Identify Hidden Risks and Warn of a Potential Crisis, which needs little elaboration from me. It is described here.

There are two panel sessions, one led by Christina Ayiotis of Georgetown Cybersecurity Law Institute which focuses on reducing costs by anticipating risk, and one called Advanced Analytics for the Legal Profession, led by Paul Starrett, Counsel and Chief Global Risk Officer for UBIC North America.

Other speakers include Bennett Borden of Drinker Biddle (and, of course, of the Information Governance Initiative), the excellent David Shonka, Principal Deputy Counsel at the FTC, and speakers from PWC and Santander bank.

I will be sorry to miss this event, whose subject matter carries us beyond the daily grind of electronic discovery. Registration for the event is here.

One of the most successful acquisitions in the eDiscovery market has been Xerox’s acquisition of Lateral Data and its Viewpoint eDiscovery platform.

I wrote recently about how Xerox has supplemented that software acquisition by buying the eDiscovery services provider Smart Data. Xerox Litigation Services has followed that with the launch of a new all-in-one pricing model which allows companies and law firms to mix and match the use of Viewpoint software and related services with maximum flexibility. Whilst many companies and firms can predict the typical level of work every year, it is hard to fit the extremes into that – a large number of small matters, for example, or the burst capacity needed when several large matters coincide.

The Xerox mix of on-premises software, custom managed services and comprehensive fully-outsourced managed services brings this flexibility. The new pricing model makes it particularly attractive. The press release is here.

I spoke to Rachel Teisch, VP of marketing at Xerox Litigation Services. She sees the new model as being attractive both to existing clients and to those who have not yet found a comprehensive way of managing diverse eDiscovery needs – “diverse” implying equally a variety of case size, an uneven distribution of work and differing levels of skills.

There are three different subscription options based on anticipated volume. The same version of Viewpoint is available whether it is in the hands of a managed services company or used in-house. Clients may choose to take a processing-only licence, a review-only licence or both together, but within those categories the full range of data management and analytical tools are available, including Viewpoint Assisted Review.

Standardisation on a single product brings more than the opportunity to bring down the cost of software licenses. An overlooked component is the cost of training. Many software providers now claim, and in many cases with good reason, that the software is user-friendly, and Viewpoint is one of these. The ability to bring the same set of skills to case after case represents encourages high quality and represents a good use of a training budget.

The success of the Viewpoint acquisition does not diminish the value of the software and services products which Xerox Litigation Services had developed prior to the acquisition. Its hosted review application OmniX and its technology-assisted review program CategoriX continue to be developed to meet the needs of the client base which Xerox has always had, whilst Viewpoint is taking it into new markets.

kCura has announced the launch of Relativity 8.2, the latest iteration of its extremely successful review and analytics software. As always with kCura, the website sets out clearly what functions justify the tagline “From hold to production and everything in between”, with an overview video and easily-navigable subsections for legal hold, collection, processing, review, analytics and its mobile Binders, as well as information about the platform.

I was at the Relativity Spring Launch in London a few weeks ago to hear CEO Andrew Sieja talk about the new release and about the importance of the UK to kCura’s market. The purpose of the launch, he said, was to show us stuff, to get feedback on it, to allow everyone with a common interest in Relativity to talk amongst themselves, and to give everyone a good time. The evening justified that billing.

There was another aspect of the evening which was impressive. kCura’s Sean Francisco had died a few days earlier aged only 41. kCura is still a company which emphasises its people, both internally and for customer-facing purposes, and Sean Francisco was widely-known and liked. Andrew Sieja said that they had contemplated calling off the event, but reckoned that this was not what Sean Francisco would have wanted. Instead, he showed a video of Sean musing enthusiastically about his work and the company he worked for. Tribute was paid, the right tone set, and we were able to move on to the main business of the evening. It was well done.

Andrew Sieja gave us some statistics – there are 42,500 active cases in Relativity and 94,000 users. 50% of the users are on a version which is no more than six months old. The company now has 402 employees, 146 enterprise clients and 131 channel partners.

The most interesting thing to me is how the company seems to have retained the youthful enthusiasm with which it was founded as it has grown into a market-leading company with international footprint. This is not an easy trick to pull off.

Whilst there, I bumped into Constantine Pappas, with whom I had recorded a webinar a few weeks previously. The webinar was about proportionality in the use of predictive coding. I enjoyed recording it and you can find it on YouTube or on kCura’s dedicated page here.

I wrote a while back about the launch of Epiq Systems’ eDiscovery review facility in Toronto. Epiq has now followed that with the addition of a processing and hosting facility to meet the growing demand for their software and their technical and consulting services in Canada.

Epiq is hosting a grand reception in Toronto tomorrow, 11 June, at which delegates can see the facility and talk to subject matter experts on the wide range of subjects which Epic is involved in.

Here is a press release about that including details of how to RSVP to this event.

Whilst on the subject of Epiq, here is an article called Essential Tool in the Age of Big Data by Martin Bonney, Director, International Consulting Services at Epiq, about the use of technology-assisted review for big data. The key point lies at the end – TAR is not right for every case, but lawyers whose work involves large volumes of data ought to know what it is and how and when to use it.

UBIC’s software has developed well beyond the eDiscovery tools with which it first made its name in Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries. It has maintained and expanded its analytical capability in that field, but also in the wider field of behaviour analytics, using big data to anticipate behaviour and not merely to discover it retrospectively.

The word “predictive” in the usual eDiscovery sense relates to anticipating the coding decisions which a reviewer will make. Increasingly, it is coming to refer to the anticipation of risk from fraud, cartel, compliance and other regulatory matters, and across a wide range of industries and sectors including health, the evaluation of intellectual property and national security.

UBIC’s AI-based technology underlies much of this including its Virtual Data Scientist software and other data analysis tools integrated into its Lit i View® data management and analysis platform. It has recently been granted a patent for this technology in Japan. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Masahiro Morimoto makes it clear that this is not the end of UBC’s investment in this technology. He said:

We will continue to research and to develop our patented AI-based Predictive Coding technology and, where appropriate, acquire complementary intellectual property in order to expand its application potential.

There is a press release about the Japanese patent here.

I mentioned Lee Reiber of AccessData in my post of yesterday called Blurmany and Spain, you and me – the trade-off between convenience and privacy. The context there was the amount of personal data which is carried on one’s mobile devices and the corresponding trove of forensic treasure which can be found by a skilled investigator armed with the right tools.

The problem is one which compounded by the growing importance of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in corporate data capture and communication.

Lee Reiber is taking part in a webinar sponsored by AccessData on 30 May. Called The Time, Man-Power and Logistical Solution to a Mobile Forensic World, the webinar explains what is involved when data must be captured from hundreds of devices all over the world.

Registration and further information can be found here.

Nuix is host sponsor of Techno Security which takes place in Myrtle Beach South Carolina. Jim Kent is Global Head of Investigations and Security for Nuix. In this brief video, Jim Kent talks about Techno Security, about Nuix’s achievements over the past year, and about training courses available at Myrtle Beach.

If you can’t watch the video, the same talk is available as an audio recording here.

The increasing data volumes required for eDiscovery brings more than merely greater volumes to process and review. Each document may bring additional tasks, of which the redaction of parts of documents is a particularly time-consuming one.

Recommind is proud of the intelligent redaction tools built into its Axcelerate 5 as well as of the other analytical tools which have been designed to ease the review process and speed it up.

Neil Etheridge and Hal Marcus of Recommind are giving a webinar on Wednesday 28 May at 1.00 EST at which they will describe these tools and show how they work. The registration page, which you will find here, includes a 90 second video which covers some of the same ground.

Organisations of all sizes consider whether to bring e-discovery in-house. While most large companies have spent years building and refining their in-house e-discovery approaches, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) generally lack legal and IT resources and are put off by the high cost of technology.

However, inside counsel and litigation support are rapidly gaining critical e-discovery skills and e-discovery technology costs are dropping, opening a new window of opportunity for smaller businesses.

This is the subject of a webinar to be presented by Chad McManamy, Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software, on 28 May at 11.00am PST. Chad will discuss, among other things,

• The importance of automating litigation hold notifications
• How IT and Legal can increase efficiencies by adopting technology that consolidates and streamlines the e-discovery process across one platform
• Reducing hardware costs and IT resources using hosted tools.

Registration for this webinar is here

Equivio continues its commitment to education with the 8th in its series of webinars with the master title Predictive Coding Minus the Hype.

This next one is called Homage to Dr Strangelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love predictive coding. Its theme is the evaluation of potential cost savings and the effectiveness of predictive coding technology by reference to an exercise conducted by Winston & Strawn – I wrote about that in an article called Equivio Relevance – Winston & Strawn paper on testing the effectiveness of Equivio Relevance and technology-assisted review.

The speakers are Scott Cohen, Director of E-Discovery Support Services for Winston & Strawn LLP and Jon Lavinder, Director, Technology-Assisted Review, Legal Solutions at DTI. The webinar will be moderated by Avi Elkoni, Vice President Regional Sales at Equivio.

Scott Cohen took part at short notice in my cross-border panel at CEIC last week and is as eloquent on predictive coding technology as he is on navigating the difficulties of international eDiscovery.

Registration for this webinar is here.

Past webinars in the series, along with other information, can be found on Equivio’s Resources page. A web site is the shop-window for a company and its products, and Equivio’s website remains a fine advertisement for Equivio’s tools – the subject filter mechanism clearly comes from the same stable as the user-friendly Zoom, whose design criteria included the exclusion of anything not strictly necessary. Decide what you want to see, and whether you are on the web site or in Zoom 3.5, you get there with the fewest possible clicks..

One of the subjects which keeps me busy at the moment is cross-border electronic discovery. When I first started talking about it in the US about seven years ago, I was met with disbelief at the idea that people in non-US jurisdictions would decline to obey a discovery order from a US court. The world has moved on since then, and there is a better understanding in the US about the scope and effect of the data protection and privacy laws of the EU and, increasingly, in other jurisdictions.

We are not usually talking of a blanket ban on the movement of all data. The problem, when viewed from a US perspective, is the restrictions on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The solution lies at three levels: first, a level of understanding as to the implications of this; second, informed assistance from people who understand the implications on how to deal with them; and third (but not least) the ability to host data within the EU and to review it here.

The first step in dealing with PII is to find it before assessing its relevance to the US discovery demands. Only then can one start working sensibly towards explaining the problem to the US court or regulator. That should be done in-country or, in most cases, in another EU country.

It is no small thing to set up a data hosting centre and review facility, which is why there are relatively few of them. Minneapolis-based eDiscovery provider NightOwl Discovery has helped remedy this by opening a data operation centre and review facilities in Dublin.

I met up this week with Nightowl CEO Andrea Wallack and its President Thomas Palladino. Their primary focus is setting up the new centre is to extend the assistance which they can give to global corporate clients in managing cross-border litigation and its privacy implications. It can obviously be used for EU-derived work as well.

The Dublin operations centre will provide secure, high performance data processing, hosting and production capabilities featuring the review and analytics application Relativity. Review management services will include first and second tier relevance coding, issues coding, privilege detection, and privacy information redaction performed by Irish solicitors and managed by NightOwl’s expert review and analytics team. The NightOwl EU operations team will also offer collection and preservation services across the entire EU and direct support for Guidance EnCase® and Symantec Clearwell enterprise deployments.

Also yesterday, I spent time talking to Mr Justice Frank Clarke of the Irish Supreme Court who was one of the judges on my judicial panel at the IQPC Information Governance and eDiscovery Summit. He was interesting (as he always is) on constitutional matters as well as on the efficient management of electronic discovery. Irish law looks to that of England and Wales, from which it was separated by independence in 1923. It continues to look across the Irish Sea for much of its legal development but has, over the years, looked to the US for developments affecting the constitution, there being no direct constitutional parallels with the rest of the UK.

There are all sorts of more immediate reasons why Dublin is a good place to be for multinational corporations, as Google, Apple, LinkedIn and other high-tech US companies have found. It is not just the favourable tax regime and other directly economic benefits, but the presence of a well-educated workforce, an advanced and business-friendly legal system and other less tangible benefits (such as being in beautiful Dublin).

This is an interesting move on the part of NightOwl, and I look forward to hearing how it goes.

Guidance Software’s annual big event, CEIC, takes place in Las Vegas from 19 to 22 May. As always, its agenda is packed with thought leadership sessions and hands-on training in cybersecurity, forensics and eDiscovery.

The agenda is packed, with multiple tracks across from Monday to the middle of Thursday. I am taking part in two panels, one (which I am moderating) on cross-border discovery and one which will look at recent developments in eDiscovery rules in the US, the UK and one or two other jurisdictions. The star panel member for both of these sessions is US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck.

The event is held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas which will be big enough to hold this event, whose delegate list grows each year. I will report on it in due course.

The Techno Security and Forensics Investigations Conference takes place from 1 to 4 June at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Nuix is the host sponsor of that event for which more than 1500 delegates have already registered.

The conference will deliver insights from public-sector agency leaders, private-sector insiders and technologists. These experts will explore emerging security trends and exchange real-world strategies for responding to current challenges.

Nuix will deliver formal training classes and hands-on labs for investigation professionals looking to expand their digital forensic and cybersecurity skills. Its own description of the event is here.

I will be there, moderating a cross-border panel at Nuix’s invitation and, with my son William, doing video interviews of some of the participants.

iCONECT has been busy adding new features to its well-regarded review platform XERA – here’s a video interview I did with iCONECT’s Ian Campbell at LegalTech in February which described the recent developments and hinted at more to come.

iCONECT is good at its product demonstrations and webinars, and there is one coming up on 21st May at 1:00pm EDT which will give an opportunity to see the new features as well as the existing ones.

The new developments include drag-and-drop foldering and thumbnail view which allows users to preview multiple documents in image format together on the screen and then return to the grid to fine-tune the search results or finish the review. There is a press release here describing the new functionality.

iCONECT is also integrated with Westlaw’s Case Notebook and Magnum from Opus 2, allowing sharing of access to transcripts with a single sign-on.

This is one example of a commitment to practical workflow designed to make the job of lawyers easier. The whole XERA interface is well worth looking at, especially by those whose perception of legal review applications was shaped by an earlier generation of tools. Things have changed, and the results of the XERA development drive over the last two to three years could be what converts you.

Registration for the 21 May webinar is here.

I do not spend a lot of time looking at applications. This is not because I am not interested – I served my time as a litigation software developer and am fascinated by the leaps which have been made in development tools and in ways to make software friendly to the user – but is a matter of priorities; I am not a user and do not give system selection advice, and there is enough to do covering developments in rules and practices across multiple jurisdictions.

I am interested in how providers market themselves, that is, how they attract attention and persuade potential users to come in through the door. I have written before about how Cicayda achieved this from a standing start, with an attractive website, interesting articles, unbounded energy and a conference, RELEvent, which I much enjoyed attending in Nashville last year. Behind the razzmatazz, however, there is serious development work going on, and I recently had the opportunity of a web demo at the hands of CTO Jason Cox and VP of Knowledge Strategy Marc Jenkins.

If I do not here give you a software review, that is partly because Cicayda’s website is a model of its kind and shows you what you need to see. Its products – fermata legal hold, staccato early case assessment, drone intelligent search and the new Cicayda review (the lower-case styling is theirs) are easily found, well-illustrated and accompanied by video demos which make it superfluous for me to do more than steer you towards them – why read my views when you can see it for yourself?

I will spend a moment, however, on the legal hold product, fermata, partly because it encourages an approach to legal hold which is relevant outside the UK. The non-US eDiscovery / eDisclosure world manages without the box-ticking and bright-line definitions of the US legal hold rules, and contents itself with broad concepts. It has always been the case that potentially relevant documents must be preserved once litigation is in hand, but there is no settled code as to what must be done before that. Practice Direction 31B of 2010 reminded lawyers (in paragraph 7) that they must advise their clients to preserve documents and, in particular, to stop automatic deletion processes. Apart from that, the absence of documents is judged by discretionary factors by which the court considers what has been done (or not done) and decides whether justice can be done in all the circumstances.

Given that, how do you sell in the UK (and other jurisdictions) a tool designed for the excesses (as we see them) of US legal hold requirements?

The answer is that legal hold products like Cicayda’s fermata can be used as generic notification systems – as a managed communication platform for fact-gathering in which the US principles of legal hold can be adapted to the (fairly obvious) requirement to find out what you have got to make sure that nothing is lost. Cicayda’s fermata

is not unique in this – many products have legal hold applications which can be adapted to put people on notice, to identify custodians and gather information from them and to capture the results. Cicayda’s fermata does this particularly well.

My demo also showed the benefits of being light on your feet in development terms. The UK rules include a structured form of information gathering which is the Electronic Documents Questionnaire contained in Practice Direction 31B. During our conversation, I sent this over to Jason Cox. Soon afterwards, he sent me a link allowing me to see how the text of the questionnaire could be incorporated into a notice sent out to potential custodians. For the moment, this is just the raw text of the entire questionnaire; it would not take much, I imagine, to set out the questions in a way which made it easy to capture the answers.

The system can handle reminders, track responses and include body text which may be a mixture of generic text, the lawyers preferred supplements to that generic text, and case-specific text.

Have a look at the website. Have a look in particular at the video for the ECA tool staccato which, by mixing information derived from the data and variable elements added by the user (such as the hourly rate of reviewers and the their estimated document rate per hour) allows you to see in an attractive display what you have got, how much it will cost to manage it, and how many people will be needed for what period. This can be refined by, for example, removing duplicates, filtering by some relevant element, or by applying data or keyword limitations. The resulting query can be exported and shared with others.

A web demo obviates the need for appointments and travel and (a point I make often) means that no lawyer can say that he or she did not have time to consider alternative tools for managing eDiscovery / eDisclosure. Just ask.

AccessData has announced the sale of its Litigation Support Services division to OmniVere. Funds from the transaction will be used to invest in AccessData’s growing developments in the incident resolution market. AccessData retains ownership of its long-standing Summation eDiscovery software applications, development of which continues as before. OmniVere takes over the hosting, support and services business.

The press release is here.

I spoke to Craig Carpenter, AccessData’s chief marketing officer, who was enthusiastic about the benefits which the sale brings both to AccessData and to its large customer base. AccessData has been following three major development paths in parallel in the past two to three years – the data forensics technology with which it made its name (and mobile forensics in particular), the complete redevelopment of the Summation eDiscovery product set which it acquired from Wolters Kluwer, and the new area of cybersecurity and incident resolution.

Incident resolution is the key and critical concern of any company at the moment and, if it is not, then it should be. AccessData has developed its Continuous Automated Incident Response (CAIR) to serve this market. Offering forensics tools and eDiscovery software as well allows AccessData to meet a broad range of concerns at the top of many board room agendas.

Hosting services, and the provision of related services, form a self-contained entity. It is important to AccessData that its eDiscovery software clients have the best possible service and the new relationship with OmniVere seems a good way of allowing AccessData to focus on development, particularly in incident resolution, whilst keeping its eDiscovery customers happy.

The focus on security issues appear appears clearly from the agenda at the AccessData User Conference, ADUC 2014, taking place this week in Las Vegas. The keynote speaker, as I have said in an earlier article, is Howard Schmidt, former cyber adviser to Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, and there is a strong security and forensics element in the agenda and the speaker list.

I will not be there – it clashes with the Information Governance eDiscovery Summit in London. In due course, I hope to speak to OmniVere to find out their plans for the development of the hosting and support business.

UBIC continues to combine its long-standing eDiscovery software and expertise with a growing range of analytical tools designed to anticipate, as well as to identify behaviour. Lit i View ANALYZER, due for release in the US on 1 June, is built on UBIC’s technologies used in Lit i View® XAMINER, a forensic software program released in September. It combines UBIC’s predictive coding engine with its Central Linkage technology whose focus is on human communications within and between organisations.

The primary market for these tools is US investigative and law enforcement agencies, although the technology will obviously be valuable to anyone who needs to identify behaviour from data.

There is a detailed press release about Lit i View ANALYZER here which describes in detail both UBIC’s AI-based predictive coding technology and its Central Linkage visualisation abilities.

You might also like to look at the Technology section of UBIC’s website which breaks down its expertise betweenLegal Intelligence, Digital Forensics, M&A and Business Intelligence, making it clear that UBIC has moved well beyond the Asian language-based eDiscovery software for which it has hitherto been best known.

Nuix has long had a relationship with Legal Hold Pro from Zapproved and joins with them to present a webinar on 28 May called Six pitfalls and opportunities from legal hold to the court room.

The webinar will cover:

• A process for recognizing a trigger event
• How to accurately scope the hold
• Creating a culture of compliance
• Establishing a defensible audit trail
• Handling new, terminated, and transferred employees
• Mobile devices & BYOD
• Ensuring proper communication with IT

If you need any additional incentive to attend this webinar, one of the speakers is Craig Ball who brings the experience of both lawyer and forensic technologist to the subject, as well as the ability to make serious points interestingly and with wit. The other speakers are Daniel Pelc from Verizon, Roxanna Prelo Friedrich from Nuix and Brad Harris from Zapproved Inc.

Registration is here.

Audio discovery represents an increasingly significant component of many eDiscovery exercises. Whilst audio files are most prevalent in, for example, the regulated financial sector, all kinds of companies now create and keep audio files for various purposes; it is no less discoverable than any other form of data, but raises issues which many companies (and their lawyers) might easily overlook.

Audio files do not merely represent bulk volume; whilst one might, just, glean the essentials from an email by running your eye down it, the equivalent exercise with an audio file necessarily takes as long as the recording. First, of course, you have to find the audio files which are potentially relevant, raising questions about search capability.

There is now a range of technologies which make it unnecessary to deal with audio in this way. eDiscovery provider Consilio has been a leader in the development of eDiscovery workflows which build in the capability to identify and review audio.

There is a webinar this afternoon at 1:00 PM EDT called Audio review: weighing available approaches whose subtitle, Avoiding slow, costly and ineffective outcomes when reviewing audio and multimedia files, accurately sets out the panel’s ambitions.

The discussion will consider case law and regulatory procedures, examine eDiscovery workflows which incorporate audio and multimedia, present the pros and cons of different approaches to audio discovery and explore cost-effective ways to conduct audio review properly.

The panellists are Bennett Borden of Drinker Biddle & Reath (and, of course, of the Information Governance Initiative), Michael Flanagan, General Counsel of Consilio, Todd Mansbridge and Robert Wickstrom who are, respectively, responsible for Product Management and client development at Consilio.

Registration is here.

The Information Governance Initiative was founded earlier this year to spread understanding about information governance and to suggest practical ways in which companies can change the way they manage information, assess the risks lying within it, and extract real value from it. I interviewed Barclay Blair, one of the founders of the IGI, in Hong Kong last week and found him eloquent on the reasons why companies must take IG seriously.

ZyLAB is one of the few software companies whose product range spans the whole information management story from creation through storage and deletion and into compliance and eDiscovery. ZylAB is one of the well-known companies who support the work of the Information Governance.

ZyLAB’s Enterprise Technology Counsel, Mary Mack, interviews Barclay Blair in a webinar to be presented on 8 May at 2:00pm EDT. Registration is here.

The issues raised by cross-border discovery remain a source of pain and expense to both to those who need to conduct such exercises and to those who face them. They bring all the complexity of any large discovery exercise, with an overlay of legal, practical and technology complexities which can add considerably to the time and expense of the discovery exercise.

I am taking part in a webcast today with Craig Earnshaw from FTI Consulting and Denise Backhouse of Littler. We will describe the problems associated with cross-border discovery and suggest some practical ways of addressing them. The webcast, one on a series being run by FTI on different regions, broadcasts at 2pm EDT / 7.00pm BST today. Registration is here.

I learn of this too late to urge you to attend, but there are points worth making based on the description of a session being led by Mary Mack, Enterprise Technology Counsel for ZyLAB, at the ACEDS 2014 eDiscovery Conference.

One of the points I consistently stamp on where I can is the suggestion that predictive coding is some kind of “magic”. It undermines the fact that the technology in any decent predictive coding application is firmly based in statistics capable of being validated. No lawyer (the putative user of this technology) is much interested in being replaced by “magic”.

Mary Mack and Bill Spiros (who I bump into in AsiaPac from time to time) expand on this theme in a session called Strategies to avoid predictive coding traps for the unwary. The session is “based on the assumption that predictive coding is neither auto-magic, not all-knowing or autonomous”.

Mary Mack said:

“Machine learning and artificial intelligence for legal applications is our future. It’s a wonderful advance that the judiciary is embracing machine-assisted review in the form of predictive coding. While we steadily move into the second and much less risky generation of predictive coding, there are still traps and pitfalls that are better considered early for mitigation. This session and the session on eDiscovery taboos will expose a few concerns to consider when evaluating predictive coding for specific or portfolio litigation.”

As the use of predictive coding technology advances, the grounds of opposition, originally generalised, have become more focused and specific. It is asserted, for example, that “predictive coding is not faster and more effective than traditional manual review”, and broad assertions are made about the merits of (for example) in-sourcing eDiscovery. When analysed, most of these assertions prove either to have no analysis behind them which is based on fact or to represent special pleading on the part of one side or the other in the debate. There are certainly issues to be discussed, but let’s do that in an objective way.

Mary Mack’s second session at the ACEDS conference examines some of these assertions with a view to encouraging dispassionate and fact-based decision-making.

UBIC is presenting a seminar on 25th of April from 11:30am to 3:00pm in New York with the title Crossing the Pacific: conducting legal business in Japan and the rest of Asia. This is part of UBIC’s Signature series of seminars – I had the pleasure of taking part in one in Washington at the end of last year.

The lead moderator is Ari Kaplan. Speakers include Masahiro Morimoto, the CEO and founder of UBIC, Jason Baron of Drinker Biddle & Reath and panellists including Denise Backhouse of Littler, John Kapp of Shearman & Sterling, David Horrigan of 451 Research, Patrick Burke of Reed Smith, and Paul Starrett of UBIC (to name only those whom I know).

As I mentioned in a recent post, Masahiro Morimoto has written a book on eDiscovery in Japan to help Japanese clients dealing with US discovery and US companies to understand the challenges and opportunities in Asian language eDiscovery. Signed copies of the book will be given to those who attend the seminar.

There is more information and registration details here.

Those of us whose focus is on eDiscovery / eDisclosure have seen technology solutions march more or less in step with the growth of data volumes and the expectations of users, courts and regulators. The availability of sophisticated technology may lighten the problem, but it also increases the duty of those who are responsible for eDiscovery – its availability brings an obligation to understand what it does and how it can be used to cut costs whilst remaining defensible, something which recent revisions to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct make explicit.

The eDiscovery focus, however important it may be to those whose job it is, is not necessarily the only or main concern of businesses. In some business sectors, of which the financial and pharmaceutical industries are the most obvious examples, the need to be compliant with growing regulatory control, to be able to prove that compliance, and to be able to produce the documentary evidence demanded by regulators, is a more dominating need.

Beyond that again, there is the more positive requirement on the part of businesses to be able to extract value from the data. That value might appear in terms of the mitigation of risk or by the increase in efficiency by freeing up time for more useful things than finding information; it might also derive from the possibility of making or losing substantial sums because of the state of one’s knowledge about the business.

This appears most forcibly in things like Over-The-Counter (OTC) International Swaps and Derivatives Association (is that) agreements where decisions must be made quickly, where transaction volumes may be high, and where up-to-date knowledge may be critical.

I have no shame in admitting that I do not understand how this market works. I can readily grasp the principle, however, that terms which lie buried in complex agreements are as potentially critical as they are hard to find.

This is the problem addressed by Recommind with its new Perceptiv derivatives contract analysis tool whose function, put as simply as possible, is to extract the key components of such documents and to store them as structured data, with links back to the source document both for reading purposes and to ensure that the most recent version (and the steps on the way to that version) are readily available.

There is an information page about Perceptiv here. Even more useful is the video which you can find here. We are beginning to see good use of video as a marketing tool, but this one is the clearest demonstration possible that I have seen so far of a complex tool.

A webinar from Nuix covers the key features, methodologies and use cases for the new release, Nuix 5.2. There are three separate editions of this webinar, for North America on 28 April, for EMEA on 30 April and for APAC on 1 May.

The timings and presenters can be seen on this page.

One of the presenters is CTO Steven Stewart. He is about to begin a world tour which will showcase some of the new ideas coming out of Nuix. New features, best practices, customer success stories all feature, as does the opportunity to meet local Nuix staff and partners and other Nuix users in the area.

There is a page about this, including the tour timetable, on this page.

One of the big areas of growth in eDiscovery support is managed litigation services. Litigation departments, whether in law firms or companies, who do not want to buy and manage their own systems nor want to spend time outsourcing to multiple providers, are increasingly turning to companies who will offer a consolidated service of both software and support them.

One of the fastest growing providers of discovery management services is IRIS Data Services. They already have offices in 11 US cities, in Europe, India and China, and have now added a client services office in Nashville.

IRIS offers a range of software solutions, including those from Nuix, Equivio and Relativity from kCura, applying whichever of these front-rank tools is appropriate for the circumstances.

The national office will provide project management, client support and sales operations. The President of Iris, Major Baisden, said in a press release:

“Our new office in Nashville cements our company’s commitment to our clients in the Nashville area. We have experienced tremendous growth in this market and are excited to offer increased local service to firms with growing amounts of complex litigation.  Real, comprehensive consultative services and support are requirements of electronic discovery. This office makes it easier for our clients to centralize all aspects of discovery so they can focus on delivering higher value to their clients.”

In a separate press release, Iris announces that it has made two promotions to VP of Sales. Irvin Marchand and John Stanton take responsibility for sales in the Eastern and Western regions of the US respectively.

It is not necessarily easy to evaluate the potential cost savings and the effectiveness of new technology. On the whole, eDiscovery exercises are done only once, and it is rarely possible to provide a side-by-side comparison between an exercise using one type of technology and a parallel exercise using another.

Winston & Strawn has been using Equivio Relevance technology – part of Equivio Zoom – for several years. At the request of a large institutional client, it conducted a project which applied Equivio Relevance to a set of documents which had previously been reviewed and coded; they estimated the time and costs required to use technology review over those documents in a defensible manner and compared the results of that process to a human review. The aim, amongst other things, was to conduct predictive coding exercise in the shortest possible time with the least amount of human review.

Winston & Strawn has written a paper about the exercise which is available on the Equivio website here.

I will be off shortly to Hong Kong, to take part in the InnoXcell eDiscovery Exchange 2014 at the Conrad Hong Kong on 29th and 30th April.

The event opens with an invitation-only session on the evening of 29th of April with a strong judicial panel talking about eDiscovery Readiness and the Practice Direction. The moderator is Menachem Hasofer of Mayer Brown JSM, with whom I did a panel on the proposed Hong Kong eDiscovery practice direction panel at the recent ALM / ILTA event in Hong Kong. The judges on his panel are Yeong Zee Kin, CIO and Senior Registrar, of the Singapore Supreme Court, Mr. Lung Kim-wan, Deputy Registrar, High Court of Hong Kong and Judge David Harvey of the New Zealand District Court in Auckland.

It will be a particular pleasure to hear Judge Harvey whom I have met only once, briefly in Singapore a few years ago, but whom I know from his many published works, including those on judicial involvement in the management of the discovery. It will be good also to hear from Senior Registrar Yeong Zee Kin as Singapore gradually increases its ambitions in international dispute resolution.

On the morning of 30 April, three of the sponsors of the eDisclosure Information Project compete for delegates’ attention. I am relieved of difficult choices because I am taking part in a panel on in-house legal and compliance led by Patrick Strong of FTI Consulting. That coincides with a session called Legal Technology – the New Breed of Attorneys, led by Paul Taylor of Consilio and Lauren Harper of Simmons & Simmons in London, and with a panel called Big Data Challenges for Cyber Security given by Stuart Clark of Nuix.

That is followed by a session called Audio Discovery: Hear What You’ve Been Missing, led by Celeste Kemper of Epiq Systems in Hong Kong and Nick Rich of Epiq in London. The technology available for dealing with audio evidence is evolving rapidly and it is not just financial institutions who to have to deal with it.

The Information Governance panel discussion includes Barclay Blair of ViaLumina, one of the founders of the Information Governance Initiative. He is a compelling speaker on a subject whose significance is only now beginning to be appreciated by those responsible for eDiscovery.

The breadth of Symantec’s solutions can be seen from the fact that they are simultaneously fielding Alan Watkins on Transparent Predictive Coding and Kerri Le on IT governance and information intelligence. Meanwhile, Menachem Hasofer of Meyer Brown and Dmitri Hubbard of Control Risks will be talking about arbitration and eDisclosure; no one knows how much dispute resolution takes place in Hong Kong, China and Singapore, but it outstrips by a substantial margin the litigation which goes on in the civil courts.

Whilst the surname Dale turns up in cross-border panels in various jurisdictions, the one in the cross-border panel at this conference is not me but Andrew Dale, a partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe. His session competes with an information governance roundtable and with a session on Using Software to Manage Big Data led by Steve Couling of kCura.

The end of the day brings further conflicts between interesting sessions. Again, the decision which to attend is made for me by the fact that I am again joining Patrick Strong of FTI Consulting for a panel on eDiscovery Pitfalls for High-Tech Industries, followed by a panel led by Celeste Kemper of Epiq Systems on the Hong Kong Practice Direction and Litigation Best Practices whose panel members include Lung Kim-wan, Deputy Registrar, High Court of Hong Kong and Dominic Wai of Baker & Mckenzie.

Parallel sessions include one by Dean Ward, Head of Enhanced Due Diligence at Thomson Reuters called Due Diligence: Knowing what to know – managing external risk by maximising your information sources, and a session on Investigation Fundamentals with Nuix 5.2.

I will be in Hong Kong for over a week with my son William, hoping to catch up with some of the people we saw on our last trips, looking for video ideas and generally sniffing the increasingly interesting air of this jurisdiction. If you have any interest in Asia-Pac eDiscovery, this is the place to be.