We can, I hope, take it for granted that most lawyers involved inlitigation and regulatory requests have got their minds round email, loose files like word documents and spreadsheets and the other more obvious discoverable material – “obvious” because they have obvious parallels in the paper world.

Such things, however, are only the beginning, because more and more communication (both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the whole) takes place in other forms – on Facebook and Twitter, by instant messaging and Skype, and by the exchange of photographs and other things which may be seen as trivia.

By no means all of this stuff is potentially discoverable and, indeed, we must resist those who argue that it must all be collected “just in case” it is relevant. Quite apart from anything else, this is unlikely to be deemed proportionate in most cases. One must not, however, overlook the possibility that there are strands of
communication passing between or created by potential witnesses which ought to be collected, analysed and reviewed in the same way as more substantial documents are.

eDiscovery software provider iCONECT, owners of the XERA review platform, has a series of webinars coming up which address these subjects, gathered together under the group heading A Survival Guide to the World of Social Communication.

The first of these is on 25 September (held over from 18 September) and called Social Communication: Is There Anything Worth Requesting? which focuses on where such information can be found and how to get hold of it.

Part two is called Is Private the New Public? and the third is called Using Technology to Turn the Tide which, as its title implies, concentrates on the tools which are available to search, sort, categorise, organised and analyse data which may be relevant.

iCONECT’s webinar links page is here.

I have taken part in any number of data collection and privacy panels at which the US indifference to privacy protection has been given as a norm. It is always qualified, however, by references to certain specific areas including HIPAA. I have not had the curiosity until now to look this up and see that this is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act 1996 – I was aware that it was to do with medical information, but knew no more than that.

HIPAA imposes significant duties on hospitals and health professionals to preserve the privacy of patient data, imposing serious duties and penalties. That includes liability for breach notification unless there is a low probability that the protected health information
has been compromised. That this is serious stuff is shown from the fact that Walgreens were ordered to pay $1.44m for an alleged HIPAA violation.

With effect from 23 September, the HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule extends these obligations to a much wider range of organisations, giving new rights and new protections to patients in respect of their data.

ZyLAB has devoted a webinar to this and to analagous provisions in the Affordable Care Act. The webinar title is ACA Reporting and the HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule. The participants are Ken Raschbaum, a specialist in health information privacy and data protection as well as the eDiscovery challenges which arise from them, and Johannes Scholtes of ZyLAB, who shows how technology can help mitigate legal risks and reduce the costs of health information governance including the risk of regulatory and internal investigations, audits or litigation. ZyLAB’s Mary Mack moderates.

This is an on demand webinar which you can access here.

One of the new releases at ILTA was Hypergraph from Recommind, a visualisation tool designed to make it easier to identify relevant information from the mass.

When you have large volumes of data, it is hard to draw quick conclusions from lists which must themselves be read and which speedily become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Visualisation gives a quick review to data strategists – what stands
out, what is relevant to what we know, what supports or contradicts existing theories and what lurks in the data which we did not know about? Graphical representations of data can speed up the process of discovering these things.

Recommind’s web page about Hypergraph is here and there is a Hypergraph video here. Visualisation is by definition hard to explain – its whole point turns on things you look at. Videos are helpful, but, even better, you could ask Recommind to show you Hypergraph.

UBIC is well known as a provider of eDiscovery software with particular emphasis on the ability to handle the challenges of dealing with CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) electronic documents.

It is therefore unsurprising to find UBIC as sponsor of an eDJ Group webinar called Introduction to Asian eDiscovery which takes place on 24 September at 1:00pm EDT. The webinar covers both the language difficulties which arise in Asian eDiscovery and the legal and regulatory context in which these challenges arise.

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

Registration is here.

The title of this live Nuix webinar, taking place tomorrow, 4 September at 4.00pm ET, is What’s new in Nuix 5? and self-explanatory.

Stephen Stewart, CTO at Nuix, and Angela Bunting, Director of User Experience, will focus on the key features and enhancements in the latest Nuix release and on how they will allow eDiscovery practitioners, analysts and technicians to complete their eDiscovery tasks more quickly.

Registration is here.

I have already written about the addition of predictive coding to FTI Technology’s Ringtail 8. I come back to it partly because I had a closer look at it at ILTA and spoke to a longtime Ringtail user who was excited about it, and partly because of a forthcoming webinar.

It is called Predictive Coding and Analytics Combined: A How-To Guide for Smarter E-Discovery and it takes place on Thursday 12 September at 2.00pm ET.

The speakers are Ausra Deluard of Jones Day, David Horrigan of 451 Group and David Grant of FTI. David Grant was one of those who walked me through the new
functionality and made an apparently complex subject comprehensible. Registration for the webinar is here.

FTI’s web page about Ringtail 8 includes a video which I commend to you as a simple way of conveying the new functionality.

Nuix has launched eDiscovery 5 which attracted much attention at ILTA, together with its new web application Director, which automates eDiscovery of workflows in the hands of eDiscovery experts, analysts and technicians, investigators and lawyers.

Nuix eDiscovery 5 can be used either web-based through Director, or through Nuix Workstation on the desktop.

A 10 minute online demo of Director can be found here.

The Ministry of Justice is seeking a solicitor member and a lay advice public consumer affairs member for the Civil Procedure Rule Committee.

This represents an opportunity to be involved in both the broad sweep and the minutiae of rule drafting. Interviews will take place in the week commencing 21 October. The details are here.

For the first time in many years, I will not be at the Masters Conference for Legal Professionals, to be held in Washington D.C. from Wednesday 18 September to 19 September.

This is the result of a collision between a family wedding and holiday, a trip to Hong Kong and a London conference, all of which are crammed into the same few days. Something had to give and it is, alas, the Masters Conference.

The main reason that I usually attend is to take part in its International Discovery panel which last year I co-chaired with Amor Esteban of Shook Hardy & Bacon.

That panel is listed this year to take place on Thursday 19 September at 10:50 am. The panel description is here. Tom Matzen of iDiscovery Solutions is the moderator and the panel includes Damon Greer, formerly Director, U.S.-EU & Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks U.S. Department of Commerce, whose views will be of particular interest as EU eyes reconsider whether Safe Harbor is safe at all in the light of the NSA/PRISM outcry.

I won’t pretend that I would rather be in Washington than on a Cornish cliff, but I will still be sorry to miss this and the other Masters Conference panels.

The partnership between Guidance Software and Magnet Forensics has resulted in a new integration module available on EnCase App Central. Evidence uncovered by Internet Evidence Finder (IEF) can be brought directly into EnCase Forensic so that all evidence for a single case can be examined, searched and analysed in one place.

Guidance Software has a webinar on this on 12 September at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT.

Registration is here.

For reasons which I will expand on in due course, I am increasingly interested in what is happening in Canada in respect of eDiscovery and cybersecurity.

eDiscovery and cybersecurity software company AccessData has appointed Chris Driscoll to lead its business as a Regional Account Executive covering enterprise, government and law enforcement accounts throughout Canada.

The press release is here. It refers to a Canadian IT security conference called SecTor, due to be held between 7 and 9 October in Toronto. Registration is here.

The Xerox Litigation Services blog, Xerox eDiscovery Talk, continues to provide thoughtful and useful posts aimed at those in corporate and law firms who face eDiscovery challenges. The blog complements a wide range of  eDiscovery / eDisclosure tools and services offered by Xerox Litigation Services and Lateral Data which, for many companies and law firms, offer the answer to the problem raised in the article to which my heading refers.

The article is called Quest for an eDiscovery Provider and is written by Dean Kuhlmann, VP Business Development at Lateral Data, a Xerox company. The article’s seven brisk points will help to focus attention on the things which matter.

What matters to one company or law firm may not matter so much to another. Even within an organisation, needs vary according to the case, the available resources and skills, and a range of other factors which complicate the decision-making process. Before you look at the specific functionality of any one product or type of product, there are broad questions to be answered about where the data sits and who is to do the work. You might want complete ownership and control of the process, with software on your own premises and run by your own people. At the opposite extreme, you might want to delegate the whole task, including hosting, technical input and so on to somebody else, allowing you to retain the control that goes with responsibility but delegating the rest. In between those extremes lies a middle course, where a provider hosts the data but the client or its lawyers deal with the tasks from data collection and ingestion through to review and production. A spike in activity may mean that the answer which was right for the last case
you took on is not practical or economically viable for the case which has just come in.

Xerox itself in fact provides all these options. Traditionally, its model was to host the applications (principally its review tool OmniX and its analytic application CategoriX) and to provide full-service consultancy to its clients. More recently, it has acquired Lateral Data, whose Viewpoint application is designed to sit behind the user’s firewall and be used
by the in-house technical and legal staff. What Xerox XLS has achieved is to make it easy to choose from this wide range of options on a case-by-case basis, including the ability to move case data to whichever of its platforms is appropriate for the current case and workload.

When Xerox acquired Lateral Data, it made much of its intention to keep the company as a free-standing entity within the Xerox umbrella, pursuing the goal of interoperability whilst retaining Lateral Data’s distinct place in the market. It has made good this promise and if you go to the Lateral Data website, you will find that it has its own branding with a discreet reference to “a Xerox company” after its name. Xerox seems to have achieved the best compromise in this respect.

Law Technology News carries an article about Lateral Data’s “Backpack” service which provides Viewpoint on an appliance which can be taken to the data for collection, processing, early case assessment, analytics, review and technology assisted review, production and case administration – everything that one might need for managing eDiscovery /  eDisclosure in a case.

One obvious example where this kind of facility might be needed is where data cannot be moved from its location, perhaps because it includes personally identifiable information or data which is particularly confidential. The Backpack service rounds out the flexible range of options which Xerox and Lateral Data offer between them. You can see them all at ILTA next week.

Before I leave the subject of Xerox, I would point you to another recent article on the Xerox XLS blog. It is called Seeing Metadata Through a Different Prism and is written by Rachael Teisch of Xerox XLS. The subject of metadata has come up recently in a different context, with the US government seeking to mollify the potential targets of its data collection (which in practice means everybody) by saying that they collect “only” metadata. Rachael Tiesch’s post emphasises that metadata can hold a substantial quantity of useful information, and can be the “little acorns” from which mighty oaks may grow – a neat way of putting it, and as relevant to those analysing data for civil litigation as it is for government agencies whose task is snooping on citizens or whatever the driving motive is for state investigations.

There are other articles of similar quality on the Xerox blog making this a useful resource well worth repeat visits quite apart from the comprehensive range of eDiscovery tools which Xerox and Lateral Data offer under one umbrella.

Guidance Software is running a three-part series on eDiscovery covering fundamental points and best practices. Its part one was about legal holds and preservation. Part two, taking place on Tuesday 27th August at 11.00am PDT is about identification, collection and processing.

It covers the advantages of a targeted collection, the use of technology for efficiency and defensibility, BYOD, and social media collections. It also includes some actual examples of sanctions and fines resulting from improper and sufficient procedures.

Registration for this webinar is here. There is a list of all recent and future Guidance Software webinars here.

There was a time when most companies involved in eDiscovery / eDisclosure focused on their own niche strengths, leaving other components of the EDRM (the Electronic Discovery Reference Model) to other companies with the relevant specialist skills. Many then spread their portfolios to left and right of the original starting positions with the aim, much valued by many clients, of keeping responsibility for the process and for the budgets in one hand – or, put more colloquially, having “one butt to kick”.

Notwithstanding the many benefits of this, there remain circumstances in which it is appropriate to use the skills and technology of one company for one stage in the discovery process and those of another for a later stage. The result has been a series of relationships between providers designed to make it easy for each to focus on what it is best at and for data to be passed seamlessly between applications.

Nuix has given us several examples of such relationships which combine Nuix’s ability to collect and process virtually any kind of data quickly and efficiently with the analytic and review capabilities of other products. One of these is FTI Technologies’ Ringtail with its advanced visualisation tools including Document Mapper, Cubes and Mines; the Nuix page about this relationship is here. Another in kCura’s widely used analytics and review application Relativity, whose relationship with Nuix is described here.

The most recent announcement is about integration with iCONECT, whose XERA provides one of the most attractive looking and intuitive tools on the market. The two companies have already been working together to provide seamless ingestion of data from Nuix to iCONECT. The fruits of the latest round of integration gives Nuix users a natural path through electronic collection, ingestion, culling and analysis to XERA. Similarly, iCONECT XERA users can seamlessly access a high-performance tool for pre-review processing and analysis.

iCONECT’s press release about the integration is here. The Nuix press announcement about this is here.

I wrote recently about the use by the British Army’s Royal Military Police of AccessData’s investigative tools, which allow data of all kinds to be captured, processed, analysed and reviewed very much faster than hitherto.

The Guardian has an interesting article on this headed Big Data: Police given access to British army’s crime-fighting software. Ignore the journalistic idea that “Big Data” and “lots and lots of data” are synonymous terms, and focus on the volumes: a wide range of crimes is covered, from child abuse, hate crimes and computer hacking through to the work of the specialist military people who comprise IHAT, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team; the latter alone collected 75 TB of data on alleged abuse by British soldiers between 2003 and 2008.

The same AccessData technology has been used by the Metropolitan Police in big investigations such as Operation Elveden, the investigation into alleged payments by journalists to public officials, as well as child pornography and abuse cases.

A point is made at the end of the article which I have come across recently in a different context. Major Keith Miller, commander of the RMP’s Service Police Crime Bureau finds that defence lawyers remain firmly wedded to physical paper despite the expense of printing and the yet more significant expense of reviewing electronic data without the
search and retrieval facilities which modern technology offers. Major Miller says “We come up against some people who insist on taking paper evidence. I dump it all on them but the data sets now are so large they rarely ask for it in that format again.”

Those of us whose primary focus is on civil eDiscovery are familiar with this reaction, coming not only from lawyers but from judges. Major Miller’s education programme may be brutal, but the defence lawyers asked for it, in a very literal way. The focus on proportionality and costs control in civil proceedings mean, effectively, that lawyers no
longer have the luxury of demanding the most expensive form of production. We need to speed up the process of education of both lawyers and judges to help them realise how much easier and more efficient it is to use technology like AccessData’s software to review material in civil as well as in criminal cases.

eDiscovery software provider UBIC, which specialises in Asian language electronic discovery, last week celebrated its admission to NASDAQ when its Chairman and CEO Masahiro Morimoto rang the NASDAQ Closing Bell to mark the end of the trading day. NASDAQ Vice President David Wicks noted that UBIC is the first Japanese company to be listed on NASDAQ since 1999.

Mr Morimoto, whom I interviewed last week – see my article here – said that he came to the US to help protect Asian corporations. He said

“UBIC has a mission as a provider of eDiscovery support solutions out of Asia: we seek to level the global playing field so that Asian companies can compete with their Western counterparts on a truly even footing.”

The press release about this summarises UBIC’s ambitions – improving brand awareness, and giving support which works natively with major Asian languages, offering Asian clients the same level of technological sophistication as is available to their Western counterparts. There are economies, as well as benefits of accuracy, in being able to handle Asian languages natively rather than translating them first.

UBIC will be at ILTA showing the latest version of its eDiscovery software, Lit i View 6.6, which includes its proprietary predictive coding technology specifically tuned to address the difficult Asian languages. UBIC will also be offering sake and Japanese beer to those who visit its booth.

There is a press release about this here.

Thomson Reuters has announced the launch of Case Logistix 6.0, the latest version of its scalable document review, analysis and production software platform. The announcement is here and the main CaseLogistix product page is here.

The new version brings enhancements which include a fully customisable user interface, advanced search facilities designed to allow non-technical lawyers to build complex searches easily, built-in OCR, advanced analytics such as concept clustering, email threading and near-duplicate document analysis, and navigation improvements which allow users to move easily between tasks.

I knew Case Logistix back in the days when it was still in the hands of its founders – indeed, it was one of the first major eDiscovery applications which I looked at properly. Even back then it focussed closely on automating tasks and on easing the user experience.

What impressed me the last time I saw it (and I have not seen the new version yet) was the way in which Thomson Reuters Westlaw Litigation Solutions have wrapped everything which a litigating lawyer can need into an integrated package in which the discrete components – West Case Notebook, West Drafting Assistant, West km and Westlaw CaseLogistix – can be invoked at any point, allowing the lawyer to mimic on his or her desktop the daily routine of managing litigation as a human matter.

Look, for example, at the product descriptions for Case Notebook and Drafting Assistant which pull together documents, briefs, transcripts, pleadings, key facts, legal research and other things, all of which are needed hand in hand with the documents in a case. Discovery may be a stand-alone process in some respects, but in others it provides just a part of the components which lawyers need to assemble a case. Add Thomson Reuters’ position as a provider of legal research and knowledge management, and a legal department can bring external resources and the firm’s own precedents and examples to bear in parallel with the raw material of discovery.

As you would expect from a company with a strong publishing background, Thomson Reuters does good videos. They have libraries of videos in relation to each product e.g. Drafting Assistant, Case Logistix, and Case Notebook.

As if that were not enough, the Elite side of the Thomson Reuters law firm business provides its Engage legal project management and budgeting tool which adds the other main component of a case managing lawyer’s task – estimating time-lines and costs, both for client purposes and for decision-making about proportionality. I spoke recently at an Elite  conference in Miami Beach, taking the opportunity to draw connections between compliance with rules, obligations to clients, the use of technology and, not least, the ability to run a case at a profit whilst yet being proportionate in the steps taken vis-a-vis opponents.

Thomson Reuters has all this in its hands and more, and it is good to see its eDiscovery flagship product released in a new and enhanced version. I will have a closer look at it all at ILTA in Las Vegas next week.

Deborah Baron was one of the first people I met when I first started getting involved in US discovery. We did panels together years ago at LegalTech, had long conversations about eDiscovery at dead of night because I was in England and she was in San Francisco, and spent time in bars and restaurants in places as far apart as New York and Barcelona.

Nuix CEO Eddie Sheehy is another whom I have also known for a long time and who has brought Nuix from its early days as a forensics software company to its present position as a leading provider of information and eDiscovery software. I was very pleased when Deborah Baron moved to Nuix early this year to take up a senior marketing role.
It is an considerable pleasure to report that she has now been appointed CEO of Nuix North America.

At the same time, Jim Kent has been appointed Global Head of Nuix Investigations Business alongside his existing role as CEO of NUIX EMEA. Jim Kent is someone else I seem to have known for ever – a feature, I suppose, of an industry which was so small in the UK back then that you couldn’t help coming across everyone in it; things have changed more than a bit since then.

These appointments are part of what Nuix calls “a significant realignment of the company’s resources”. It has created four dedicated business units: Information Governance and eDiscovery; Intelligent Migration; Investigations; Litigation Support. There is a media release here about the appointments and about the reorganisation.

I look forward to giving Deborah a congratulatory kiss at ILTA (though I will probably pass on that when it comes to Jim Kent) and I wish them and Nuix every success with a business restructuring which plays to its many strengths.

I have referred before to a paper which I wrote for Equivio called Equivio Themes: shifting the eDiscovery focus back to lawyers looking for evidence. It has now been published on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel site. The immediate context is Equivio Themes, an interesting new software application (part of Equivio Zoom) designed to help lawyers quickly pick out the important themes (thus the name) from large document collections. The thrust of the paper, however, is the words “lawyers looking for evidence” which appears in its title.

The emphasis on process and on the mechanics of achieving eDiscovery / eDisclosure in compliance with ever-stricter court rules and tighter deadlines is important for all sorts of reasons; it has, however, somehow made us lose sight of the fact that what we are looking for is the evidence to support our cases and undermine those of opponents. That is what Equivio Themes is designed to do.

The processes are important; the objective is more so.

I wrote recently about the admission of eDiscovery company UBIC to the NASDAQ market and about the ringing of the closing bell at NASDAQ on 5 August. I wanted to find out more about the background to the company and about its plans for the money raised on the flotation, and spoke to Mr Masahiro Morimoto, UBIC’s founder and CEO and to Mr. Naritomo Ikeue, UBIC’s President and COO. I started by asking Mr Morimoto about his own background and the circumstances in which he set up UBIC. Before 2003, he said, there was no concept of electronic discovery in Japan. That changed as Japanese companies increasingly expanded abroad, bringing them within the ambit of regulators, particularly US regulators. That inevitably gave rise to a requirement to find and produce electronic information, both as part of the relevant compliance regimes and in response to investigations.

Mr Morimoto was a graduate in economic science and had joined the Japanese Navy before moving to a role at a semiconductor company. His experience in the Navy had given him an interest in both damage control and the anticipation of risk. The development of UBIC was partly in response to this and partly because he saw an area for business development which was not then occupied by anyone else.

The management and searching of electronic documents gives rise to particular problems in Japan and in Asia-Pacific generally, where languages are not just “not English” but involve completely different character sets from the English-speaking world in which most of the search technology has been developed.

The first stage of taking UBIC public began with an IPO in Japan, raising money for investment both to develop new technology and to establish a brand. The admission to NASDAQ was, Mr Morimoto said, the logical extension of that and of UBIC’s ambitions in the US and beyond. The technology developed for the company’s niche specialisation in
Asian-language discovery has much wider application than that. The need for regional language discovery is growing as trade increases between Asia-Pacific countries and the rest of the world, but the pure English language, US-led market for discovery is very much bigger.

I asked him what his investment plans were for the proceeds from the flotation. Top of the list, he said, was the application of development resources towards continuous improvement to UBIC’s own software, with development resources applied to that. In parallel with that was R&D activity on behavioural science, specifically as it related to the business processes of giving discovery.

Mr Morimoto is passionate about the potential for the use of predictive coding technology, the use of which had produced very significant savings in time and cost for a very large discovery exercise on behalf of one of UBIC’s Asian-language clients facing a US-led investigation. It had been necessary, he said, to educate the clients as to the benefits of using predictive coding, although the US lawyers were already used to using predictive coding for big anti-trust matters, especially for quality control and to find gaps and mistakes in the work of contract reviewers.

Mr Morimoto’s interest in the behaviour of business people and their lawyers includes a focus on how people separate their data and on how behaviour can be modified to increase efficiency by studying how people work.  This is leading UBIC into wider areas than merely eDiscovery for litigation and related purposes and into information governance and any other areas where large volumes of data and Big Data (these are not necessarily the same thing) generate a business need.

This was an interesting conversation from my point of view, giving me an insight into the company’s motivation for the future as well as of its existing business. I look forward to seeing how UBIC makes progress with these plans.

There is a webinar today, 13 August, at 1:00pm Central moderated by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann of EDRM Apersee and sponsored by AccessData. Technology assisted review, or predictive coding, is one of the components in AccessData’s new Summation 5.0, along with a full range of eDiscovery functionality from collection and culling with FTK, through to review.

As Apersee say in their webinar description, “no controversy should remain regarding the effectiveness of TAR.… It saves money, saves time and improves accuracy. So, why isn’t everyone using it already?”

The speakers are Joshua Gilliland (“the BowTie Lawyer), Allison Walton, eRisk Consultant and president of Fortis Quay, Inc., and Charlie Kaupp, Senior eDiscovery Consultant at DigitalStrata. My experience of taking part in these Apersee webinars that they are fun to do, which always makes for a better user experience, especially when the topic is as important as this one is.

Registration is here.

eDiscovery and information management company ZyLAB has produced a white paper which emphasises the importance of being able to find PII or personally identifiable information. It is called Privacy and Data Protection: it all starts with locating PII, and you can find it, with other useful papers from ZyLAB, here. Every corporate data store contains PII and, in the EU and increasingly elsewhere, it is protected by legislation. This is not just a matter of being ready for eDiscovery exercises; the existence of PII, even without eDiscovery implications, gives rise to compliance duties.

Those companies who face US-led discovery demands, whether as a one-off or as a continuing matter, have an obligation to identify PII, something which ought to be done in-country, or at least within the EU (the rules vary from country to country), before any data is sent to the US. The technology which enables this to happen is improving all the
time.

The origin of the problem, as with so much else in eDiscovery, is the existence of far too much data – “too much” meaning that data stores are full of material which serves no business purpose and which is not required to meet any existing or prospective litigation or regulatory requirement. If companies were to implement a defensible archiving plan and a strict policy for data retention and destruction, not only would their eDiscovery problems be reduced, but the obligations which they have anyway in relation to such data and its data subjects would diminish.

ZyLAB has experience on both sides of this, helping companies in the drafting and execution of relevant policies, as well as being involved in major discovery exercises. The title of ZyLAB’s paper accurately describes both the problem and the solution.

Having recently done a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) webinar myself, I am up to date with the complications which arise for corporations with the growing trend towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The conflict between an individual’s wish to use devices and applications with which they are familiar, and the security and eDiscovery implications of that, is one which organisations of all sizes are grappling with. Many more, one suspects, are simply ignoring the problem or not recognising it as such.

FTI Technology is giving a webinar presentation on this on 14 August at 2pm ET / 11am PT. I recommend it because the featured speaker is the excellent Ronni Solomon, a partner at King & Spalding. I first met Ronni when we did a social media seminar together for the New York City Bar Association a couple of years ago, and I know we can expect lucid explanations of the problems which BYOD brings to corporations.

The other speakers are Martin Tully of KattenMuchinRosenman LLP and Veeral Gosalia, a Senior Managing Director at FTI Technology who have  between them practical expertise of both the legal and technical implications of BYOD.

Registration for this event is there.

Nuix is now known as a provider of eDiscovery and information governance solutions used by major companies and law firms as well as by regulators, particularly financial regulators. Its roots, however, lay in the development of a forensic collections tool, and it has not neglected those roots as it expanded into other and wider things. Nuix has now appointed a Director of Forensic Solutions. He is Paul Slater, who began his career as a computer forensic investigator in the Greater Manchester police, going on to serve as interim head of the Digital Forensics Unit in the UK Serious Fraud Office. He then spent seven years as a digital forensics adviser to legal, corporate and government clients, a career which amply fits him for the post to which Nuix has now appointed him.

He is familiar with Nuix, having advocated its use, and having been a user, in his earlier career. He looks set to be a valuable addition to the growing Nuix senior management team.

There is an announcement about this appointment here with more details.

AccessData has continued to maintain its older versions of its eDiscovery tool Summation, acquired by so many companies and firms over many years, whilst developing its new integrated eDiscovery platform built around its FTK forensics tools and the new Summation 5.0.

eDiscovery Journal has written about this and I have no hesitation in piggybacking on their story. Barry Murphy’s article of 6 August called AccessData to continue support for iBlaze brings you up to date on this story, with a quotation from AccessData’s Caitlin Murphy, who says:

“There are no plans to sunset support for iBlaze. We will continue to support the product indefinitely, while of course encouraging and making it easier for our users to switch to the modern Summation Express and Pro platforms”.

The long-standing user-base can’t ask for more than that.

kCura has released Relativity Binders, which allows users to organise, annotate and prepare such documents from anywhere at any time. Like everybody else, the decision-making lawyers engaged in discovery / disclosure are not at their desks as they used to be, and need to be able to access eDiscovery data, just as they access email, accounts and other office resources, from wherever they happen to be.

There is a page about Relativity Binders here, including helpful videos which demonstrate the functionality.

Business consulting services group Huron Consulting Group has announced that Robert Rowe is to lead the Huron Legal practice. Mr Rowe was previously a managing director and leader of Huron Legal’s Discovery services business. Robert Rowe’s background includes 20 years experience in providing eDiscovery solutions and project management for legal matters to large companies and law firms in the US and internationally.

There is a press release about the appointment here.

There is an article in the current edition of eForensics Magazine called How KPMG uses EnCase Tools to solve client’s E-Discovery challenges in Canada. It is written by Dominic Jaar of KPMG Canada who is both technically accomplished and one of the best explainers in the business – technical skill and the ability to articulate functions and benefits do not necessarily live in the same hands. I have done several panels with Dominic Jaar over the years and always learn something. Dominic’s article describes the use of Guidance Software’s EnCase eDiscovery for remote collection over clients’ networks, discusses the ever-topical (and never more so than now) data privacy issues which KPMG’s clients face, and describes how KPMG simplifies data transfer, culling, and production; lastly, the article describes how Guidance Software’s EnCase Portable can be used to collect data from clients with offices in remote geographic areas.

Everybody involved in eDiscovery, clients and external lawyers alike, should be familiar with the basic principles of digital investigation and have an understanding of how eDiscovery requirements depend on proper forensic investigations. This article is firmly grounded in practical things, and pulls all these subjects together in a readable way.

You can access the paper here.

FTI’s Ringtail 8 has been through a complete overhaul in the last couple of years, making it one of the most visually attractive applications on the market as well as one with the power and functionality which legal departments demand. Much of FTI’s focus has been on developing easily-navigated visual representations of the data to make it easy for decision-making lawyers to see and therefore to gain control of their data. The latest development brings predictive coding (which FTI has long offered as a service to its clients) into Ringtail 8.

Here is the press release and there is a webpage about it here, which includes a video walk-through which will be more valuable to you than any summary from me.

The focus remains on ease of use and on the ability to make informed predictions based on statistically representative sets. Ringtail provides a visual validation of a model’s performance, and a projections matrix which allows recall and precision targets to be examined and fed into a costs-benefit analysis based on the predicted review volumes. The predictive coding functionality is supported by statistical sampling as well as by Ringtail’s existing visual analysis tools like Mapper and Mines, and the well-established review capabilities.

The new release also includes improved facilities for managing transcripts, enabling users to browse, search, annotate, link, report and export the materials.

I had a web demo last week and will have a proper look at it at ILTA.

One of the most respected analysts and commentators on eDiscovery is US-based eDJ Group which embraces news and commentary on the eDiscovery Journal, plus analysis, consultancy, strategic consulting and a wide range of other services covering the eDiscovery and information governance. eDJ is two years old, and the founders, Greg Buckles and Barry Murphy, have been joined by a select team of experts bringing sector knowledge from different parts of the eDiscovery wood.

Between them, they have contributed immeasurably to the level of understanding and discussion about every aspect of electronic discovery and information governance. Jason Velasco has written a short piece called eDJ Group – Two Years Old and Growing which tells eDJ’s story so far with a little about their future plans.

kCura’s annual event, Relativity Fest, is due to take place in Chicago between 6 and 8 October. Reports from previous events suggest that Relativity Fest has something for everyone, and not just those who are existing or potential Relativity customers. The full agenda has yet to be published, but one item on it will be of particular interest to those who are considering the use of predictive coding. Whilst this technology is most often talked of in the context of conducting electronic discovery for civil litigation, it has many other functions both ancillary to the litigation process (such as quality assessment or for analysing incoming productions) and for any other activities which require rapid and efficient analysis of large volumes of data.

One such example is the response to a regulator’s investigation in the context of a proposed merger. This came up when Anheuser-Busch InBev and Grupo Modelo planned a merger which would combine two of the largest suppliers in the world. That, and the surrounding proposed deals, attracted the attention of the US Department of Justice, which was concerned to know whether the merger would give too much market share to a single entity. The parties to the merger had a very short period in which to find and produce relevant information.

McDermott Will and Emery, lawyers for one of the parties, decided to use Relativity Assisted Review for this task, and satisfied the DoJ both as to the technology and the proposed workflow. The story is taken up in this case study produced by Relativity.

Warren Rosborough, a partner at McDermott Will and Emery, who worked on the matter, is one of the speakers at a predictive coding panel at Relativity Fest. Another is information retrieval expert Dr David Grossman. This should make an interesting – and rather different – discussion about the merits and the economics of using predictive coding.

The Relativity Fest website is here. Apart from a good use of video and photographs, I like the button at the top right corner called Justify your Trip which explains the value and benefits of attending Relativity Fest and even provides an email template for those seeking permission to attend.

This is a considerable improvement on a conference website I once saw whose focus was on golf and other “benefits” which, whilst doubtless ancillary to the primary legal technology purpose, were not necessarily calculated to persuade a budget holder to give approval. Most conference brochures idly recycle a stock section headed “Why should you attend”, whose wording seems to have copied from event to event without much thought as to what it is for. The Relativity Fest approach is a much more useful way of arming potential delegates with genuine arguments as to the benefits.

Registration for Relativity Fest is here.

I wrote recently about the admission of eDiscovery solutions and services provider UBIC to the NASDAQ Global Market on 16 May. Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Mr Masahiro Morimoto desribed this as “another significant milestone in [UBIC’s] strategy to expand our global brand awareness and help take UBIC to the next level of growth and international expansion”.

One of the privileges of membership of NASDAQ is the opportunity to ring the opening or closing bell at NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square. Mr Morimoto and other senior UBIC executives will ring the closing bell on Monday 5 August at 4:00pm Eastern Time.

There is a press release about this here.

As I have mentioned before, Equivio is running a series of webinars with the overarching title Predictive Coding Minus the Hype. One of those present at an earlier one commented expressly on the absence of self-promotion and on the practical value of the webinar.

The third of these takes place on Wednesday 7 August at 12:00pm EDT and is called Demystifying Statistics in Predictive Coding. It will be presented by Avi Elkoni and will cover:

• 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
• And much more

Registration is here.

eDiscovery software provider iCONECT has added Russian language support to the interface of its attractive document review platform XERA.

eDiscovery software, like most other products, depends for its survival on the anticipation of trends and demands. iCONECT is not the only observer of the worldwide economic scene to identify the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries as the expanding economic forces worldwide. Increased commercial activity brings both disputes and regulation, and they in turn require electronic discovery tools. The requirement in such cases is not merely for the ability to manage a particular language, but to do so in a context of mixed languages and across borders.

The UK in particular has seen Russian businesses and businessmen turn to the English courts to resolve their differences, most famously in the litigation between Berezovsky and Abramovich. No one knows quite how much litigation is taking place at any one time involving less prominent players, but it is astute of iCONECT to pick Russian as an area on which to focus.

eDiscovery software and principles are not merely driven by change – they can, to some extent, be the driver. As eDiscovery software becomes more sophisticated and more capable, so the courts expect higher standards from parties and are less willing to accept excuses based on the difficulty of the task. In the same way, it may be that the availability of Russian language eDiscovery software will become a driver for more Russian language litigation – since the tools are available, more companies may be willing to engage in litigation.

Whatever may be the present state of regulation in Russia itself, the spread of Russian-based business around the world inevitably attracts the interests of regulators. They too are unlikely to be impressed by excuses based on language when the tools exist to facilitate discovery in multiple languages.

There is a press release about the XERA Russian language interface here. As with most other large providers of the discovery software, iCONECT will be at ILTA in Las Vegas and will be pleased to show you XERA.

I have been away and may have missed several webinar announcements. There is just time to tip you off about a webinar taking place today at 11 AM PDT at which Guidance Software will talk about Litigation Holds and Preservation.

This is part of a series called eDiscovery Done Right 101 which includes subsequent webinars on Identification, Collection and Processing on 27 August and on Document Review and Production on 24 September.

Registration for the first in the series is here.

The write-up for this FTI Technology webinar, called eDiscovery for Second Requests: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and which takes place on 31 July at 11am PDT / 2pm ET, begins by saying “Second Requests offer an advanced course in e-discovery – everything is a bit harder and faster, and legal teams need to be better and stronger to effectively handle the matter. Deadlines are shorter, data volumes are higher, and for added pressure, regulators and executive boards are often keeping close tabs on progress.”. Other features include foreign data collection and review and broad subpoenas.

That justifies a webinar dedicated to the specific requirements of Second Requests. The speakers are Kathryn McCarthy, Andrew Szwez and and Kathryn Hardie of FTI Technology. Registration is here.

This is one of a series of eDiscovery webinars which FTI Technology is running. You can find the full programme here.

Epiq Systems is giving a two-part webcast about cross-border data transfers and global privacy regulations, with the first one on 30 July (that is, tomorrow). The primary (though not the only) context is eDiscovery demands, whether for litigation or for regulation. There is much discussion going on moment in the EU following the PRISM revelations, making this a very good time to catch up with the implications of cross-border discovery.

The speakers are Hazel Grant of Bristow’s LLP, Dan Charboneau of Epiq Systems and David Panzer of Greenberg Traurig LLP, a combination which ought to be able to cover every aspect of the subject. The moderator is Sarah Brown of Epiq.

The webcast takes place at 11.00am CDT / 4.00pm BST on Tuesday, 30 July. Further information can be found here, with a link to the registration form.

The Masters Conference does more than the big annual event in Washington for which it is best known. Since Robert Childress took up the post of CEO last year, it is expanding the range and number of events around the US.

One of these events takes place in Philadelphia on 23 July. The keynote speaker is Jason Baron, Director of Litigation, National Archives and Records Administration. Jason Baron’s keynote discussion is called Predictive Coding, Pizza and Religion: a Report on the DESI V Workshop in Rome.

Other subjects include titles such as Predictive Coding: What is it? What’s next? Why is it important? and Data Privacy: Issues Faced by Multinational Corporations. There are five sessions in all with speakers including Patrick Burke of Reed Smith, Pete Pepiton of Dinsmore & Shohl and Tess Blair of Morgan Lewis.

Registration for this event is here.

Equivio has published a White Paper which I wrote for them on the Resources Page of its website.

The paper gets its title, Shifting the eDiscovery Focus Back to Lawyers Looking for Evidence – from two things: one is the functionality in Equivio Themes, the latest addition to its eDiscovery platform Equivio Zoom; the other comes from my conviction that we have lost sight of eDiscovery as a route to evidence in all the stir and concern about eDiscovery process.

Equivio captures it nicely with its catchline “Themes thinks like you (just faster)“. My paper describes how Equivio Themes can be used to get senior lawyers and case strategists into the heart of the document collection as quickly and intuitively as possible. The paper sets this ability in the context of the requirements of litigation and investigations, with particular focus on the new UK requirements that parties must exchange information with opponents, and provide it to the court, at a very early stage in the proceedings.

Another relevant context is the pressure on lawyers to get more done with reduced resources. Software like Themes, and like Equivio’s predictive coding tool Relevance, reduce the hours needed to get to the evidence, with obvious benefits for strategy and tactics, as well as budgets and timelines.

Equivio’s Warwick Sharp gives good demos and you can have it online if you prefer.

The Epiq Systems Summer Newsletter includes links to various resources which are worth looking at.

One is a link to the video of Epiq’s recent panel called Changes to the Civil Procedure Rules on Costs which I wrote about here. Another is the article which I wrote in the recent Legal Efficiency supplement to The Times which included a quotation from Saida Joseph, International Director of Document Review Services at Epiq emphasising the fact-finding purpose of eDiscovery / eDisclosure.

There are references also to Epiq’s global development which includes the following:

• New York: Two new document review centres providing expanded capacity
• Washington, D.C.: Additional document review centre to meet record demand
• Dallas: New document review centre
• London: Comprehensive expansion for all services
• Hong Kong: Expanded office and document review facilities; full suite of services
• Tokyo: New office opened in February; full suite of services
• Shanghai: New data centre
• Canada: Coming soon

The most recent of these is the new office in Tokyo which offers the full range of eDisclosure / eDiscovery services including consulting, forensics, collections, processing and hosting, together with a new document review services facility with Japanese and other foreign language support. You can read more about Epiq’s Asian operations here.

I am just back from Hong Kong, where I took part in educational sessions alongside Laura Kibbe, Managing Director of Expert and Professional Services for Epiq Systems, and saw Epiq’s impressive new Hong Kong premises. I will be writing more about my visit in due course.

The US version of the newsletter includes a link to an article called Technology-Assisted Review 102: Beyond the Basics, written by Ignatius Grande of Hughes Hubbard and Andrew Paredes of Epiq. They discuss technology assisted review mechanisms, downfalls and applications, showing some best practices to help you get the best results for your client.

You can subscribe to the Epiq newsletters here.

I recently recorded a webinar with Bryant Bell of Guidance Software whose subject was BYOD (Bring Your own Device) and the impact on eDiscovery. That webinar is now available on demand and you can find it here.

Bryant Bell began with some statistics about the increase in the number of devices being used within organisations and, of those, the number which belong to the employees of the company.

I then turned to BYOD. That D, I said, could refer to other things – device, data, doubling your day, domestic difficulties when you keep working in bed, discovery danger as the sources multiply, that damn phone’s ringing again. That was an introduction to my suggestion that most of the problems arising from BYOD are problems even before you get into the question who owns the device and data.

Gartner estimates that there will be 9 million tablets in use by 2016. It also reckons that, by 2017, employees will be requiring users to bring their own devices, saving cost thereby. We are already seeing employees declining to work for an employer which does not allow them to bring the devices they are used to working with.

Use of such devices is liberating for the employees, but a nightmare for those responsible for security. They thought they had just nailed down the types of devices on the company network, and suddenly data-types and sources were proliferating. They bring risks such as games surreptitiously taking contact data – whose contacts data?

Twitter, Facebook and the rest are all doorways both in and out the enterprise, bringing risks both that your data might be stolen and that evil-doers might intrude into your network. They steal not just contact data but valuable IP, designs and real secrets of the company. This no longer just script-kiddies but nations using security as an arm of international strategy. Just at the point when IT most needs control, various pressures are encouraging proliferation of devices.

The short, and trite-sounding, answer is that companies must establish policies – security policies for devices brought into the organisation, and service policies governing how they can be used, all backed by the statements as to what is allowed and what is banned. Particular problems arise with BYOD as opposed to company-owned devices because of the mixture of company and private data (though that can arise whoever owns the device). There is no ducking this and it must be addressed in a set of rules.

The privacy implications are but one of the factors which arise when discovery must be given from such devices. It would be easy to overlook them completely. How does one physically gain access to a device of an employee who may have left the company or who simply declines to hand it over? The purpose of the policies is to contain these risks and, where possible, to reduce them to a level where they are acceptable, at least relative to the purported benefits of allowing employees to bring their own devices to work.

We enjoyed recording this webinar and I hope you want to listen to it. Registration is here.

I missed the eDiscovery Exchange in Hong Kong this year, spending the week instead at the Sedona Conference Cross-Border Programme in Zurich. One of the themes there was the rise in importance of cross-border eDiscovery with Asia-Pacific countries, whose law and language combine to complicate eDiscovery in the region.

Not being there, I missed hearing one of UBIC’s very large Asian technology clients endorse UBIC’s expertise in complex, multi-language predictive coding technology. A representative of the clients was full of praise for UBIC’s performance in relation to a privilege review involving Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK)-language capable predictive coding technology. There is a press release about this here. The best sort of reference, of course, is one which comes direct from a happy client.

One does not need to be at a conference if eDiscovery Journal’s Jason Velasco is there to report on it, and the panel in question is covered in Part Two of his Asian Dawn for eDiscovery series. You can find Part One here.

Conferences are all very well, but they put you in the eDiscovery Bubble, that peripatetic circus in which everyone is a believer. Given the choice, I would rather get out amongst the lawyers and hear from them what challenges they face, and I kept my Hong Kong time in reserve for just that. I was there last week, and will give my own report shortly following educational sessions, meetings and social events in the company of Epiq Systems and Consilio. Whatever else comes up there, the ability of advanced eDiscovery software to handle CJK languages is a prerequisite for any cross-border eDiscovery exercises in the region.

Consistent with UBIC’s involvement in Asian and other cross-border eDiscovery, Sunil Mudunuri from UBIC was amongst those present at the Sedona Conference Programme in Zurich, and I had breakfast with him there. Since then, he has been appointed to the Advisory Board of ACEDS, largely on the strength of his cross-border experience, something you can read about here.

Two recent articles by respected commentators address the future for law firms.

The American Bar Association’s Law Practice website has published an article called Tomorrow’s Lawyers by Richard Susskind, much of which is a summary – and a useful one – of Susskind’s recent book of the same name. The key messages appear towards the end where Susskind argues that law firms, educators and educational policymakers should be extending training of tomorrow’s lawyers “to encompass new disciplines that…will be central to the delivery of legal services in the future – such as legal risk management, legal project management, legal knowledge engineering and legal process analysis. He recognises that these terms “may sound alien” to many lawyers, but believes that he makes “a strong case for the likely importance in years to come.” So do I..

Jordan Furlong has the knack of producing the meaningful headline which tells you in a few words what the article is about. You don’t need to read beyond the title of The Secretarial Canary in the Law Firm Coal Mine to know that it is about the early warning signs that law firms are, if not necessarily in trouble, at least casting around to save costs. Jordan Furlong’s article is expressed mainly in terms of concern at the way in which law firms are “lashing out” by getting rid of low skilled staff. Why not, he asks, “divert secretaries into…high value and highly necessary roles”. Not doing so is “not just a lost job, but also lost opportunity.”

I have referred before to the series of webinars being run by Equivio called Predictive Coding Minus the Hype.

The second of these will take place on Wednesday, 17 July 2013 at 12:00pm EDT. It will be given by Conor, R Crowley, Esq., who is one of the most lucid speakers I know on a range of subjects, including predictive coding. You can register for this webinar here.

In the webinar, called Legal Aspects of Predictive Coding, Conor Crowley will:

• Analyse the line of cases from Da Silva Moore to Biomet which provide guidance on the use of predictive coding in civil discovery and will examine why its use was deemed appropriate or not.
• Discuss the role of agreed-upon protocols and the need for disclosure of both the process used and results achieved.
• Examine cooperation and transparency in the context of predictive coding, considering both the Rules of Civil Procedure and Sedona Principle 6.

Not every speaker warrants my prediction that he or she will be simultaneously interesting and informative. Conor Crowley does, and my guess is that he will cover much more than appears on the bare list of advertised topics. Amongst the subjects on which he has written in the past, for example, is the duty of competence in eDiscovery (I wrote about his article here). Whether or not that subject features in his Equivio webinar, you cannot speak or write about predictive coding without the sub-text of lawyer competence.

It’s great, all this easy communication, isn’t it? It’s not just lumbering servers on corporate networks fed by clunky desktops any more. We can exchange views and information for business or pleasure via any number of devices, from anywhere, at any time, using e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, texts, LinkedIn and instant messaging. What’s more, we can use our employers’ devices for personal stuff and our own devices for work. Marvellous, isn’t it?

And of course that is all true – down to the point when a dispute breaks out or a regulator starts poking his nose into the company’s business. Then, suddenly, the company’s lawyers want all the data which may be relevant. They may have issues enough because the company’s own data has been shoved up into the cloud. Where is that exactly? Oh, and what do we mean by “the company’s own data”. It was easy in those days of servers and desktops but what about all that easily-generated material which has been knocked out on all those devices? Who owns that iPad? Who owns the data on that iPad? Where is the data? Oh, I see – that is what they mean by “the cloud”.

All this raises serious issues for those responsible for giving eDiscovery / eDisclosure. The difficulties are not simply those of process – the physical and technical problems of identification and collection arising from having multiple information stores. Ownership, possession and control raise their own questions, to say nothing of privacy. And will anyone know the data exists anyway? The focus on process tends to obscure the fact that all this data may conceal evidence which matters.

All this is the subject of a webinar to be given by eDiscovery software provider iCONECT on 17 July at 12:00 CDT / 18:00 BST. Its title is ePocalypse Now: the 24/7 Work Week, Social Media and the Cloud. The host is Thomas Barnett, Esq., whose purpose is to examine how technology is changing how we communicate, work and live as it tracks almost everything we see and do. The issues are legal, technical and, increasingly, personal.

Registration for this interesting sounding webinar is here.

Rachel Teisch of Xerox Litigation Services has written a helpful summary of eDiscovery implications in Asian nations with the title Think Global, Litigate Local: Handling the Demands of eDiscovery in Asian Countries.

What was once seen as a US-EU problem has shifted eastwards as each jurisdiction in turn creates its own data privacy and data protection rules. The first conclusion which you will draw from Rachel Teisch’s article is that you need local advice; the second is that technology can help, not least by its ability to help identify personally identifiable information.

AccessData has recently released Summation 5.0, the review application with the long pedigree and wholly new interface and functionality. You can read about Summation here:

AccessData is giving a webinar on 11 July at 11 AM to 12 PM CDT to give existing and prospective users an introduction to the new functionality. The webinar is presented by sales engineer David Speringo.

Registration is here.

eDiscovery software provider ZyLAB hs been busy, announcing new Visual Classification tools, Global Support Package for language handling and a white paper on technology-assisted review. Not the least of ZYLAB’s recent news has been the report of a recent very large deployment of ZyLAB’s eDiscovery and Production System.

Searches made for eDiscovery/eDisclosure purposes rely heavily on words. Most of the documents are found by technology of varying degrees of sophistication, from simple keywords through to the algorithms which underlie predictive coding. Cases and investigations involving financial matters may have a high volume of numbers which are not susceptible to linguistic or semantic searches and which raise issues of their own.

Pictures bring yet further complications. Forensic technology has developed its own techniques for identifying pictures which cause concern, most obviously in relation to pornographic images. Forensic software can detect a high proportion of flesh in a picture with a reasonable degree of accuracy, making it possible to trawl large volumes of image material in aid of potential criminal investigations or to seek out material which employees should not be keeping on company servers.

As it becomes more common to convey information in pictures, eDiscovery requirements move beyond the need merely to identify porn. ZyLAB has added visual classification to its eDiscovery tools, with native visual search enabling fast identification of non-textual information.

We are used to this in everyday computer use: domestic photograph software allows identification of people by reference to their facial characteristics; Google’s image search does a reasonably good job of finding things and scenes by allowing comparison with a source file. I had a recent example of this: a photograph of wartime London included an equestrian statue and I wanted to know where the photograph was taken; by cutting out a distinctive part of the statue, I was able to locate it with the help of Google’s image search which quickly found matches for the picture extract.

ZyLAB’s Visual Classification can also be used to identify images within documents, which may be useful for finding personally identifiable information, handwritten notes etc. There is a press release about ZyLAB’s Visual Classification eDiscovery tools here.

Coming back to words, potentially discoverable information often includes languages which are not English. ZyLAB has  recently launched a Global Support Package which incorporates UNICODE support, linguistic support for full-text indexing, optical character recognition and the other features described in this press release.

At the higher end of linguistic and semantic search, ZyLAB presented a paper at DESI V in Rome, the workshop on standards for using predictive coding, machine learning, and other advanced search and review methods in eDiscovery. ZyLAB’s paper, written by Johannes Scholtes, Mary Mack and Tim van Cann, was called The Impact of Incorrect Training Sets and Rolling Collections on Technology-Assisted Review. Its conclusion is that the effect of incorrect training documents is smaller than expected; deliberately wrong training documents were inserted into a training set and resulted in far less quality reduction than one might think.

There is a press release about the paper here which includes a link to the paper itself.

Lastly on ZyLAB, the company has recently deployed its eDiscovery and Production System on a very large case for a multinational service provider, supporting leading enterprises in the financial and electronic industry. The size and variety of the data sources, and the number of users, relied on ZyLAB’s ability to add processing power as required as well as on the broad set of functions which ZyLAB brings to projects of this scale.

There is a press release about the project here.

eDiscovery is a words thing isn’t it? For all the technology used in its processing and analysis, the whole business of giving and receiving discovery depends on an understanding of words and language. A writes e-mails for B to read; search strategies and search technology depend on words, whether simple keywords or sophisticated semantic and linguistic tools;  the end-product of a search is a set of documents for someone to read; our laws and court rules are expressed in words, as are the requests, pleadings, affidavits and the rest of the formal components of litigation or investigations; product descriptions, marketing materials and education and training delivery all depend on an audience who can read.

We take this skill for granted. What if you could not read and write? What occupation would you now follow if you could not extract meaning from words on the page or screen? How would you receive instructions, acquire knowledge or inform your opinions?

The business of Nuix is the provision of software for extracting information from words and data, used for discovery in litigation, investigations and similar exercises.  I have written before about the Nuix initiative to raise money for a charity called Room to Read through the sales of a version of its eDiscovery and investigation software called Proof Finder. Proof Finder has many of the capabilities of Nuix’s investigation products, with a maximum case size of 15 gigabytes which is more than enough for many cases. The Proof Finder initiative puts all this power into a user’s hands for only $100 a year, and all that money goes to charity.

Nuix has now reached its initial target of $100,000, that is, has sold 1,000 copies of Proof Finder. The latest receipts will fund two libraries in Delhi and 20 education scholarships for girls in India. Earlier Proof Finder sales have helped build schools in Nepal and Sri Lanka, to publish local language school books, and to provide support for 30 girls to complete secondary education. The focus on girls reflects  a mission to improve gender equality as well as literacy.

The press release, which you can find here, told me something I did not did not know about Proof Finder –  that Bryan University gives a Proof Finder licence to each graduate of its eDiscovery Project Manager Certificate Program as a way to make them familiar with the concepts behind searching for data and to be part of their eDiscovery toolkit after graduation. William F Hamilton, Dean and Chairman of the Department of E-Discovery at Bryan University says it helps students to overcome “dataphobia”.

Here is a thought for law firms and companies. If you provide some of your lawyers with a copy of Proof Finder, they too could use it to overcome their “dataphobia” and to understand something about the data which underlies their eDiscovery/eDisclosure exercises. The Proof Finder website offers self-help support and learning options for users, so the cost should be no more than the $100 which goes to charity.  Many firms would happily give $100 to a good cause like Room to Read without receiving anything in return.  I can’t think of a better way to give lawyers a hands-on introduction to eDiscovery concepts which could be as fundamental to their skill set as –  well, as reading is.

Recommind is giving a workshop on predictive coding in Birmingham on 4 July

The opening speaker is HHJ Simon Brown QC who has been extremely active in the implementation of the new case management and eDisclosure rules. Mark  Surguy of Eversheds will talk about timing – when is it right to use predictive coding? I will give an eDisclosure technology overview, and speakers from Recommind will talk about and demonstrate the technology. The session ends with a cost budgeting case study in which we will all take part.

The workshop begins with registration and breakfast at 8:15am for an 8:45am start at the Hotel du Vin in Church Street, Birmingham B3 2NR. Reserve a place by sending an e-mail to Kay Allen kay.allen@recommind.co.uk at Recommind.

I recently went to see Joel Tobias, Managing Director of forensics and electronic disclosure company CY4OR, at its head office in Bury near Manchester. CY4OR began as a one-man forensics company 11 years ago and has now grown to employ 30 people covering forensic collections and investigations for a range of purposes – criminal, investigative and regulatory – and the electronic disclosure and litigation support services.

The resulting video interview can be seen here.

The interview covers a range of topics, starting with the question whether an apparently straightforward electronic disclosure exercise ought to begin with a forensic (that is, a byte-for-byte, exact copy) collection. There will be some cases where this is obviously right – where employee fraud is alleged, for example, or where the case involves some form of computer misuse. In other cases, an employee self-collection of a small number of e-mails and Word documents is all that is required. In between lies a wide range of cases where, however proportionate one wishes to be, one cannot be sure how wide-ranging the investigations will go.

It makes sense, Joel Tobias suggests, to ask what the likely costs are, both the identifiable costs of a forensic collection and the potential implications of having to go back for further data which may have been deleted or altered by the time you realise that you need it.

The message to potential clients is that one ought to seek estimates before assuming that a forensic collection will be disproportionately expensive. Joel emphasises that CY4OR will always do its best, subject to obvious contingencies, to fix fees at the outset. For much government work, for example, this is a pre-requisite for bidding for the work.

I take Joel Tobias through a couple of sample situations – a defecting employee, for example – and ask him to explain what advice he gives to clients and what factors suggest one approach rather than another. This influences the choice of processing tool and review platform as well as the manner of collection, and we hear about the two platforms which CY4OR recommends, Symantec’s Clearwell eDiscovery Platform and Nuix.

The recent amendments to the Civil Procedure Rules impose new duties on lawyers to identify what electronic sources of information are available, what might be relevant for the purposes of disclosure, and what the potential costs are of rival approaches to managing documents and data. The message which comes through from the interview is that an early call to a forensic and edisclosure services provider like CY4OR is essential at this scoping stage of litigation in order to be ready for the Disclosure Report which must be filed no more than 14 days before the case management conference.

eDiscovery software company iCONECT is running a webinar on 26 June about Rule 11 FRCP with the title “The Wrath” of Rule 11 – how to get boldly sanctioned.

Rule 11 of the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (find it here on the useful Cornell University Law School site) is headed Signing Pleadings, Motions, and Other Papers; Representations to the Court; Sanctions. It is an express and clear statement of the duties which a US lawyer assumes in relation to formal court documents by appending his or her signature to them or by taking any other step such as filing, submitting or presenting arguments. The lawyer’s confirmation thus given covers not only the propriety of presenting the documents or arguments but extends to delay and cost – he or she is stating that the step will not “cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation”.

Lawyers, and not just in the US, are often accused of racking up time and costs by giving or demanding discovery / disclosure whose only purpose is to “cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation”. Rule 11 therefore deserves scrutiny.

iCONECT’s Ian Campbell is taking part in a webinar about Rule 11 called “The Wrath” of Rule 11 – how to get boldly sanctioned on 26 June at 1:00pm EDT along with Joshua Gilliland, “The Bowtie Lawyer”. Since both Ian Campbell and Josh Gilliland are eDiscovery experts, one can be certain that the context for the webinar will be an eDiscovery one.

Registration for the webinar is here.

We are promised a Star Trek them which reminds me of Josh Gilliland’s recent and entertaining post How a lawyer would take a bite out of Amity for the shark attacks in Jaws. What different considerations, he asks, would apply to the liability of Amity for the deaths of skinny-dipping Chrissie Watkins, Alex Kintner and the dog Pippit, and the other victims. One might hope for a similarly inventive approach to Rule 11 in the iCONECT webinar.

Equivio, makers of text analysis software for eDiscovery, specialising in eliminating data redundancy and for predictive coding, are launching a series of webinars called Predictive Coding Minus the Hype.

The webinars follow a series of educational seminars given by Equivio in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and the first one is called A Primer on Classification Technologies. Given by Avi Elkoni of Equivio, it covers key concepts such as:

• Supervised and unsupervised learning
• Syntactic and semantic algorithms
• Random sampling and active learning
• SVM and PLSA

The webinar will be given on 26 June at 12:00pm EDT. Registration is here.

There is a helpful article in Today’s General Counsel written by Warwick Sharp of Equivio. Called 10 Essential Best Practices in Predictive Coding, it does just what the title implies, setting out briefly the factors which make a successful and defensible use of predictive coding.

Its emphasis on preparation, on control and on validation gives reassurance to lawyers, and negatives the idea that the use of this technology is a “black box” standing substitute for the lawyers’ skills.  Warwick Sharp makes it clear that proper use of this technology depends on a set of skills and a rigourous approach which is not only defensible but ought to appeal to lawyers whose intellect and training should be used for more than just turning pages.

Equivio has been adding to the resources on its website. It is worth going back there from time to time to see what is new there.

Epiq Systems, which provides managed technology for eDiscovery and other requirements of the legal profession, has now opened its first data centre in Shanghai. This allows Epiq to collect, process and host data on mainland China, enabling its clients to host and review the data in country with the help of production and project management professionals with the requisite language skills. The press release is here.

The technology  is the Clearwell eDiscovery platform from Symantec.

This is not Epiq’s only new expansion in Asia. In February of this year it opened a new office in Tokyo, building on the success of the Hong Kong office. Both Tokyo and Hong Kong offer the full range of eDiscovery services including consulting, forensics, collections, processing, hosting and review, with fluency in all relevant languages.

I am going back to Hong Kong in July, when I will catch up with all these developments, which include a move to new and larger premises in Hong Kong.

Whilst we are not yet in sight of the end of e-mail and word documents as the primary source of discoverable data, increasing volumes of potentially discoverable information lie on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

For reasons which are difficult to understand – perhaps it is because the devices themselves are small – lawyers often overlook such data whilst gathering information, whether for civil litigation or for regulatory purposes or for internal investigations. The police, security forces and government agencies, however, have long been alert to the significance of such data.

Nuix has now complemented its eDiscovery processing and analysis tools with a partnership with Cellebrite, which specialises in mobile data extraction, decoding and analysis.

The Nuix press release about this is here.

ZyLAB has enhanced its eDiscovery bundle with functions specifically designed to make life easier for the reviewer and therefore to speed up the process of review. It has also come up with some useful resources which aim to help companies and their lawyers both understand and manage the eDiscovery processes.

One of the main enhancements in eDiscovery Bundle 3.2 is the e-mail conversation functionality in the Early Case Assessment (ECA) and Legal Review interface which is designed to allow the user to browse quickly through an e-mail thread, tagging single, multiple or all of the e-mail messages in the conversation. It also identifies messages which are missing from the e-mail thread.

In addition, eDiscovery Bundle 3.2 identifies and flags documents containing foreign (that is, non-English) languages, provides the ability to personalise the review layout by allowing discrete sections to be moved or hidden, and enhances the keyword highlighting.

The press release is here. I suggest that you take the link to the video, which amply illustrates the truth in the cliche about pictures painting 1,000 words. Potential users who are unfamiliar with eDiscovery software generally will find it useful to see particular functions actually being used. The video brings that to your desk.  I have commented on ZyLAB’s videos before, and this one maintains the standard.

ZyLAB’s tools cover all stages of an eDiscovery / eDisclosure project and include advanced search, filtering, grouping, bulk redaction and and tagging functions. It has been used in very large criminal cases as well as civil ones, and for UN War Crimes Tribunals.  This is not a bad set of testing grounds for more everyday use in companies and law firms.

ZyLAB’s senior staff include Chief Strategy Officer Johannes Scholtes and Enterprise Technology Counsel Mary Mack, who bring many years of experience and a high level of intellectual gravitas to the subject of eDiscovery – I recorded a webinar with them recently called Bridging the Gap Between Legal and IT which you can find here .

Johannes Scholtes and Mary Mack were interviewed recently by Ron Friedmann under the auspices of Project Counsel, and the resulting videos can be seen here. Between them, these videos cover the development of new rules and skills within corporations, the use of technology (and particularly visualisation and visual analytics) to investigate wrongful activity such as bribery, the use of statisticians and other specialist technologists to conduct the new discovery processes, and the adoption of computer-assisted review – a broad range of topics of increasing relevance to companies and their lawyers.

Multilingual eDiscovery raises issues which are well worth identifying early in the eDiscovery process, not least because of the potential effects on timelines and cost when a high proportion of potentially discoverable information is not in English. ZyLAB has partnered with SDL to offer automated machine translation technology which, amongst other benefits, routes foreign-language documents to users capable of understanding them.

All the things mentioned above – new information-related roles within companies, the use of technology to identify issues in advance of eDiscovery obligations and to manage those obligations when they arise, handling foreign languages, and the development of new technology, are all applicable equally in England and Wales and in the US. An article called Changes in the Civil Procedure Rules in the UK, ZyLAB summarises what these mean for your company, pulls together the threads mentioned above in the context of the Jackson reforms. There is a link from this article to a webinar in which Johannes Scholtes and George Socha talk through the implications.

I wrote recently about the excellent party which kCura hosted in London, which they choose as the venue for the release of their latest upgrade, Relativity 8.

In writing about the London party, I focused more on the event than on the release, partly because there were points worth making about product marketing which arose from it, and partly because the party preceded the actual release. That has now happened and the kCura website now includes information about Relativity 8.

There are, we are told, more than 100 improvements, ranging from performance enhancements through analytics, Relativity Assisted Review, and into the user experience of review.  As always, kCura’s website speaks for itself, as does the press release which accompanied it.

Whilst I am on the subject of Relativity, I should refer you to a paper which kCura has produced called Control Sets: Introducing Precision, Recall, and F1 into Relativity Assisted Review. Much of it is Relativity-specific (which gives it a wide enough potential audience); there is helpful stuff in there also which is of wider application, and anyone in need of a primer in technology-assisted review will find it helpful.

Lastly on the subject of kCura, US and international law firm Miller Canfield has taken Relativity licences to support the work of its eDiscovery and Records Management team. Miller Canfield acts as discovery counsel amongst other roles, and wants to be able to offer a custom, on-demand extranet facility to its clients. The press release is here.

AccessData has announced the release of Summation 5.0 which includes a licence for AccessData’s FTK forensic review tool, technology assisted review and free training.

For reasons which escape me, it remains fashionable for AccessData’s rivals in the review market to refer to Summation by reference to its history. A long time ago, before many of those rivals existed, Summation was one of the most widely-used review tools in the world. It spent some time as the unloved child of a legal publisher who neither understood  its market nor invested in it. That was a long time ago. AccessData bought it in 2010 and spent well over a year redeveloping it before launching their all-new version in January 2012, fitting it into a comprehensive range of products which begins with AccessData’s long-established FTK forensics tools and goes through the full range of functions into review and production.

Summation 5.0 carries this development yet further, adding technology-assisted review, visual analytics, improved search performance and speed, and enhanced export options amongst other new or redesigned functions.

Given the pace of development in the eDiscovery software market, none of AccessData’s rivals would expect to see comparisons made with their versions of 2010. It is lazy marketing (sorry,  boys and girls of the marketing fraternity) for them to talk up their own products by reference to a pre-2010 version of a competitor. Why not go head-to-head with the completely redesigned 2013 version?

The Summation section of AccessData’s website is here and there are separate sections for AD eDiscovery and for AD ECA. You might also like to look at the section on MPE+, AccessData’s tool for forensic collections from smartphones and similar devices.

AccessData is giving a webinar on 20 June at 11.00am PST called Introduction to Summation 5.0. Registration is here.

Nuix has announced two new products, a Nuix Investigator Bundle and Nuix Investigator Lab. The aim is to make it easy and affordable for law enforcement and government agencies to undertake investigations.

The Nuix Investigator Bundle is an entry-level product designed to provide a complete and affordable set of evidence collection, processes and analytics capabilities for a single investigator or small team. Nuix Investigator is for agencies setting up a dedicated facility to ingest and process last large volumes of evidence.

There is more information about these bundles here, including the names of some of the users and lists of the component elements.

eDiscovery companies rightly see sense in hiring representatives of their customer base to come in house and help them hone their messages for their audiences. For eDiscovery providers, that often means hiring people out of law firms who have not only the skills but an understanding of how the target audience works.

With this in mind, eDiscovery software and services company iCONECT, makers of the XERA eDiscovery software and XERA Advanced Analytics, has hired Shelley Smith, former manager of technology at Gardere Wynne Sewell LLPas their Manager, Training and Education Services. In this role, Shelley Smith will oversee day-to-day operations of iCONECT’s training department, including traditional product education and content development of training and sales materials.

To my eye, iCONECT is already good at this, with one of the more interesting web sites in the market and with a continuing series of webinars and other means of explaining their products to new and potential users. Shelley Smith’s appointment will strengthen this.

The iCONECT press release about the appointment is here.

eDiscovery can be a resource-heavy business, making demands on both the technical and the human resources of an organisation.  Every case generates its own set of decisions, not least as between the different technologies available to apply to the processing, analysis and review.

There is a prior set of decisions, however, which offer different long-term strategic approaches to managing an organisation’s eDiscovery as well a case-by-case options. Organisations can bring all or most of the process in house, using technology which they own and their own people; they can outsource the whole  thing – infrastructure, software and human resources – to third parties; in between, they can use the physical resources provided by others and apply their own people to the task of managing eDiscovery.

Many factors go into weighing the broad options here, of which cost, though significant, is only one. The availability of internal resources, including the relevant skills, is another, and one which is not a constant – it fluctuates with the size of the case and the overall workload.

FTI Technology offers all of these options and will discuss them in a webcast called E-Discovery On Premise, Outsourced or Hybrid: Which is Right for You? to be broadcast on 5 June at 10:00am PT | 1:00pm ET | 6.00pm BST. The speakers are Caroline Sweeney of Dorsey and Whitney LLP, Joel Jacob of FTI Technology and Babs Deacon of eDiscovery Journal, and they will discuss the key considerations for each deployment model including:

• Key characteristics of legal teams deploying the on-premise, SaaS or managed services models
• Pros and cons of each option, including cost, security and compliance considerations
• Trigger points for evaluating whether your current deployment method is aptly handling organisational needs.

Registration and further details can be found here.

Whilst you are on the FTI Technology website, you might like to look at the schedule of forthcoming and past webcasts. The next one is called Is Predictive Coding Right for Your Case? with Sophie Ross of FTI Technology, Raymond Hafner of Jones Day and David Horrigan of 451 Research. This will be broadcast on 19 June and registration details are here.

I am taking part in a webinar tomorrow organised by Inside Counsel in the company of Bryant Bell, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Guidance Software. Its title is Mobile devices and BYOD and the impact on eDiscovery.

BYOD is, of course, Bring Your Own Device, something which assumed rapid prominence with the launch of the iPhone. The dull corporate BlackBerry held sway for some time as the only approved device, prized for its rigid control and almost always owned by the company. iPhones, and then iPads and other tablets, were useful, fun and easily connected – even now, when I travel with my wife, her iPhone connects seamlessly to any Wi-Fi link whilst I have long given up trying to connect my BlackBerry.

As an employer, you can simply ban the use of personal devices or, at least, their connectivity to the company’s systems. That is to turn your back on the many opportunities for productivity and for inventiveness which can benefit the company. It is also, one hears anecdotally, a good way of driving away the productive and inventive employees whom you most want to attract and keep.

To an IT department, such devices represent a multitude of doorways through which data may leave and threats may enter the company’s systems. To legal departments, amongst many other considerations, come questions about discovery. Even before you get to questions like who owns the data, and the privacy implications which arise, will you even think to look on employees’ devices when eDiscovery obligations arise? Do even they know what they have got? Further, will you think to question the other side about it?

We aim to discuss the opportunities, the threats and the policy considerations which ought to be put in place to reconcile the many opportunities brought by such devices and the undoubted risks.

The webinar will be broadcast on Tuesday 4 June at 2.00p, ET / 11.00am PT | 7.00pm BST. Registration is here.

iCONECT is launching a roadshow in September, taking its XERA eDiscovery application and XERA Advanced Analytics to a number of US cities and to London and Sydney. The list of cities and booking information can be found here.

This is an opportunity not only to see XERA’s user friendlyinterface, but to talk with product experts on new features and on how to use them to reduce costs and generate income. The intended audiences include law firms, hosting providers, technology providers, legal consultants, corporate legal departments and government agency professionals. Each seminar will last for three hours.

I have written a fair amount recently encouraging potential users to make themselves familiar with the technology tools which compete for their attention in this thriving and competitive marketplace. From the seminar descriptions, the XERA ones offer far more than mere demonstrations, and with the added bonus of having them brought to the doorstep of many potential users.

iCONECT has gone out of its way to make itself accessible – better than many others who are keen to encourage interest in their products. The starting point was a user interface which, as I put it on its launch, is “an interface designed for the Facebook and LinkedIn generation but which nevertheless conveys business-like efficiency”; they followed that with a redesigned website and a continuing series of webinars aimed both at existing users and at those interested in seeing what XERA can do. These include a series of recorded webinars for end-user training, custom webinars on request and support tools which include links to user groups and feature requests.

The next live webinar is on 12 June and called XERA best practices – searching and filtering. You can see a list of future iCONECT educational and industry insight webinars here.

When you add that to stories like iCONECT’s involvement in the BP oil spill (see BP Oil Spill Plaintiffs Sucessfully Deploy iCONECT Review Platform), you have a combination of use-case and presentation which deserves attention.

If none of the venues is convenient for you, or if you cannot wait until September, iCONECT will happily bring XERA to your desktop in the form of a scheduled demonstration – you can set that up on this page.

I recorded a webinar recently with Johannes Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer at ZyLAB, and Mary Mack, Enterprise Technology Counsel for ZyLAB.  it was called Bridging the Gap between Legal and IT, a topic on which we have spoken before and on which I wrote a paper for ZyLAB last year.

The primary proposition is that legal and IT departments only really seem to speak to each other when an eDiscovery crisis of some kind arises. The daily obligations of IT departments and the periodic – and often urgent – requirements of legal departments do not always mesh together properly. There is risk involved here, but also potential benefits and budget savings if the gap is closed.

There are gradual signs of change, driven mainly perhaps by the realisation that money spent urgently and reactively might be better allocated to anticipating legal department needs. If saving money is the primary driver, there are strategic and tactical benefits in being able to respond efficiently to eDiscovery demands. There are also potential benefits in terms of the accessibility of value within corporate data which could be better exploited if it was more visible. Our webinar, which is available here, includes the slides which were used to illustrate our discussion.

Johannes Scholtes has also recently recorded a webinar with George Socha and Tom Gelbmann of Apersee and EDRM. It is called Bringing eDiscovery in House and looks at the expected processes, inherent risks and available technical solutions to support and enhance the discovery function. The recording is available here.

I am pleased to see that UBIC has been listed on the NASDAQ stock market. The NASDAQ announcement is here.

UBIC, which is among the sponsors of the eDisclosure Information Project, is a provider of eDiscovery solutions and services with offices in Japan, the US, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the UK. It has particular expertise in Asian-language eDiscovery, allowing litigation and regulatory investigations to be undertaken in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, as well as in English, for law firms, companies and government agencies.

UBIC’s language and character-encoding technology  is of particular value in cross-border matters and other exercises where Asian languages can be a barrier. The potential is considerable as the trade with the Asia-Pacific region grows in significance.

My congratulations to UBIC.

Anyone who has ever seen an eDiscovery / eDisclosure demonstration will be aware of the Enron dataset, the very large collection of e-mail derived from the investigation into the collapse of Enron. It has been publicly available for some time,  providing a test bed for a variety of search methodologies as well as an object-lesson in business practice.

Whilst it is hard to feel sympathy for the main players at Enron whose business practices were laid bare by this, it has recently emerged that personal information lay hidden in the dataset, including credit card numbers, social security or other identity numbers, dates of birth and other personal, medical, legal and contact information.There is a post here from BeyondRecognition about the discovery of all this personal information.

Investigative software provider Nuix, in conjunction with EDRM, have now republished the Enron PST Dataset after finding and removing more than 10,000 items of personal information from it. There is a press release about this exercise here, and an explanation here, with links to a case study and the cleaned up dataset.

I have a very recently published a story about the use of Nuix to investigate a very large source of information about concealed assets and financial transactions. Here is another example of Nuix’s processing power being applied to a major exercise for the public good.