eDisclosure Information Project

Equivio continues its series of educational webinars with the global title Predictive Coding Minus the Hype. The sixth webinar in the series is called Advanced document clustering for eDiscovery and takes place on 16 December at 12:00pm ET. It is given by Equivio’s Avi Elkoni.

Put as broadly as possible, clustering is technology which groups together documents which have similar contents and other characteristics. The user can drill down into each cluster to make decisions about the group as a whole or about individual documents and can use “find similar” functionality to find others.

The EDRM definition is:

An Unsupervised Learning method in which Documents are segregated into categories or groups so that the Documents in any group are more similar to one another than to those in other groups. Clustering involves no human intervention, and the resulting categories may or may not reflect distinctions that are valuable for the purpose of a search or review effort.

At an early stage in the eDiscovery / eDisclosure process, clustering is great for developing an overview – one of the characteristics of eDiscovery is that you often have no idea what is in the collection, and clustering helps with this; at a later stage, when, perhaps, a technology like predictive coding has been used to narrow the collection, clustering is useful for identifying classes of documents which should not be there – non-relevant documents in the relevant pile and vice versa.

Like predictive coding, clustering is a tool which can be used in conjunction with others, at least by those who understand what it can and cannot do. The webinar is advertised as being “a must for everyone who uses text analysis tools in eDiscovery”. I would go further and say that it is a must for those who need to understand what each of the different technology types can achieve to in order to inform future decision-making about the choice of tools.

Registration for this webinar is here.

Nuix is presenting a webinar on December at 1.00pm ET in conjunction with Today’s General Counsel. Its title is Information transparency the cure for information governance analysis paralysis.

“Analysis paralysis” is the state in which a problem seems so insuperable that one gives up even trying to think about it. This is a common condition for companies who look at their ever-increasing volumes of data and conclude that there are easier problems to deal with.

The flaws in this approach, as with any growing problem, are obvious. What is less obvious is how to start doing something about it. As the description for this webinar puts it, how do you “take the leap from thinking about information governance to acting on it?”.

The purpose of the webinar is to describe some case studies and best practices about three stages – constructing an actionable strategy, getting buy-in from both those who must authorise it and those who must perform it, and delivering on its promise.

The panel members are Barclay Blair, President and Founder, ViaLumina, Bennett Borden, Chair Information Governance and eDiscovery Group, Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, Leigh Isaacs, Director—Records and Information Management, Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe LLP and Brian Tuemmler, Information Governance Program Architect, Nuix

The moderator is Julie Colgan, Director of Information Governance, Nuix

There is more information here and registration is here.

Hobs Legal Docs, based in London and Manchester, has made two significant appointments to strengthen its team and to work on the development of new eDiscovery solutions.

One is Rob Crowley, formerly of Recommind, who joins as General Manager and Director of Hobs Legal Docs. The other is Jonathan Chan, formerly of Ernst & Young, who becomes Director of Technical Services at Hobs.

These are significant appointments to support Hobs Legal Docs’ ability to grow its share of an increasingly busy market.

I wrote recently about one aspect of iCONECT’s encouragement to the next generation in an article about a speech given by iCONECT’s President Ian Campbell to the graduating class of Bryan University’s eDiscovery Project Management Graduate Certificate Program.

iCONECT has extended this encouragement to practical learning by making copies of its XERA review platform as a learning tool on the Electronic Discovery and Digital Evidence graduate course curriculum at the University of Texas School of Law.

US law schools (and don’t even start talking about the UK in this context) generally have a poor reputation for teaching their students anything about the practical aspects of electronic discovery, still less giving them hands-on experience of it. ICONECT’s involvement with the University of Texas School of Law go some way to remedying that, at least for one pool of lucky graduates.

Industry expert Craig Ball is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and teaches the course. Craig said:

“In selecting XERA, I appreciated the quick, can-do way the iCONECT executive team pitched in to supply instructional material, credentials for each student and a big, real-world data set to support our search and review exercises.  I particularly liked XERA’s support of both Mac and PC devices – a key consideration in education, where most students use Apple hardware.”

We need to see many more initiatives like this if we are to bring on a generation of lawyers who get eDiscovery. ICONECT is to be applauded for this initiative.

I wrote recently about a number of new initiatives from Epiq Systems, including the opening of a new document review facility in Toronto.

Epiq has now appointed Wendy Cole as director of the new facility. She was called to the bar in Ontario and joins from a leading Canadian legal software and solutions company. Wendy Cole is secretary of the Women’s Law Association of Ontario and is a member of the Sedona Conference Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production in Canada.

The press release is here.

Two main factors distinguish information management and eDiscovery provider ZyLAB from most of its competitors. One is the exceptional range of its activities, from enterprise information management through to every eDiscovery function. The other is that, whilst having a substantial US presence, it is equally rooted in mainland Europe (it is in the Netherlands) and the UK.

These are significant factors in a business world where the life-cycle of information from creation through to production matters very much, where a tweet may have no less evidential importance than a folder of emails, and where business is global. The privacy and data protection implications alone make this latter point a significant component of ZyLAB’s appeal.

There is in fact a third element and that is the fact that ZyLAB has been around for 30 years. It is as aware as anyone that history matters less than this year’s products set, but staying power and experience matters as well.

The very wide range of ZyLAB’s activities is illustrated by the recent publication of two white papers whose subject-matter is at opposite ends of the scale. One relates to email archiving and is written for the benefit of legal and information (risk) management professionals in corporations. The other is about the newest challenges at the other end of the information management scale, eDiscovery of social media. Despite their differing primary audiences, both papers are of importance to anyone involved in information management both within a corporation and within the law firms and others who advise them.

Both these papers can be found here.

The email archiving paper is called Your first step towards enterprise information archiving, and is written by Mary Mack, Enterprise Technology Counsel at ZyLAB. It covers the legal risks and regulatory requirements involved in the management and archiving of email, looks at the IT challenges and at the discovery challenges, and goes on to consider the benefits in cost and compliance terms of building an eDiscovery-ready email archive. It ends with helpful case studies.

The second paper is called eDiscovery in social media – “if it exists, it is discoverable” and is written by Annelore van der Lint. Those who are regular readers of my writings will be aware that the discovery of social media has been a constant theme of mine during the last few months. Whilst, as the paper’s title promises, the primary focus is on giving discovery of social media, the paper emphasises that the ability to deal with all this stuff begins before it is even created, with internal policies, appropriate software tools and comprehensive training and education.

These are but two of a comprehensive range of papers and reports on ZyLAB’s site. The latter is a model of its kind, with each element of ZyLAB’s services and software clearly set out. A tagline on the home page read “Information you can use”, and that promise is borne out by these two papers and the other resources which ZyLAB makes available. There is a lot of good reading here, going well beyond mere product marketing.

Behaviour informatics and eDiscovery company UBIC is running a big data and information governance seminar in Washington on Friday 6 December. It takes place at the National Press Club and starts at 8.00am. Speakers include US Magistrate Judge John Facciola and Jason Baron of Drinker Biddle & Reath. I am moderating a panel on data privacy.

This is a tightly packed programme, aiming to fit high-quality input into the shortest space – the event occupies only the morning and is due to end at 1:30pm. There is an event summary here, and the registration page is here.

It begins and ends with top-notch keynotes – Jason Baron will open by talking on the subject of Applying TAR to information governance. I wrote about Jason Baron’s move to Drinker Biddle here, identifying it as one of the most significant developments of 2013 that a law firm should so overtly promote its expertise in proactive information governance. We think of technology assisted review primarily as a tool for reacting to very large discovery problems. Why not use it to anticipate and reduce those problems in advance of eDiscovery issues?

There is plenty to talk about in US eDiscovery at the moment, with proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil procedure, the continuing debate about the use of technology assisted review, costs-shifting, cooperation and competence, to say nothing of privacy concerns. That requires a context, and Judge Facciola will give that in a talk entitled What the Past 10 Years of eDiscovery Have Taught Us about Lawyers, Judges and Technological Change.

In between these two substantial bookends are two panel sessions on key topics. The first is called Benchmarking Big Data Analytics and its panel members are Ayumi Nishino of NEC Corp., Elle Pyle of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Wendy Butler Curtis of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, William P. Butterfield of Hausfeld LLP and Paul Starrett of UBIC North America, Inc.

The second is called IG & Data Privacy Challenges for Global Corporations under U.S. Regulatory Investigations. I am going over to moderate this panel, whose members include David Shonka of the Federal Trade Commission, Gil S. Keteltas of BakerHostetler, Stephen M. Byers of Crowell & Moring, Patrick Burke of Reed Smith and Conor R. Crowley of Crowley Law Office.

The relationship between privacy and eDiscovery is one full of inherent difficulty, with the one suppressing what the other would expose. This is an A Grade team to discuss these subjects, and I am fortunate to have the opportunity to moderate it.

Do please come along for what promises to be a high value occasion. The seminar is complimentary, once again registration is here.

What challenges face legal teams in the coming year? This is the subject to be addressed by Daniel Lim, Deputy General Counsel at Guidance Software, in a webinar to be broadcast on 5 December at 11am PST / 2pm EST with the title Top five eDiscovery recommendations for 2014.

The webinar will cover:

• The proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which, if they go through in their present form, are likely to have significant impact on the management of eDiscovery
• Case law and its increasing emphasis on accountability within organisations.
• The growth of both cost and risk as technology changes.
• Information security concerns arising in collection and review for investigations and litigation.

You can register for this webinar here.

If you speak and write a lot on the same subject, you develop a set of phrases which trip off the tongue semi-automatically. They can easily lose meaning as a result – the words “repeatable, defensible process” have long since lost any meaning because its mindless repetition (and boy, do they repeat it) just floats over one’s head like traffic noise. The message is important – vital even – but once is enough.

We all do it. I have a standard sentence which goes something like this: “You do not need to understand how the technology works, but you need to know what it does, what it costs, and what its benefits are”. Yes, I can see your eyes glazing as I write this, but it is a key message and there are finite ways of expressing it.

We need sometimes to unpick what lies behind these phrases and to expand a little on what we mean. Dean Gonsowski, Global Head of Information Governance at Recommind, is better than most at explaining the meaning behind the well-worn expressions. In an Inside Counsel article called Predictive Coding Cost Savings and Return on Investment Dean tackles the second line of defence raised by lawyers and clients who would like to close their eyes to the benefits which predictive coding technology can bring (the first, of course, is to whine about “black boxes” as an excuse for not even trying to understand what the technology achieves).

Dean’s article is about return on investment. Many companies, especially those ruled by accountants, consider a saving or a return to be invisible if you cannot quantify it precisely, even where common sense shows that an improvement in the bottom line must inevitably result from some action. Dean shows how it is done.

The article starts with the statistics of a typical eDiscovery / eDisclosure exercise, focusing on cost-per-document which, when multiplied by the number of documents, produces a (usually very large) cost. We can’t do much about the review cost per document (that is, the time taken for a competent lawyer to form a human evaluation of its relevance and importance) so we must tackle the number of documents to be reviewed. In Dean’s first example, keyword searches brought a starting volume of over 2 million documents down to 679,349 by getting rid of the easy targets; the use of predictive coding then reduced the reviewable documents from 679,349 to 175,018. Interested?

The article includes a table which compares the time and costs of linear review against the time and cost of the same exercises using predictive coding.

Dean Gonsowski then goes on to consider how the outcome of this calculation translates into a return on investment for those who adopt predictive coding for other cases over longer periods. If the savings look good on a case-by-case basis, then you can start drawing conclusions from the metrics emerging from multiple cases, and set that against the cost of buying and using predictive coding tools.

Most such explanations rapidly run into the sand either by drowning us in detail or by reliance on calculations too complex for the arts graduates which most lawyers are. Dean avoids that, and you do not need to be a genius with figures to get the message.

Epiq Systems provides managed technology for the legal profession around the world, supplementing its consulting practice with appropriate technology. Its focus is very much on seamless delivery of client services, particularly in the US, the UK and the Asia Pacific region. 2013 has been marked by expansion, notably into China, Japan and, most recently, Canada.

To reinforce the importance of the service element, Epiq has appointed Dianne Drummond as Senior Director of Client Services, based in London. Her role is to manage the client services team, to oversee project management and client relationships, to ensure delivery of projects within budget and on time, and take the lead with new clients and projects. She brings 15 years of experience to the task.

Epiq’s International Managing Director Greg Wildisen said: “As we expand within our existing markets and into new territories, it is important to ensure that we continue to deliver consistently high levels of service to our client base. Dianne’s knowledge and experience will be a tremendous asset in maintaining service excellence.”

There is a press release here.

The latest amendments to HIPAA substantially increase the obligations placed on companies, their law firms and their eDiscovery providers in relation to patient data, including data handling, data access, the policies and procedures which must be followed and obligations of audit and record-keeping.

eDiscovery software provider iCONECT, and its partner Avansic join forces on Wednesday 20 November at 1:00pm PDT to present a webinar about these aspects of handling Personal Health Information. It is called 7 things law firms need to know about HIPAA
and the speakers are Gavin Manes, CEO of Avansic; Gordon Moffat, Legal Project Management Director, eDiscovery, Baker Donelson; Iram Arras, Vice President, Product Strategy at iCONECT and Ian Campbell, President and Co-founder of iCONECT.

Registration for the webinar is here.

In addition, there is a paper jointly written by Gavin Maines and Ian Campbell also called 7 things law firms need to know about HIPAA  You can get hold of the paper here.

Guidance Software has partnered with Box to ease eDiscovery collections from Box cloud users.

The business of Box is the provision of cloud hosting and services. It is much more than a cloud repository, offering features, Apps and access for its clients’ developers, together with a set of admin features.

Box has increased its sales in the legal industry by more than 150% in the last year, as customers like Perkins Coie, Wilson Sonsini and Fowler White Boggs use Box to collaborate internally and externally, to manage and share information and to access legal documents on mobile devices. An article on the Box blog called Box adds new partners to help law firms be more competitive gives an introduction to both the market and the End User App partners.

Most recent of these is Guidance Software, a move on Box’s part which recognises that eDiscovery requirements are a major consideration for law firms and their clients. The integration between EnCase eDiscovery and Box allows users to collect and preserve information managed in Box with the same ease as data which is stored locally. The integration allows EnCase to connect to Box APIs and eliminate multiple manual steps such as copying files. This obviously improves the speed, security and defensibility of the discovery exercise.

The Guidance Software press release is here.

Litigation support and eDiscovery company UBIC, has supplemented its litigation support software and services offerings by launching a team of certified investigators in Asia and North America under the name Global Forensics Services. The team will have access to comprehensive forensics laboratories in California and in Asia.

The forensics service complements UBIC’s Xaminer forensics software designed to manage forensic investigation projects particularly, but not exclusively, for the difficulties of Asian language investigations. A high proportion of discovery exercises in the US involve significant volumes of Asian language documents even where the primary language of the collections is in English, and the availability of forensic services and software specifically designed for Asian languages is a significant consideration for many companies.

The press release is here.

Nuix began as forensic investigations software tool. It moved from there into eDiscovery / eDisclosure, and from there into information governance. When I say it “moved” from one activity to another, I do not mean that it abandoned each of these territories as it expanded into new areas. Far from it – recent months have seen much activity on the forensics front where Nuix began.

This is evident from its recent appointments. I wrote here about the appointment of Paul Slater as Director of Forensic Solutions. That has now been followed by the appointment of Stuart Clark, formerly of Millnet, as Director of Investigation Services (press release here), and of Rob Attoe as Senior Vice President of Investigations Training and Services (press release here).

We have also seen the best eDiscovery marketing video of the year, the excellent Finding the Digital Elephant in the Room, of which I wrote here. The theme of that video is the need simultaneously to examine every potential source of discoverable information and to discriminate between those which have value and those which do not.

Now Dr James Kent, Head of Investigations at Nuix, has written a paper called The Investigative Lab – A model for efficient collaborative investigations which expands on that message in the elephant video by describing how investigators can use tools like Nuix to assemble all available evidence, to make decisions about importance or relevance, and to route tasks into the right hands.

That latter point is important whether the investigation is for criminal or civil purposes. In the civil context, it is important, for example, to identify foreign language documents or financial documents or privileged documents as quickly as possible, either because they warrant specialist attention or (conversely) because they are deemed to have little or no relevance and should drop out of the pile to be reviewed.

If this is partly a matter of analysis, it is also one of workflow – who does what, in what order, and with what degree of priority are critical questions whether one is urgently investigating fraudulent activity or defining the scope of an eDiscovery project for budgeting or strategic purposes. Jim Kent’s paper explains both the implications.

kCura has this week announced the release of Relativity 8.1, the newest version of its web-based eDiscovery platform.

The press release here and the information page here highlight the main enhancements to workflow, assisted review and analytics, processing and performance. The information page includes a short video which gives a quick guide to the new features in a form which is easily assimilated.

eDiscovery software provider iCONECT seems to be everywhere at the moment, including Japan – see Japanese Doc Review Strengthens Client Services with iCONECT’s XERA – and in the Cloud – see XERA Now in the Cloud.

On top of that, iCONECTs president and co-founder, Ian Campbell, delivers the Commencement Address this week at Bryan University’s eDiscovery Project Management Graduate Certificate Program (press release here). This course is rather different from most in that it makes a big effort to relate the students’ studies to the real world of hands-on eDiscovery practice.

The Bryan University course is also a leader in the delivery of online courses, enabling it to call on a wide range of experts to supplement the coursework.

AccessData has opened registration for its user conference ADUC 2014, to be held at the Aria in Las Vegas from 13 to 16 May 2014.

The conference brings together the elements of cyber security, computer forensics and eDiscovery litigation support under one roof, and includes training in AccessData’s tools, presentations for CLE / CPE credit and a forum for sharing knowledge and networking.

AccessData is looking for speakers on all these subjects. Its call for speakers includes a list of the topics which will be covered.

AccessData has also recently been ranked highly by readers of the New York Law Journal whose annual survey gave AccessData high rankings for its legal hold solution, its online review platform, its predictive coding solution and its managed document review services.There is a press release about this here.

James Michalowicz has joined Huron Legal as a managing director with a focus on cost control and metrics in law firms and legal departments.

It is trite to say that the control of costs is a key driver for clients who get involved in eDiscovery exercises. The ability to predict and control costs is one of the primary attributes expected of those who offer professional services whether at in-house departments or in external law firms. The “more for less challenge” as Richard Susskind calls it, has never been more acute.

That challenge is met, in part at least, by the improvements in analytical software which captures cost and performance and the metrics both on specific cases and in the general management of in-house and law firm departments. The value derived from this goes beyond cost reduction and prediction and into the ability to fix fees – the latter is impossible if one has no idea of what a “typical” job costs and what variables might arise

This is where James Michalowicz experience comes in. Bob Rowe, executive vice president of Huron Legal, is quoted as saying:

The use of Big Data and business analytics to control costs has brought great opportunity for law departments and law firms facing constant pressures to contain outside spending while delivering quality service. Our clients will benefit from Jim’s track record of delivering results through value-based budgeting, alternative fee arrangements and cost/result driven metrics.

The press release is here.

Equivio’s successful educational series of webinars carries the title Predictive Coding Minus the Hype, and anecdotal feedback suggests that the target implied in the title has been met in the previous webinars, with delegates coming away well informed about the practical application of predictive coding.

The fifth webinar takes place on Tuesday 19 November at 12:00pm EDT. The speakers are Stephen Goldstein, Director of Practice Support at Squire Sanders and Tom Groom, VP, Discovery Engineering at D4. These are people who have made use of predictive coding since it was first made available to the legal market – I wrote recently about Squire Sanders’ use of Equivio predictive coding in my article Equivio helps send Squire Sanders to the InformationWeek 500 list of Top Technology Innovators.

In this fifth webinar, Stephen Goldstein and Tom Groom will cover

When and why they started working with predictive coding

Overview of the metrics used on a case

Details of a few key cases

Other approaches and technologies used in conjunction with predictive coding

Lessons learned

Registration is here.

FTI Consulting and Ari Kaplan have established a reputation between them for producing reports on ediscovery trends which are simultaneously comprehensive, properly sourced and interesting to read. They are based on input from corporate counsel at major US and international corporations, and reflect the views and experiences of those who are most interested in efficient, defensible and cost-effective solutions.

The most recent report, just published, is called Achieving and Maintaining eDiscovery Fitness. Its topics, summarised by FTI here, include the implementation of information governance programmes for proactive control of very large volumes, the repurposing of input between cases to reduce duplicated effort from case to case, the use of technology like analytics and predictive coding, controlling and predicting eDiscovery costs, and dealing with the legal and practical implications of international discovery.

These reports have a long shelf life – I find myself referring to them long after their publication date – and this one is particularly useful. We do not need to make generalised and unsourced assertions about the view from corporate counsel when we can refer to Ari Kaplan’s reports.

The paper can be downloaded here.

UBIC has added a new litigation hold function to its Lit i View eDiscovery tool to ensure that users can safely manage litigation holds on multiple matters across the corporation.

The functionality is described in this press release. Although the support of complex Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) is not the only thing which UBIC specialises in, the addition of a legal hold functionality which works in those languages is clearly significant.

We have seen a lot of activity from Epiq Systems recently, both in different jurisdictions and in print. Each of the things mentioned below might have warranted its own article, but you perhaps get a better idea of Epiq’s breadth and reach if I group them together.

I have already written about the eDiscovery round table which Epiq organised in Hong Kong in September and which I moderated – see Moving forward with eDiscovery in the Hong Kong civil courts – the Epiq Systems / ALB Round Table.

Document Review in Canada, London and elsewhere

Epiq has also opened a new document review centre in Toronto, building on recent large eDiscovery document review projects in Canada which have encouraged Epiq to expand its presence there. The new document review centre is capable of seating 50 reviewers and the project management, recruiting and staffing support to back them. The press release is here.

Meanwhile, Epiq has increased its London document review space by 50% at its Old Jewry premises. Saida Joseph, Epiq’s International Director of Document Review Services, said “This expansion will help us meet growing demand for scalable review solutions in London. This year alone, Epiq has reviewed more than 3 million documents in 10 languages, and conducted nearly 3,000 hours of audio review at the London location,”

This complements an increase in Epiq’s international document review capacity with dedicated facilities in Hong Kong and Tokyo and increased document review capacity in New York and Washington plus existing dedicated review facilities in Texas and Arizona.

Technology-assisted review in the age of Big Data

We have also seen an article from Epiq in the Lawyer called technology assisted review in the age of Big Data. Written by Saida Joseph and Celeste Kemper, Director of Document Review Services Asia, the article looks at how technology assisted review (predictive coding) can be applied to the analysis of very large data volumes.

Two key points emerge from the article. One is the metrics which can be derived from a document population by using TAR at a very early stage, informing decision-making about resource requirements as well as strategy.

The other point which is well made in the article is that technology assisted review is not a threat to lawyers but an opportunity to magnify the reach of their expertise. As the authors put it:

In reality, TAR is about injecting augmented intelligence into the legal process and humans and machines working together. With the volume of data growing exponentially, human linear review of documents is difficult in legal cases without extreme cost, undue burden and lengthy timelines. But machines alone are not the answer. The use, and the value, of the output is solely dependent on intelligent input and training from a human expert.

Meanwhile, Epiq’s international managing director Greg Wildisen has taken part in a round table on cross-border regulatory cooperation organised by the Lawyer, in the company of an impressive turnout of general counsel and external lawyers. The subject was the web of inter-related financial services investigations which arise when US and UK regulators cooperate.

Round table on cross-border regulatory co-operation

Some points emerge from the resulting article which are worth focusing on. One is the reference to the new breed of litigation project managers who, as the article puts it, “sit beside general counsel and conduct the logistics of the dispute… often… responsible for managing external costs”. The other is the prudent observation from Epiq on the merits of a proactive approach which anticipates the initiation of proceedings by a mixture of policy and technology.

Perhaps the most interesting observation is the one about lawyers sharing some of the risk of litigation with their clients. Pavel Klimov of Unisys says “Yes, litigation is unpredictable but so are so many other things in life. You can get life insurance pretty quickly so law firms should be able to develop better offerings”. This insurance analogy is one which I have raised a few times; it applies to both lawyers and to eDiscovery / eDisclosure providers and approaches the fees question by defining the risk and pricing it by reference to those same metrics as are referred to in Epiq’s big data article.

The collection of documents from multiple jurisdictions raises all sorts of issues, not least the privacy and data protection regimes which might be encountered. The focus on this can sometimes obscure very practical difficulties which arise after that, including the certainty that multiple jurisdictions will involve multiple languages.

ZyLAB has a very wide range of tools for dealing with all aspects of managing an organisation’s information, including information governance and other proactive phases as well as eDiscovery. Many of these are available in bundles (the “Analytics Bundle”, the “eDiscovery Bundle”) as well as independently. Amongst the modules is one for machine translation.

ZyLAB’s Mary Mack has written a short paper called Facing Multilingual Litigation which briefly describes the problem faced by lawyers once the data collection is complete. She does it by reference to a case study involving the collection by a US law firm of documents from a company based in Spain.

ZyLAB’s language detection and machine translation technology was used to identify and then translate the documents right at the beginning of the process, allowing the US lawyers to form views as to relevance and importance without waiting for manual translation. This approach meant that the costs were less than 10% of the bill which would have been incurred had it been necessary to translate documents manually in order to get started. In practice, very few documents may have to be translated manually.

The critical components are volume, speed and accuracy, together with the fact that the ZyLAB machine translation technology is fully integrated with the other components of ZyLAB’s information management tools.

Recommind is organising a breakfast briefing on 7 November at which the main topic is the location and management of mandatory data. Those of us who know Recommind largely through its predictive coding tools for eDiscovery purposes will not be surprised to know that they apply the same technology to predictive information governance with a focus on reducing costs, mitigating risks and enabling the identification and use of value in the information.

The event details, including an RSVP are here. The event takes place on Thursday 7 November at 8:15am at One New Change, St Paul’s, London EC4.

George Socha and Tom Gelbmann of Apersee continue their well-regarded series of webinars, with two coming up shortly. One, on 7 November, is sponsored by Nuix and is called Discovery Processing Made Simple with Martin Audet of Nuix and Bill Hamilton of University of Florida Law e-Discovery Project

On 19 November there is one sponsored by AccessData called Summation 5 Showcase – see the modern solution in action with Caitlin Murphy and Scott Lefton of AccessData.

George Socha and Tom Gelbmann take part in both events.

The full list of Apersee webinars, including archived versions of previous ones (there’s one with me and AccessData in there somewhere) can be found here.

Among the many people whom I saw only too briefly at ILTA in Las Vegas was Stephen Goldstein, Director of Practice Support at Squire Sanders in Cleveland, Ohio. Steve is one of my more valued sources for what is going in the more technologically-alert law firms, and I could have done with more time in his company.

There are not many law firms which are recognised specifically for their use of technology. Squire Sanders is to be congratulated on making it to the 2013 InformationWeek 500 – a list of the top technology innovators in the US. Their press release is here.

The award comes in recognition of Squire Sanders’ “Intelligent Discovery Process”, an eDiscovery project management technology process using predictive coding and technology to increase efficiency whilst reducing client costs.

A key component of Squire Sanders’ intelligent discovery is Equivio Relevance, Equivio’s long-established predictive coding application, now part of Equivio Zoom. A 2010 Equivio press release called Squire Sanders Leads the Way to “Intelligent Discovery” With Equivio>Relevance Technology tells you more about this.

In it, Joel Tobias talks about the relationship between forensic technology and the evidence required for civil proceedings. He talks also about CYFOR’s relationships with Symantec-Clearwell and with Nuix.

A batch of videos, with Ian Campbell of iCONECT, Caitlin Murphy of AccessData and David Horrigan of 451 Research, were all shot at ILTA 2013 in Las Vegas, with my son William (who also designed the website) as cameraman. More recently we filmed Roe Frazer of Cicayda and Casey Flaherty of Kia Motors America during Cicayda’s RELEvent un-conference in Nashville.

A yet further group of interviews was filmed at Lawtech Europe Congress in Prague; these will be published in due course.

One of the problems in assessing the use of any one technology is that you rarely get the opportunity to compare one approach directly with another. It is time-consuming and expensive enough to undertake a big review exercise once; it is rare that you get the chance to do it a second time with the same reviewers, same dataset, sisters and similar issues.

Atlanta-based Paragon Legal Technology Support recently did have such an opportunity. The review tool was iCONECT XERA and one pass included the use of XERA Analytics powered by CAAT from Content Analyst. The review involved 7TB of data. The saving with the use of analytics was $1.3 million.

The 6 November webinar, which involves speakers from Paragon, from iCONECT and from Content Analyst, tells the story of these parallel reviews. Registration is here.

HTCIA is the High Technology Crime Investigation Association which runs an annual conference  on high-tech crime forensics investigation techniques. This year’s event takes place on 2-4 December 2013 in Hong Kong.

Civil litigators tend to ignore this stuff, somehow thinking that their cases do not require digital investigations beyond email, and overlooking the fact that much evidence and narrative may be derived from the same tools and expertise as are used by crime investigators. I wrote about one aspect of this, photograph EXIF information, in my article of last week called Using EXIF GPS information from a camera in eDiscovery / eDisclosure.

This year’s HTCIA Asia-Pacific Training Conference agenda includes contributions from Richard Kershaw of FTI Technology, Paul Taylor of Consilio and Frank Butler of Guidance Software. Nuix is running a session called Nuix Investigation Fundamentals, and Guidance Software has a workshop at which examples of the EnCase product suite are explained. Sponsors include Nuix, FTI Technology and Epiq Systems.

Registration for this event is here.

I am back from LawTech Europe Congress in Prague, where I moderated two sessions. One was called Scope, Method and Budgets and addressed ways of controlling eDiscovery / eDisclosure volumes and costs in ways which are relevant in any jurisdiction. The other was about cross-border discovery, where we considered (amongst other things) whether the EU Parliament’s approval of the Draft Data Protection Regulation and the NSA revelations had made it harder than ever to take discovery data to the US. More on both of these in due course.

I also shot some video interviews to add to the growing collection here, had a lot of interesting conversations and ate extremely well.

I do not attempt to keep up with reporting the news when at conferences – that is a chance to get close to primary sources of information and to collect my own in the form of the videos, and it is a waste of good opportunities if I shut mysef away and write. I know that if I do not immediately make some notes, archive the videos, and enter the business card information, I never will, so new publishing has to wait behind all that.

I am speaking with others at a London law firm on Thursday, so it will be Friday before I start catching up with what has been going on.

Pangea3, a provider of legal process outsourcing services and part of the Thomson Reuters empire, has joined forces with information governance and data management specialist Recommind to deliver a workflow and predictive coding solution for Fortune 500 corporations and law firms. There is a press release about this here.

This seems to me to be a model for the way the world is going, with providers of outsourced services joining forces with the best technology providers to offer services of quality and at a price which few law firms can match.

Whilst I will not join the chorus of those who predict that Big Law is dying, I agree that it must move away from the traditional model of hourly rates multiplied retrospectively by the number of hours in favour of an approach which brings predictability to the delivery of legal services. The arrangement between Pangea3 and Recommind offers a way to spread the load.

A short video from Symantec called Symantec Project Honeystick explains what happens when Symantec deliberately left cell phones lying around in public in various US cities. Although many of the finders made attempts to trace the owners, it appeared that nearly all of them had a good look at the data, including corporate data, accessible on all of the phones.

If this is alarming for the cell phone users, it should be even more alarming for their employers. This video is a good way of getting that message across.

One of the reasons I went to Chicago last week was to sit down with the Huron Legal Leadership Team at the invitation of Jon Resnick, managing director and Huron Legal’s Global Sales leader. My task was to survey the worldwide developments in electronic discovery rules and practice as part of my general mission to carry eDiscovery / eDisclosure news and views between courts, lawyers, clients and providers.

Amongst those at the table was Bob Rowe, whose appointment as Huron Legal’s Practice Leader I wrote about here. Huron Legal has also recently appointed Mark Williams (press release here) and Jennifer Mendelsohn (press release here) to leadership roles in the eDiscovery side of Huron’s wide consulting practice.

Huron Legal’s name has also turned up amongst the finalists for the the Legal Week British Legal Awards 2013 where they appear on the shortlist for Supplier of the Year. I wish them well with that.

With its offices in Hong Kong, China and, most recently, Japan, Epiq Systems is as well qualified as any provider to talk about global data protection issues arising between the US and Asia.

That expertise is to be applied to a webcast, the second in a series called Global Data Protection. Part 2 tackles the US and Asia data protection, covering regulatory and other changes relating to cross-border data transfers and security as well as global discovery best practices.

The speakers are Jeffrey Jaeckel of Morrison & Foerster LLP, Scott Nonaka of O’Melveny & Myers LLP and Scott Warren, General Manager – Japan for Epiq Systems. The moderator is Jayne Rothman, Vice President, Corporate Counsel at Epiq Systems.

The webcast takes place on 23 October at 12:00pm EST and registration is here.

I am scrupulous to avoid suggesting that the products of any one of my sponsors are better than those of any other. Quite apart from the tact and diplomacy, I am not a user of software applications and have no opportunity to undertake the hands-on comparative exercise which would be necessary to form such a judgement.

Marketing materials are a different matter. Although, again, I usually try and avoid making public pronouncements about who is “the best”, I am in the same position as any viewer to form comparative judgements about the ways in which providers of eDisclosure software and services present their wares to prospective clients.

I am going to break my rule here, and say that Nuix is unequivocally the best eDiscovery provider at coming up with ways of promoting itself and its products. The web site is simultaneously easy on the eye and stuffed with useful content. The use of its own people in the photographs achieves one objective which I consider critical, namely giving a human face to the company. Judged by its web site alone, Nuix is as good as any and better than most. It is its use of video which makes it stand out.

Much of this is reasonably conventional stuff in the form of interviews (and “conventional” is good in this context – the target is a “conventional” audience). Nuix also does good product demonstrations by video – I wrote about the launch of Nuix Director here. The videos which make Nuix the clear winner, however, are the two which give my article its title – the 3 billion cans of beans video used to launch Nuix Luminate earlier this year and now one called Finding the Digital Elephant in the Room which explains what Nuix Investigator does.

There is no need for me to describe it – it runs for 2 minutes 46 seconds and you can watch it for yourself.

Nuix told us about Nuix Director at ILTA. Now it is ready to be rolled out to users.

Nuix Director provides template-driven, web-based eDiscovery workflow automation. It is built (of course) around the powerful Nuix engine, and allows development of automated workflows, processes and reports for all stages of the discovery process.

The templates mean that processes can be developed and run with minimal risk of human error. The reports allow summaries of the eDiscovery workflow – what you did, in plain English – so that you can show clients, fellow workers and the court or regulator what was done. The whole project can be seen in an interactive dashboard.

I am not going to waste my time or yours with any further description, because Matthew Geaghan of Nuix has produced a short demo on video which walks through the steps involved in a typical eDiscovery exercise. Nuix uses video very well, and the walk-through is self explanatory.

You will remember, no doubt, what was said about the dance routines which Ginger Rogers did with Fred Astaire: “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels”.

The quotation came to mind as I read Brett Burney’s article Successful Predictive Coding in an unfamiliar linguistic landscape. That was written in conjunction with UBIC, the developers of eDiscovery software developed originally for Asian languages.

Predictive coding is complex enough. Add the need to deal with Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, called collectively known as “CJK” and you have the equivalent of a Ginger Rogers dance routine, with the complexities of the CJK matching the “backwards and in high heels” requirement.

Brett Burney, whom I met for the first time at ILTA, makes a good job of explaining how predictive coding, including UBIC’s Lit i View, works, and describes the additional hoops added by the presence of CJK documents in a collection.

As Brett makes clear, the complexity is not simply one of language, hard though that is on its own. Where most English language (and most European languages) use familiar email environments such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, CJK countries have developed their own email platforms, with their own architecture and storage protocols. “Backwards and in high heels” barely suffices as a description of the potential complexity with which UBIC and its software have to deal.

Despite our best endeavours, I did not manage to meet up at ILTA with Bob Rowe, the leader of the Huron Legal part of Huron Consulting (there is a report about his appointment in July here).

I did, however, find a recording of an interview with Bob Rowe in which he talks about the evolution of technology to manage ever-larger volumes of data from the days when a law firm’s lawyers did the review, via the stage of using contract attorneys and through to outsourced managed review where companies like Huron offer a mixture of technology and review services on the basis of a cost model which, amongst other benefits, is predictable. Predictive coding and advanced analytics are the key.

This week brings two new announcements from Huron Legal. One is the award of ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification by UL DQS Inc. for its adherence to rigorous information security standards. Clients are increasingly (and rightly) concerned about the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their information, particularly when the requirements of eDiscovery require its removal from the company’s own systems. There is more to this than technology excellence, important though that is. The audit focused also on controls and formalised security policies and procedures and on the compliance with internationally recognised standards.

The second, and no less important announcement this week, has been the achievement of Orange-level Relativity best in service recognition which is given for outstanding and exceptional customer service for Relativity end-users. Orange-level, the higher of kCura’s Best in Service designations, includes recognition of investment in people, process and technology for installations with higher user accounts.

The press release about these two significant accreditations is here.

The big announcement at Guidance Software’s CEIC, which I attended in Las Vegas in May, was EnCase Analytics, a set of tools which allow early identification of previously unknown and difficult-to-detect threats through the use of “big data” analytical techniques.

Collection and monitoring of endpoint activity is an enormous task which requires analysis and visualisation. That is what EnCase Analytics brings, and its announcement caused great interest at CEIC.

EnCase Analytics is now availabe for release. There is a description of it here which includes links to a helpful set of visualisations and to relevant product pages.

I am off to Chicago at the weekend to join kCura’s Relativity Fest 2013 next week. I am taking part in the Assisted Review Panel on Tuesday. Its purpose is to discuss the development of best practices in this fast moving area, and my role is to discuss how the requirements of courts and clients coincide when it comes to reducing timescales and cost, and in achieving some level of predictability in both.

The Moderator is kCura’s Constantine Pappas and the other panel members apart from me are information retrieval expert Dr. David Grossman, Emma Kettleton of Millnet, Marty Mazzone of Fidelity Investments and Warren Rosborough of McDermott, Will & Emery.

There is more information about the panel on the Relativity Fest web site here.

The Financial Times and legal research company RSG Consulting are jointly running this year’s FT Innovative Lawyers Awards which focuses on the way in which people work and on the value delivered to clients rather than conventional metrics such as size, revenue and profit.

Recommind, with its specialist niche in unstructured data management, analysis and governance technology, is sponsoring the “Legal expertise: dispute resolution” category. There is a press release about it here.

The ceremony takes place on 3 October at the Natural History Museum in London. It be interesting to see who wins and what factors influence the judges.

The mid-year meeting of EDRM – the inventors of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model and the leading standards organisation for the eDiscovery market – is holding its mid-year meeting in St Paul, Minnesota from 9 to 11 October. The meeting is sponsored by Relativity and NightOwl Discovery amongst others.

There are further details and a tentative agenda here and those interested in taking part in achieving and revising the goals of the EDRM projects might like to take this opportunity to sign up and attend.

EDRM has also published what it calls the Privacy Risk Reduction Model, a process for reducing the volume of private, protected and risky data as part of the information management, identification, preservation and collection phases of the EDRM.

This will be of interest to anyone concerned with a collection of data which may include private, privileged or proprietary information.

Global eDiscovery software and services provider Consilio has reached agreement with Business Intelligence Associates to bring BIA’s TotalDiscovery platform to Consilio’s clients. Consilio becomes a BIA Platinum Partner.

TotalDiscovery as a cloud-based platform which automates identification, preservation and collection of data, enabling legal hold notification and remote collection. The objective, as Consilio Executive Vice President Todd Horst puts it, is “to help clients get to early case assessment and full in disclosure review faster … removing many of the barriers associated with traditional on-site data collections”. The objective, put shortly, is to shorten the time before lawyers get their eyes on documents so that they can start giving advice to clients.

It is at this stage, for example, that collections run into legal and practical difficulties such as local privacy and data protection regulations. Consilio gains a significant advantage for its clients where such issues can be identified as soon as possible and factored into the estimates of time and cost.

The Consilio press release is here.

CEIC 2014 – the Computer Enterprise Investigations Conference organised by Guidance Software – takes place at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas from 19 to 22 May 2014.

It brings together cybersecurity, eDiscovery, security intelligence and digital investigations in a comprehensive package in which all these disciplines, and the lawyers and technical experts who work in them, mix for a packed schedule of hands-on training, thoughtful presentations and the opportunity to mingle and talk.

A call for speakers has now been published. If you are interested in taking an active part in this event, now is the time to say so.

ZyLAB is now known well known as a provider of eDiscovery and information risk management tools used by corporations and their advisers to plough through very large volumes of data to get quickly and cost effectively to the information which matters. If much of its technology is aimed at solving eDiscovery and investigations problems, it is increasingly involved also in anticipating them and in pre-emptive mitigation of potential problems and the expense which they cause.

There are not many companies in this area which can point to a 30-year history, but it is ZyLAB’s 30th birthday this year. I have known it almost from the beginning, since I was an early user of ZyIndex, the first full-text retrieval software for the personal computer. I used it when I was a litigation lawyer in its original MS-DOS version, cutting my Boolean teeth, as it were, with its command line syntax.

ZyLAB is understandably proud, not just of its longevity, but of the success which it enjoys with its wide-ranging portfolio of products and services. It has published a calendar of its developments from ZyIndex all the way through to its tools for eDiscovery, defensible disposition, intelligent data migration and Big Data risk management with visual classification tools which seem as far removed as possible from the long and complex queries which I used to write.

The next 30 years should be even more interesting.

I have known Sasha Hefler for a long time, having come across her at many of the higher end eDiscovery conferences which I attend in the US and elsewhere and where she usually seemed to be quietly – but ubiquitously – running the show.

Her main strength is marketing communication – developing business growth strategies for companies and conferences and using her skills to promote them.

UBIC, who provide litigation support, predictive coding technology (notably for Asian languages) and forensic solutions, have appointed Sasha Hefler as Senior Director of Strategy and Communications, aiming to call on her many years of developing marketing strategies and brand-awareness in the eDiscovery technology sector. There is a press release here and a fuller report here.

UBIC became a public company in May when it was listed on NASDAQ and Sasha’s appointment is part of a strategy to develop UBIC’s business beyond its Asian language specialisation and into mainstream US and global eDiscovery support. Amongst its strengths in this area are hosting sites around the world.

This is a good appointment, and I wish both UBIC and Sasha Hefler well as they continue their work together.

The webinar which I recorded last week with Ian Campbell of iCONECT and Thomas Barnett of Saito Sorenson LLP is now available online, with other iCONECT webinars, at http://www.iconect.com/webinar-recordings/

The webinar’s full title is Social communication: is there anything worth requesting? Its purpose was to draw attention to the many and varied sources of electronic information which may exist within a company or (crucially) in the possession or power of employees and others who are potential custodians for actual or prospective eDiscovery exercises.

Part of our purpose was to remind lawyers to ask their own clients, as well as the opposition, about such sources. The point is not necessarily that everything should be collected – far from it – but that lawyers should know enough about such potential sources to be able to ask the right questions and begin to evaluate whether the sources are worth collecting. Proportionality (which I defined in the webinar as the balance between cost, benefit and risk for these purposes) is the element which is needed to determine whether sources have a value or really must be collected to comply with a duty.

Tom Barnett made the point forcibly that the purpose of collecting and collating evidence is to create a narrative. The process, and compliance with relevant rules, is critical, but we perhaps overlook the importance of storytelling in the scramble to get processes right.

The webinar was fun to do – and not overly structured, which gave us room to develop our own story within the constraints of the title.

This is the first of a series of iCONECT Webinars on the same general theme. The next one is on Wednesday 2 October with the title Social Communication: Is Private the New Public? You can find a list of other iCONECT webinars here.

Those who read my blog will know that I have been away for the last three weeks and that I turned up late for a rare holiday because I was in Hong Kong moderating an interesting panel in the company of Epiq Systems. That is one of a series of events with Epiq in Hong Kong in the last few months and interesting stuff it is – with more to come.

Meanwhile, Epiq is keeping me busy wearing my writing hat as well. I get back to my desk to find that it has been awarded the Lawyer Monthly’s annual Technology Supplier to the Legal Sector award for the second year in a row, and that it has launched a web-based early case assessment platform called Epiq Analytics which enables users to make case strategy decisions as early as possible in the eDiscovery process. There is a press release about Epiq Analytics here.

It is worth having a look at Epiq’s eDiscovery technology page. Epiq Analytics joins a stable which includes DocuMatrix, Epiq’s hosted discovery management platform, eDataMatrix, its data processing tool, and Epiq Portal which delivers budgeting and management information about the progress of projects. On top of all that, Epiq partners with some of the best eDiscovery solutions providers in the world, allowing users a choice between its own tools and those of others.

Referring to the Lawyer Monthly award, international managing director Greg Wildisen referred to the “very specific needs of clients” and the consequent need to provide a taxable range of solutions.

What makes that possible for Epiq is that the technology solutions provide only part of the story – it is a broadly-based consulting company for law firms and corporate clients whose solutions include managed review services wherever the client needs them, including the US, the UK, Hong Kong, China and, most recently, Japan.

As noted in an earlier article today, the senior judiciary is reviewing the Jackson Reforms. Meanwhile, we live with the rules and the cases as we find them. Birmingham Law Society is promoting a session called Essential Update on Jackson with Professor Dominic Regan and Ed Pepperall QC.

Both speakers have been involved in the Jackson reforms since they were first discussed, Dominic Regan as adviser to Lord Justice Jackson and perhaps the leading educator on the reforms as a whole, and Ed Pepperall as both a member of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and a barrister who gets his hands dirty dealing with cases. I have shared platforms with them both and their joint fire-power will be considerable.

The subject headings alone are bait – proportionality and cost budgeting, sanctions, default, disclosure, and amendments are all key topics for anyone practising in the civil courts.

The event takes place on that October at 8:30am at the DWF offices in Birmingham. The details are here.

eDiscovery software and services company UBIC specialises in Asian language eDiscovery. The most recent version of its forensic software, Lit i View Xaminer™, is designed in Japan with an eye to the requirements of Japanese police and other government agencies.

UBIC offers more than just the software, with a business division aimed at the deployment of their applications in support of the relevant authorities, and based on their views and requests.

Cybercrime has been increasing in Japan, as everywhere else, and the feedback received by UBIC suggested that the lack of language specific functions was impeding investigations – thus the new development.

There is a press release about the software and the supporting business here.

It was with mixed feelings that I heard that Craig Carpenter was leaving Recommind to become Chief Marketing Officer with AccessData.

As Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Recommind, he was closely linked in my mind with the development of predictive coding – not just Recommind’s great progress with that technology, but with the technology itself and its acceptance by lawyers for eDiscovery purposes.

He has also been an eloquent advocate of information governance as Recommind broadened its scope in that direction. Wearing my Recommind hat, as it were, I am sorry to see him leave.

On AccessData’s behalf, however, I am delighted to see him there, with a broader and very different portfolio of products in his care. AccessData already has a strong marketing team (see my newly-posted video of Caitlin Murphy talking about mobile forensics, for example) and Craig Carpenter will bring new ideas.

There is a press release here about Craig’s appointment. I look forward to meeting up with him shortly in his new capacity.

Guidance Software is presenting a webinar on 2 October at 11am PDT with the title Endpoint Security from A-Z with EnCase Technology.

It is a technical webinar intended both for those new to EnCase products and for power users to show how the EnCase products can be used to gain insight into what may happen next, whether from internal or external threats.

The webinar lasts only 35 minutes and will show how you can:

• Expose, assess, and remediate both known and previously unknown threats lurking on enterprise endpoints
• Responsively validate, triage, and remediate detected threats.

The presenters are Anthony Di Bello, Strategic Partnerships Manager, Guidance Software and Ale Espinosa, Senior Product Strategist, Guidance Software.

Registration is here.

Here is the fourth webinar given by eDiscovery text analytics company Equivio in their series Predictive Coding Minus the Hype. It takes place on 1 October at 12.00pm EDT.

This one, given by Equivio’s Rachi Messing and Avi Elkoni covers various use cases beyond the fulfilment of eDiscovery obligations, including early case assessment, culling, prioritized review, quality assurance for review, virtual replacement of first-pass review and much more

The series has gained praise, not merely for living up to its “without the hype” tag line, but for being informative, educational and topical. The messages, in other words, apply more widely than to Equivio’s own technology.

Registration is here.

This is a reminder about a webinar called Introduction to Asian eDiscovery Challenges to be given on 25 September at 1:00pm EDT by eDiscovery Journal in association with Asian language eDiscovery software specialist UBIC.

The speakers include James E. Gordon, Director, Berkley Research Group, Yodi Hailemariam, Discovery Counsel at McDermott, Will & Emery, Jason Velasco of eDJ Group and registration is here.

I wrote recently about the series of eDiscovery webinars being put on by iCONECT, owners of the eDiscovery platform XERA, and how the enthusiasm which I expressed for the subject led to an invitation to take part in the first of them.

That is called Social Communication: Is There Anything Worth Requesting and concerns the potential eDiscovery value of new forms of social inter-action which might easily be overlooked. The “worth requesting” bit reflects the fact that the mere existence of potentially discoverable material does not make it worth extracting, processing and producing – that is determined by its relevance and by proportionality. The error lies in not identifying it as a potential source of evidence, whether on your own side or in the hands of opponents.

For reasons beyond our control, this webinar did not go out as planned last week. It has now been fixed for tomorrow, Wednesday 25 September at 1.00pm EDT / 18.00 BST. The presenters are Ian Campbell of iCONECT, Thomas Barnett of Saito Sorenson LLP – and me.

The list of iCONECT webinars, with their new dates, can be found here.

FTI Technology is giving a webinar on Wednesday 2 October at 2.00pm ET | 11.00am PT with the title eDiscovery Fitness Survey results – five steps for getting your program into better shape.

By “eDiscovery fitness”, FTI refers to the general state of preparation of companies who are likely to face eDiscovery challenges. They say that five characteristics can be identified in companies which have addressed this. These are:

• Effectively handling “big data” volume, velocity and variety
• Adopting advanced technology, including analytics and predictive coding
• Efficiently re-using collected, processed and reviewed materials from previous matters
• Thinking and acting globally
• Budgeting with transparency and predictability

The speakers are Raquel Tamez, Deputy General Counsel – Litigation / e-Discovery Computer Sciences Corp., Ari Kaplan, Principal Ari Kaplan Advisors, and Mike Kinnaman, Senior Managing Director at FTI Technology

You can register for this event here.

Equivio Zoom brings together Equivio’s technology for reducing large volumes of documents and data by identifying redundant data and by helping lawyers to distinguish between important and unimportant data.

It includes Equivo’s Relevance application for predictive coding, with advanced analytics including clustering, near-duplicates, email threads and language detection.

For those who have licenced it, Equivio Zoom appears in a tab in kCura Relativity. The press release from the original integration is here.

Equivio Zoom 2.6 now works in conjunction with Relativity 8, bringing new features and enhancements to existing functions. Equivio will be amongst the developers at Relativity Fest in Chicago from 6-8 October.

Given the number of conferences which I attend in a year, it is unsurprising that many of them merge together in my recollection. There is a finite range of subject headings; similarities between jurisdictions outweigh the differences; many of the speakers turn up at several events; the conference centres may vary in detail, but the rooms are much the same whatever the country. I wake up some mornings and have to think where I am.

If that sounds like a criticism (and you come across people who like to sneer at this sameness), I rarely hear a presentation which does not bring something new to the debate. The pool of speakers and the range of subjects may be small, but the spotlight shifts, priorities change, and different permutations of speakers cast new light on their subjects.

One conference from last year which stands out in my recollection, and for a number of reasons, was the LawTech Europe Congress in Prague.  If the Clarion Congress hotel is much like any other venue, the audience was very different, the speakers more varied and the range of subjects broader than at most conferences which I attend.

This is partly implicit in its title – electronic evidence, computer forensics, cyber security and legal technology. It is not therefore just an eDiscovery conference, although eDiscovery is about evidence, it depends on forensics, it increasingly overlaps with cyber security and it is obviously about legal technology.

I have written before about Fred Gyebi-Ababio, the founder and enthusiastic mover behind LTEC. He is aided this year, as last, by Sasha Hefler, the organising and marketing genius behind so many events and products (I don’t do recommendations as a rule, but if you want some oomph put into a marketing exercise, Sasha Hefler is the one you need on your side; she is also ubiquitous, and I have long stopped being surprised to find her running the show when I go to events).

The keynote speaker this year is Paul Salazar who is head of healthcare litigation and litigation information management at Siemens AG in Munich. I have had the pleasure of sharing panels with
Paul Salazar and he is a good choice as keynote speaker. Siemens has more experience than most in dealing with the kinds of issues which form the subject-matter at LTEC, and Paul is eloquent on the causes and on solutions.

The conference is split into two tracks, one for educational and explanatory sessions and one for demonstrations.

My own panel is on the subject of court control over expenditure, with a focus on the objectives of the rules, the parties and the courts. I am joined by Damian Murphy, barrister of Enterprise
Chambers in Newcastle, who impressed at IQPC’s Information Governance and eDiscovery Exchange in London in May. Damian has a background in management consultancy, a strong technical grasp (are there any other UK
barristers who keep a copy of eDiscovery Tools on their desk?) and a keen focus on that word “objectives” which appears in our conference session description. My panel also includes Carl Obayi, another hybrid simultaneously qualified as an English solicitor and a forensics and eDiscovery expert – not many people can put both “Solicitor” and “MCSE” after their name.

Andrew Haslam of Allvision leads a panel on enterprise information management, focusing on the advantages of a dispute resolution readiness plan, its role in compliance and eDiscovery, and its effect on the bottom line. He is joined by Browning Marean of DLA Piper US, Jiří Matzner of Oracle, Tomáš Hulle of PPIT and, not least, Alex Dunstan-Lee who has recently joined Navigant from KPMG.

Jim Kent of Nuix moderates a panel which looks at the increasing volume, types and complexity of electronic evidence and considers techniques for managing them to get to the evidence. He is joined by Robert Lewis of Barclays Bank, Ady Cassidy of Nuix and Andy Domaille of the Guernsey Police.

Mobile data raises problems of its own and Yuval Ben Moshe of Cellebrite considers not only the technical issues but points about admissibility and proportionality. His panel includes Patrick Burke of Reed Smith, known to me for years as Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software, and the always excellent Jo Sherman of eDiscovery Tools.

These extracts from the programme ae enough, I think, to show that this conference covers a broad range of subjects relevant to eDiscovery and its constituent components of forensics, security and technology.

Prague sits at the centre of a very large region whose economic important increases. The big consulting firms like Deloitte and EY are inevitably present in such places (and at the conference) and stand to be the eDiscovery winners whether for litigation or for regulatory investigations. That dominance-by-default can be challenged by those familiar with the region, and attending an event like this is an easy way to start to get the feel of the area.

One of my sessions last year was interrupted by a gentleman who called out “This is all fairytales, you know that?”, going on to explain that local judges knew little or nothing about electronic discovery. That is to miss the point. As trade and business with foreign countries, including the rest of the EU and the US, continues, so there must inevitably be an increase in US-led litigation and in interventions by
regulators from both the US and the EU as well as local ones. That is reason enough for law firms and for providers of software and services to be at this conference.

If that is not enough for you, Prague is one of the most beautiful cities I have been to. The conference, held over two days this year, is on Monday and Tuesday, making it an easy decision to go to Prague for the weekend and enjoy out. There are good commercial reasons for wanting to be there as well.

Nuix is running a series of courses aimed at people with different skill levels and objectives with self-explanatory titles like Nuix Fundamentals training, Nuix eDiscovery Specialist Training and Nuix Investigation Specialist Training.

The first of these takes place in Texas on 1 October. A list of all the courses, with registration details, can be found here.