Dublin Irish Festival Gets Social

Well, yes, technically speaking any festival that gathers thousands of people in the same place on the same weekend is social in nature. But, I'm specifically talking about an interesting use of online social networking.

If you look at the Entertainment Schedule for the Dublin Irish Festival coming up July 31-Aug 2, you'll see the option to not only create your own agenda and either print it or save it so you can access it on a mobile device, but also an option to share it with others. If I were to create one, for example, it would show me hanging around the Celtic Rock stage from 4ish Saturday afternoon on. Since that's not exactly complicated, and I'm lazy, I didn't actually create one, but if you were doing something more complicated and hitting different shows at different stages, I could see where this would be helpful not only to keep your plans straight, but to also let other folks know where to find you.

It appears that they are using a paid service, sched.org, to provide this functionality, and I would think it's a good idea for some events. Certainly multi-stage musical events, but also multi-track conferences like TechShow or ILTA09 would be interesting places to have a similar functionality, if the budget allowed for it. You could let folks know, well ahead of time, which sessions you're planning on attending so they could find you to say hello, speakers could have a small idea of who will actually be in the audience ahead of time, and I could use it to stalk e-discovery experts. ;-)

It's a win-win!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Sedona Commentary on Achieving Quality

Many of you may have noticed that it's been a bit of a quiet week around here, in terms of me writing anything of substance instead of pointing out some other stuff. I can explain. I have been writing a whole bunch of things, just not here. In fact, I finished a three-part series on the recent Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in E-Discovery over on the firm's e-discovery blog.

You can read it over there, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Obviously, by the time I yanked all of those words out of my brain, there hasn't been much left for my own blogs, but hopefully a little R&R over the holiday weekend next week will put me back in the right frame of mind. Not that I don't have a couple of things planned for this week as well, but I'm struggling with the words for those too!

In the mean time, go check out the series, and read the Sedona Commentary itself, it's very interesting reading.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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LegalTech West Coast Coverage

I have to admit, I've been so busy the past few days that I haven't spent nearly any time paying attention to tweets and blog posts coming out of Legal Tech West Coast the past couple of days.

Luckily, it looks like the Posse List is doing a good job of putting together the highlights. Their day-one highlights from the e-discovery side of things seem like there's some interesting presentations being done, though also think much of it is not new to anyone who's been paying attention. On the other hand, maybe some of the folks who show up to things like this conference haven't been. Either way, it's good stuff that everyone working in the legal field needs to hear, and think about!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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New e-Discovery Blog with some Good Advice

Gabe Acevedo pointed me to a brand new blog on Twitter earlier today, e-Discovery 101, and even though there's only one post up, it really hit home with me. Their 5 easy steps to becoming an in-house electronic discovery guru matches up pretty well with some of what I've been thinking as I transition in to being the Litigation Support Manager over the next couple of months. Especially the idea of getting out of your desk/office and letting people know what you can offer them, and most importantly, listening to their past experiences and expectations. I'm just starting that process and already I'm seeing some real benefit in talking to people and seeing where some small changes might be beneficial. Hopefully, that will continue as time allows me to get out!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Make the Case for ILTA09 Conference

I know, times are tough, and budgets have gotten cut all over the place, let alone in the legal industry. That why the folks at ILTA put together a "Make the Case" page that you can present to the management of your law firm as good reasons why the expense of this year's conference (Aug 23-27 in Washington DC) is worth it.

Seriously, I'm speaking at ILTA09 on Social Networking, and the sessions are so good that my own session would have been the 3rd choice of sessions I attended during that time slot. The schedule is that good!

Hoping I'll see some of you there!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Information Management isn't just for Compliance

At least according to an HP global survey.

A global survey undertaken by HP found that less than half of business decision-makers have a high confidence level in the quality and accessibility of information within their organisations.

The survey, and the linked article seem very focused on the need to retrieve information as part of an e-discovery request, or compliance measure, but the concept that this many organizations don't really know what data they have or how to get it also dovetailed nicely with an article my boss had sent me earlier in the week about the software company Autonomy. Specifically, this quote:

"Look at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that are driving a lot of this compliance business. That goes back to Roman law and is the basis of the discovery process and it makes sense, particularly in simpler times," Lynch said. "But imagine today the role of IT in trying to track and store and catalog and find every voice mail, every Word doc, text message, etc. It often leads to a type of legal lockdown where companies feel paralyzed because they just don't know how to get started or how to ensure they have all that unstructured data and can index it and find it.

"And we think our potential is that once companies have done that type of work for legal indexing, then they can use it afterward for many other things, primarily to get a richer and more-complete view of customers. For example, on average, large corporations today have 9,000 systems across the enterprise, and all of those represent some sort of architectural silos that resist or confound efforts to see and interact with customers in a unified way."

Solid information management isn't just about compliance and e-discovery, even if that is the primary motivation right now. It's about imagining all the things you could use that data for if you knew what it was and how to analyze it. So maybe e-discovery readiness isn't just about the costs versus risk of litigation, maybe e-discovery readiness can also be about getting to data that can grow your business? Turning a cost center into a revenue center? Priceless... ;-)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Kurt Leafstrand Gets It

On the e-discovery 2.0 blog yesterday at least, he gets what I've been saying about social media in regards to legal risks, there's not much that's new here:

There’s talk of intellectual property being cast out, irrevocably, onto the Internet for all to see. Or slanderous things being uttered for which your company may be held liable. But, hold on a second: is there really anything new here? Anyone heard of e-mail? Web pages? Peer-to-peer? Google? Instant messaging?

I'd actually go further, anyone heard of the telephone, or face to face conversations in public places? (Not to mention cell phone conversations on a commuter train, *cough*)

Any time one of the people who work for your organization is talking to someone outside of the organization, there's a risk they'll say something they shouldn't about their workplace, and yet we still actually let them do it! Shocking!

I don't know how business has survived this long, surely it's time to start requiring your workforce to live in company camps and only interact with coworkers, isn't it? I mean if you let them go out to dinner, or to a ball game, you have no idea who they might be sitting next to and who they might strike up a conversation with. Surely you can't risk them complaining about their job, or leaking confidential information, can you? These communications must be blocked! Or at the very least we should have strongly worded and specific policies regarding any and all such possibilities. Just giving employees general guidelines that apply to all such situations can't possibly be enough. We need a new policy for every new possibility!

Yeah ok, overkill, but not by much.

Labels: Blogging, Career, LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Tech

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ILTA09: Seems So Official Now

It's June 1, the day the fine folks at ILTA released the full list of sessions and speakers for the annual conference in August. Naturally, I went looking for the session I'll be speaking in, which made the whole idea just a little bit more real, and thus scarier. :)

Seriously, though, I'm looking forward to both attending and speaking at the conference this year. I've never been before, but I hear nothing but good things, and looking at the full schedule leads me to think that I'm going to have a hard time choosing which ones to attend! Heck, even our session is up against some serious competition, specifically that judges panel on e-discovery and a panel on disruptive technologies. I'm actually sort of sorry I'm going to miss those!

So, who's going to be at ILTA this year?

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Personal

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How do you Cover for Specialists?

Some of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen that I worked late a couple of days last week as some sort of epidemic has swept the help desk area of our firm, leaving them quite short-handed. In fact, they were left with no one available between the regular folks who work there, and the couple of usual backups to cover the phones until 6PM each evening, which is the customary procedure. Not having any immediate plans after work, I stepped in and covered them.

While I was down there, another one of our IS folks and I were discussing how much tech support has changed. Time was when he, and everyone in the IT department where he worked, had the help desk line on their phones and we expected to answer it when the regular folks were tied up, but that was when all you had to support was PC hardware and maybe MS Office apps. Now, there are dozens of apps in use, in a variety of specialties, that he doesn't even know how to use, much less support.

As we talked, I realized how much that is true. The folks who were brought in as specialists, like for Networking, Telecommunications, and DBA, simply don't have the knowledge to do general end-user support. Our firm is a little luckier than most, because some of the other IT specialist positions are folks who started out working at the help desk, like myself, and can step in. On the other hand, it's only been a bit more than 2 years since I worked there fulltime, and there have been some applications added that I don't use, and couldn't possibly support. (Luckily no one called with a question about those while I was flying solo down there!) The others who've been away for even longer, have even more apps where that is the case.

We came to realize, not just that we really only had a limited number of people who could effective backup the help desk folks, but that we had very limited backup for any of our positions. When our telecomunications guy is on vacation, there is an official "backup" person, but what can be handled in his absence is very limited. A major telephone system meltdown during his vacation is going to result in a serious problem. Now with our Litigation Support Department consisting of me, and one other person working remotely 4 days a week, on that 5th day, if I get sick, and there's someone needing trial prep work done, there's no one to do it. Same goes for our one web developer. If something needs done, and she's not there to do it, what happens?

As more and more firms try to "do more with less" in this economy, how many IT people are having to be "on call" even when they're on vacation, or over weekends, or when they're sick, because they're the only one's who can handle some tasks? What does your organization do to try and prevent this, or do you simply require them to live with this expectation? Are your IT people expected to always be reachable? Are they therefore limited in where they can go on vacation, because of this expectation that they will always be able to log in remotely and work on something at a moment's notice? Is that really fair?

Personally, I don't think it is. More importantly, if there's only one person at your firm who can fix certain issues, what do you do when that person gets hit by a bus? Or leaves? Aren't you asking for trouble if you simply ignore the fact that skills and knowledge haven't been shared among the whole team and you've simply laid these expectations at the feet of your folks as your "solution"?

So as technology gets more specialized, and budgets get tighter, what do you do to have a backup plan?

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Labels: HelpDesk, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Micro-Sponsorships?

Ran across this idea from a local Blogger/Tweeter, @wyliemac, and I think it has some real intriguing possibility. I've often seen local events that I might want to help out, but because of other commitments I couldn't volunteer, or attend, and even the lowest sponsorship levels are out of the question for an individual, so I wind up not doing anything.

In a blog post called Wyliemac Gives Back, Alvin lays out his idea:

And other than Startup Weekend, the big institutional investors seem reluctant to sponsor small niche tech events like the ones I put on. As a thank you to my sponsors, I’d like to give back by helping tech events in Columbus find sponsors. Little sponsors. You and I. The ones with “personal brands”.

I want to put together a syndicate of people that give a little to pool their money for sponsorship. The event will have a link to a landing page with all of the individual sponsors and we’ll also set up individual pages so you can get some Google juice.

As I said, an interesting idea for local events, which are pretty niche events by their nature most of the time, especially the first event he's trying this with, which is a Ruby developer's conference. Since I'm not a developer, I'll just be watching to see how this works more than being directly involved, but I do wonder if this sort of model might work in the Legal Tech industry. Obviously, with all the vendors in the Litigation Support and e-Discovery space, there's usually pretty good sponsorship, but I wonder if we couldn't get a group of bloggers to create a cooperative effort like this? Maybe not for national events, but perhaps for some regional and local events?

What benefits, aside from the cooperative web page linked and promoted by the event, would make you consider donating $25 towards a sponsorship? What events do you want to support in that way, even without further benefit, if the opportunity was available?

Discuss....

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport, Personal, Tech

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Technology in the Courtroom

This article was being passed around on the Yahoo LitSupport mailing list, and since it specifically talks about a program that we have used, albeit in very limited capacities, in trials before, it really caught my eye as something to pass around the firm.

Jurors and Technology in Trial: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

They have some great examples of using technology as part of your case, and how it impacted some rather high profile cases recently.

Of course, if I start promoting the effectiveness of the program that probably also means I need to know it inside and out, which I currently don't. Let me add that to the list of things I want to look at more closely now that I'm managing the department.

It's getting to be a mighty long list! :)

Labels: LitigationSupport

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How much is too much?

Now that I'm in management, I've been thinking about how many hours I can get people to work...

No, not really. I have, however, been thinking a bit about the idea of working extra hours though, and not just because I was doing a little bit of that getting things ready for trials. It started when I read Jenn Steele's post On Human Sustainability:

There is a perception that human sustainability is too expensive, that we're needed to be "on" at all times for the good of our company or family. This is completely false. Why? Well, I call it "working stupid". If I'm not giving my body and mind its basic needs, it will take me much longer to do any given task, and I'm much more likely to make a mistake and have to re-do the task later.

Then, I heard a similar take during a Fios webcast about Project Managemet and Litigation, as covered by Paul Easton:

One bit of wisdom shared at the very end is that for a legal project manager, time management includes the ability to manage yourself as a resource and knowing what your personal constraints are.

I found this one to be really interesting, because I know how very easy it is to just keep going, wanting to just be done with a project. I also know there are limitations to that but we don't really think about them in regards to ourselves, usually it's about how much to ask of others. Tired people work slower, and are much more likely to make a mistake. Even in Construction cases that I've been involved in you hear about how you can't simply have everyone work 12 hour days to get a project done in 50% less time, because they don't work as effectively at hour 10-11 as they do at hour 3-4. Knowledge workers maybe don't have the physical demands, but there is definitely that same point of diminshing returns for an hour of labor.

How many of us can tell story after story of the all-nighter we pulled in order to install a new server in an emergency, and the mistakes we've made in those situations. I know I can. Configuring something at 2AM on the weekend, after being in the office for 14 hours does not lead to the most careful testing of the configuration. I've overlooked simple problems when I've worked too long, I've created problems that slowed me down when I've been rushing to finish something and go home, and I've made boneheaded choices that required me to redo a lot of work later on. I'm sure you all have similar stories. Mostly we sit around drinking a beer and laugh about them. Heck, us IT folks wear those stories of grueling hours working on a project like a badge of honor! It's all part of the job, and you know, some times I absolutely agree. Stuff happens, and every once in awhile you have to do what needs to be done, but I do wonder sometimes if it would go a lot smoother, and with less glitches, if we could get some rest too!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Searching with Human Input

That's the point of my latest eDiscoTECH blog post over at the firm's blog, where I also try, probably not very successfully, to simplify the difference between keyword and concept searching for folks who aren't up on the algorithm.

If you're interested in taking a look, you can see it here.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Interesting New Challenges

Since it was announced at work earlier this week, and the details were officially accepted by me today, I guess it's a good time to make an announcement here.

Things are going to be changing for me, professionally, yet again. Our little 2 person Litigation Support Department is being overhauled, due to the engagement and subsequent relocation of our current Lit Support Manager. He's agreed to stay on and work remotely for a time, but he won't be in the office to run things on a day by day basis. Thus, I'm taking over as Manager and will be running the department from Columbus, while he continues to do most of the same work he's been doing remotely. It'll be nice to have somewhere to turn when I run into questions, sure beats being the old one-man IT department from back in the day!

So I guess I need to look at our work in a whole different way now, and probably listen to more Manager Tools. I do think I have a number of meetings to schedule and conversations to have over the next few weeks, sort of gathering intelligence to see how this is going to impact everyone and how to best get the work done. I'm going to strive to go with a "listen first" attitude to make sure I've got as much information as possible before making any changes.

As such, I'll also take any managerial advice you guys have as well. :)

Should be pretty interesting, and of course I'll be sharing what I learn about managing right here too!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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Summ it Up! - Practical Guide to Summation

A couple of weeks ago a rep from somewhere left a copy of Michelle Kovitch's Summ it Up! book with our office. It found it's way to me, and I've been leafing through it to see how I might adjust my training sessions with the way Michelle presents the information in her book.

I had heard positive reviews of the first edition of the book going back over the past couple of years, so I was very interested in getting a glimpse at this edition. As I went through it, I have to admit I was really impressed not just at the amount of information, but also that it is written in such a non-tech jargon kind of way. Something any attorney can pick up and get a better understanding of how Summation works, and what they can do with it, above and beyond simple document review.

On top of that, it was good to read through some of the chapters and remind myself of some of the features, and what we could do with Summation that we don't do now. It can be difficult in the midst of trying to get the day to day work done, to view the larger picture and see how we might do something differently. Michelle's book, by covering Summation so thoroughly, helped remind me of that.

If you're working in a Summation environment, I definitely recommend it!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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TweetDiscovery

Gabe Acevado has created the perfect page to send your boss to if you're getting flack about Twitter not being work-related. At least, if you work in the Litigation Support or eDiscovery field.

It's called TweetDiscovery, and while it's still a "very early beta", it's tracking all the conversations about e-Discovery that are taking place on Twitter, both by tracking search terms, and by tracking the tweets of some of the big names in the field.

Look through the list of folks they're tracking over there? I'm betting lots of your firms have the books they've authored on the shelves somewhere. (I know we do!) How could following these same folks on Twitter not be work-related? ;)

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Labels: LitigationSupport

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The First Rule...

I was reading Josh Gilliland's post from yesterday about being careful not to break client confidentiality in your online networking status messages.

Here is how the risk of disclosure is possible: a Facebook user posts a status message they deem harmless, such as “I just landed ‘Company A’ as a client and have a bunch of back-up tapes to restore.”

Does this disclose any mental impressions or strategy about the case? Probably not, but it is flirting with disclosure. Moreover, Company A would probably not be thrilled with their lawyer announcing their actions in a lawsuit to 300 “friends.”

After reviewing data from imaged hard drives, the same individual posts the status message, “Wow, they really blew preserving their emails.”

If the client is somehow identifiable, there is a problem, because a mental impression of the client’s ESI is being disclosed. While the “friends” are probably in no way related to anyone in a lawsuit, disclosing a client confidence to one person is one too many.

As I read this, I was reminded of something I often talk about with people when it comes to social networking tools. The first rule of social networking has got to be "Don't be Stupid". In this case, anyone who works as a lawyer, or works in the legal field at all, has had client confidentiality drilled into their heads. Just because Twitter, or Facebook is easy to update and new doesn't mean those same old rules don't apply. Thinking they don't, is stupid.

Don't break the first rule. :)

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Labels: Blogging, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Living a Dual Life

With the wife leaving for Europe later this week, I'll be the only one of us at home all of next week. As luck would have it, at work we also have a trial next week that I will need to be on site for, at least for a couple of days. That will mean that for those few days, no one will be home. So, we have to kind of plan for that, as well as planning to make sure I've got a couple of suits to wear to court, a bag to pack my stuff in, and maybe some food/drink to take with me.

On the other hand, as those of you in the Legal field know, the trial could very easily settle at the last minute, or get delayed for any number of reasons. So, I have to also plan for the possibility that I will be home, and will be wearing my regular business casual stuff to work all week, and eating at home all week.

As we ran our various errands this week, and stocked up at the grocery store, naturally, we were keeping both of those possibilities in mind, which is sort of a weird thing to do, I admit.

Of course, I've already learned that I may get a request to do some work at a trial at any moment, so I'm always a little prepared for that possibility, but it's a very different planning routine when I know Angela won't be home. Now things like getting the mail, checking the answering machine, etc. become a bit more important, as opposed to when she's home taking care of those things. Alas, as her job requires her to travel, this sort of thing is going to happen from time to time. I don't think when I signed up for this I knew how much you would have to be prepared for numerous possibilities all at the same time, but it seems to be very much part of working in litigation. Oh well, it keeps you on your toes!

Now you know why we can't be bothered with keeping pets, or plants that require much care. ;-)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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Training Blog and My Latest Blog Post for the Firm

I spotted this on a link from one of the many people I follow on Twitter this evening, The Lit Support Trainer's Blog. It's relatively new, but I'm interested in seeing something dedicated to training others to do Lit Support work. As a Certified Summation Trainer, I've done a bit of training in our firm on using Summation, and am always interested in hearing how others manage to get training done, so I'll be keeping an eye on it, for sure!

In other news, the latest blog post I wrote for the work blog is up, titled e-discovery 2.0, it's a reminder to legal departments and lawyers that their organizations data might not end at the corporate firewall anymore, it may be in the cloud!

It's sort of different writing over there, one because there is much more of a sense of having to do it, as well as being very careful in what I say, since it's representing the firm, not just me! I definitely like writing representing myself better, but it's important to bring some value to the table in your career, so I'm more than happy to bring my years of blogging to the table there! Any extra value I can bring in this legal downturn can only be a good thing.

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Labels: Blogging, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Love this Craig Ball Quote

From Brett Burney's blog about a session at Techshow:

I consider preservation letters a gift because it gives me insight into the other side’s real intention. If it says “save all the metadata,” then I know they are an ignoramous. But if they are specific in their request, then I know that I have to have my ducks in a row because they know exactly what they’re doing.

Craig makes a great point, if you simply say "all metadata", you're asking for a bunch of back and forth between the parties, and requests of the court before you finally get to an acceptable definition of what you're actually looking for, as opposed to simply knowing what you're looking for and asking for it. As usual, Craig nails it!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Couple of Areas For Attorney Tech Education

I've seen a number of big names in the E-Discovery industry emphasizing the need for some basic technology education as part of the law school curriculum, especially as it relates to e-Discovery.

In the last couple of days, I've also seen a couple of articles that highlight a couple of areas where just a little bit of knowledge can help out in regards to an attorney managing e-discovery.

The first was a great overview of how virtualization can impact the process of locating relevant data. The attorney managing e-discovery doesn't need to be an expert in hardware virtualization tools, but needs to be aware enough to find out if it's being used, and realize that sitting down at a PC and doing a keyword search for documents isn't going to locate anything that might be stored in the VM. Jason Briody does a good job giving enough information so that any attorney can be a bit better educated, without getting into too much of the nitty gritty tech stuff.

The second is a post by Craig Ball about the impact of 1TB and larger hard drives being out in the wild now. Simply put, when it comes to forensic imaging, it means more time, and more cost due to the shear size of the drives. This is a concept that I find many non-techies, not just attorneys, have difficulty grasping. Larger drives take longer to image, just as larger files take longer to copy, and larger data sets take longer to process, etc. It's important to understand the size of what we're dealing with before you agree to deadlines or make promises to clients about the time/cost involved.

It might seem pretty simply to the tech folks reading, but these are important details that often get overlooked when dealing with e-discovery. Having an attorney who is educated on these somewhat simple items can make a big difference!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 6:23 PM | 1 comments | Links to this post

 
One Problem with SaaS Document Reviews

I've sat in on enough product demos now, and had my own experience test-driving some of the applications, to have noticed something of a theme. Further discussions, have led me to believe that there's something to this as well. Namely, that while using hosted document review tools may safe you some money on the backend, they inevitably cost you in one other area, bandwidth.

You see, I've noticed that every hosted review tool I've used is dog slow compared to our in house Summation databases when it comes to loading document images, and switching between documents, and that is all because our office internet bandwidth can't keep up.

I suppose that's to be expected, every office I've ever worked in has had issues with bandwidth getting used, that's actually one of the understandable reasons for having Internet use policies. You don't want people soaking up all the bandwidth listening to streaming audio and making it harder for others to do any work, but even with those, there are days when it's a struggle to stay afloat in the bandwidth race. As more and more businesses put out audio/video content that is job-related, and more firms start using the "cloud" to offset in house IT costs, how do you make sure you still have enough bandwidth for your attorneys connecting to a hosted review platform to be productive?

I can't say that I have an answer, if you do, I'd love to hear it. Maybe that'll make my next test drive include a little less waiting.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Working from Copies

Image by ogal via Flickr

In the course of a conversation with a peer in the Litigation Support industry last week about best practices, a question struck me, that I don't really have an answer for. I've always believed that when it came time to process, or search, collected data that came in from a client, you should always copy that data to your network, then put the source media on the shelf, for safe keeping.

The theory, of course, is that, no matter what happens to your copied data, you always have that "clean" copy available if you need it. Surely, that's the safe thing to do, right? But what if it's not?

Doesn't the very act of copying that data introduce another point of failure? What if you make a mistake with copying the data, say leaving a switch out of your Robocopy command, thus failing to bring over an important piece of metadata, or bring it over incorrectly? Doesn't this risk intensify if the person doing the copying has more of a legal background compared to a tech one?

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not talking about forensic images here, surely I agree that if you had a hard drive copied forensically, bit by bit, you would want a second forensic copy to work from, always leaving one hard drive on the shelf, untouched, not connected to a PC or read from. That's the best way to guarantee that you have a good copy of not just the active data, but also the slack space, and recoverable deleted data of the original drive.

On the other hand, if you get a CD or DVD or even an external HD from a client that contains just the data that they copied over from their network, does it make sense to copy it again, or does it save time, and this extra risk, just to process it straight from the source? Especially when you consider that most ESI processing programs simply pull from the source location, extracting metadata and making it's own copy of the original documents?

What do you consider best practices in this area? Granted, the extra copying is a small risk, but with so many law firms being so risk averse these days, is it small enough to not worry about? Let me know your thoughts!

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Labels: LitigationSupport

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Speaking of Techshow Speakers

I know I just spent a lot of time recommending you look up Brett at Techshow, but today I was listening to the latest ESI Bytes podcast, and the more Craig Ball talked about forensics, e-discovery, and security, the more things I wanted to blog about.

In fact, there was so much good stuff in there, I decided to just tell you to go download it yourself.

Though, for highlights I love his CSI rant, the comparison of forensic requests to "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" , i.e. you don't always need it, explaining that requesting "all" metadata doesn't mean anything (I've seen those requests), and the warnings about unqualified forensic "experts". (Hmm, sorta reminds me of social media "experts")

Like I said, there's a lot to digest in there!

Then, if you're going to be at Techshow next week, check out Craig's presentations as well. Not only does he know his stuff, but he's a really entertaining speaker as well. (Though I don't see his E-Discovery Jeopardy on this year's schedule, that was a highlight of last year for me.)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Local ILTA Meeting: Brett Burney on Information Management

This afternoon, at the Central Ohio ILTA Lit. Tech. meeting, we started our series on the EDRM model with a presentation from Brett Burney on Information Management. If you've ever seen Brett speak, or met him, you know he can talk energetically and passionately about e-discovery and technology for hours at a time, and this was really no different. He went through the various areas of Information Management, and all the various acronyms used to discuss things like content management, or lifecycle management, etc. It was quite good, and led to a really good discussion among the group after he was done.

One of the interesting things that Brett said, was that sometimes he felt like Information Management was the "black hole" of the EDRM. Those of us working in the legal field could understand what was going on in the other areas of the EDRM, even if we didn't do that work, like forensic collections, but when it came to information management, we tried to stay out of that.

Of course we try to stay out of that, in many organizations, their information isn't exactly what you would call "managed". Trying to make sense out of an organization's data can be trying, to say the very least. So, it's maybe the least understood part of the EDRM, but the most crucial, because, as I mentioned in my Ignite Presentation, if you can get a handle of your data ahead of being involved in litigation, the rest of the EDRM workflow will be pretty smooth sailing, and if you don't, it'll look like Columbus traffic when it snows. (Those of you not familiar with the driving habits of our neighbors during snow events, trust me when I say, it is anything but smooth driving!)

Anyway, after taking us through some of the trends in this records management world, Brett had a slide that simply said that records management is a business decision, not an IT decision. I had to comment on that in the meeting, mostly because there are not a whole lot of folks with an IT background in our Lit Tech meetings, and to me, this was a huge point that Brett was making. When you do IT for a small company, you look at Information Management so differently that people from a record management or legal background.

If you had come to me back when I was the one-man IT department, my "solution" to problems with data management would have been to buy more disk space. It's easy, relatively cheap, and most of all it keeps with the one theme that was beat into our heads about redundancy. You see when you work in IT, you are constantly reminded about having backups. You have to backup, you have to test your backups, and you have to have backups to your backups, just in case of failure. In fact, the more redundancy you can build into your systems, the better! No matter what fails, we're prepared with a way for people to access their data!

That's all well and good, but it leads to IT people being the worst kind of pack rat you can imagine. We never get rid of anything, because someone might want it some day. If they want it, and I don't have it, somewhere, they're going to yell at me, and I don't like getting yelled at. So, I keep everything, somewhere. It's the antithesis to lifecycle management!

Besides, how many organizations do you know where the IT people have enough power to make management adhere to a retention and destruction policy? Yeah, that's what I thought. Let's put this responsibility on people who can get something done about it!

Overall, it was a good meeting. It was great seeing Brett again, especially since I won't have the chance to hang out with him at Techshow this year, but if you're going to be there, definitely look him up and say hello! Tell him I told you to check out his presentations. Looks like he's got a few on the schedule.

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Good E-Discovery Conversation

There's just so much good stuff in this conversation with Ralph Losey and Judge Shira Scheindlin that I can't even decide which parts to quote or comment on. Just go, and either read or listen to the podcast.

I will say this though, I wish I could get every attorney in our firm to read it, especially the parts where Judge Scheindlin warns of the dangers of half-doing the job:

JUDGE: But that’s the key point. You can’t use self-help. You either go for protection by coming to court or you comply. But you can’t take the middle ground and just ignore it, put your head in the sand, do it half way and then say, “Well the reason I didn’t do better is it was too expensive.” That’s what you can’t do and that’s where I think a lot of lawyers make a mistake

I do believe there's a real risk of "sort of" collecting, searching and processing in the way you're comfortable with, but which isn't actually in compliance with what was requested, all because they aren't comfortable with the technology. Which leads to the other great piece of advice she had:

I don’t think that we can turn all lawyers into computer specialists, and there are some lawyers who have a love of computers and they really do both fields – and probably Ralph Losey is one of them and there are a couple others who come to mind – but many lawyers are really lay people. They don’t have an engineering background, a science background, a math background, and they’re never going to implement technology. But what I think is important is that they at least identify when they need help, the questions they should ask, the places they should go. We just want them to be educated, conversant with the field, even though we may not expect all lawyers to become technical specialists.

Hmm, wonder where attorneys could meet up with technical experts to get the help they need when they need it? Where could they invest some time and network with some technical folks, forensic experts, etc.? Don't suppose a little investment in social networking tools would help out there, eh? ;-)

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Failure to Communicate

This is a bit of a follow up to a post a few days ago about whether having an open ticketing system would help with the communications between techs and the users they support.

As I mentioned there, and talked more about in the comments, when you have systemic failure to communicate, it's much more than a technical problem. It's a people problem, and in many cases, it a culture problem. If your organization sees their IT department as "those" people down in the basement, you are going to continue to have these issues with people not giving the techs enough information. Conversely, if your IT folks see the people they support as (l)users, you are going to continue to have issues with your techs no following up appropriately.

Worse yet, when these attitudes are displayed by the CEO, or the IT manager, there is no hope of it getting better, no matter what technology you put in place! If your IT department is in its own silo, you're going to have problems. If all the other departments are in their own silos, you're going to have problems that go well beyond tech support. From what I hear, this is actually pretty common in larger law firms, as each practice area tends to be in their own silo, not to mention staff departments, like IT, which exist even outside of those practice area silos!

As I've written elsewhere recently, there are some things you can do, even if you're not in management, that will help. First and foremost, do some internal networking. Get to know people in other areas, develop relationships outside of the silo. Learn about what is happening in other areas of the firm and try to find ways in which your talents, or technology, can assist them in accomplishing things that are important to them.

Don't wait for management to develop a plan to get rid of silos, do it yourself on whatever level you can. Go to lunch with someone in another area of the firm, offer to show them how to use some bit of technology during a brown bag lunch. I've had some success offering to show people how to setup an RSS reader, for example. It's not official firm-approved technology training, it's taking my own time to help teach someone how to use a technology that could help them, with their job, or with other interests.

One other area where I've only recently begun to consider is in the use of social networking tools. As I've been on Facebook for a little while now, I'm realizing just how much it's growing in use, even among the non-techie people I know. In some cases, they are joining up to keep an eye on their teenaged kids, and finding plenty of old friends/classmates on the service, or are using it to connect with family members who are far away, possibly as a way to share photos, an then finding plenty of other groups and activities they enjoy, etc. Lots of these folks are also listing their work information, including employer.

I can't help but wonder if "friending" some of these folks would help me to learn about their interests, and find common ground, or maybe increase the level of interaction with folks who I don't normally get to see on a regular basis. At this point I've only connected with a handful of folks that I work with on Facebook, and none on Twitter, but I'm wondering if I should spend some time tracking down more of them, and using the technology to develop better relationships across silos. (Doing so without coming across as creepy stalker guy from Lit Support might be a little difficult though..*L*)

To me, a lack of communication in any business is a sign of a lack of relationships within that organization. People who know each other, are familiar with each other, and heck maybe even like each other, are more likely to share important information. People who don't know each other, or who couldn't even tell you the name of the IT person who helped them, aren't.

Of course, since I met my wife at work 9 years ago, maybe my perspective on building relationships at work is a bit biased. I tend to think the better you know the people you work with, the better you are going to communicate with them, and they with you. It's worked that way for me with plenty of folks that I didn't wind up married to as well. :)

What do you guys think? Do you regularly connect with folks from within your organization outside of work? If you work in a law firm, what chance do you think an internal networking goal has of getting any sort of momentum with people who are ruled by billable hours? I will say, it's been easier to build relationships with other staff members than it has been with lawyers. That is one silo that is going to be difficult to reach across, it takes time, and that's time that isn't being billed! Share your own thoughts in the comments...

Labels: HelpDesk, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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New CT Summation DII-eDII Guide

For those of you using Summation, especially service bureaus, but also law firms doing in house Summation work:

This document provides information about the CT Summation DII/eDII file to service bureaus. The Table of Contents serves as an outline of the electronic discovery (eDiscovery) workflow from the perspective of a service bureau. This document also discusses changes to the structure of the DII file that allow for the batch loading of electronic discovery, and provides a reference of new DII tokens used for email messages and electronic documents. This document assumes prior knowledge of DII files, their structure, and tokens.

This document is geared toward service bureaus that deliver data and eDiscovery to the client in the form of native files, images, full-text, fielded data, or any combination thereof.

You can download it here.

Labels: LitigationSupport

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I'll Have to Settle for ABA Techshow Buzz

Image by mikemac29 via Flickr

I've seen a slight increase in the number of blog posts, and tweets, talking about the upcoming ABA Techshow in Chicago. Last year's conference was a great time, but I won't be back there this year due to a limited budget, and plans to attend ILTA 09 instead.

So, much like LegalTech in February, I'll be doing my best to keep an eye on Techshow through the writing of people who are actually there. Unlike LegalTech though, I won't have to spend any time creating my own Yahoo Pipe output of searches, they already have their own at Techshow Buzz.

As it turns out, that's a very good thing for me schedule-wise. I'll be on vacation in NYC Mar 28-April 1, and will probably not even have access to do much of anything online. Techshow starts April 2. I won't have to do anything more than make sure I have the RSS feed for Techshow Buzz plugged into Google Reader, and then it'll just be a matter of catching up! Of course, someone scheduled the Twitter session for 8:30AM on Day 1, so I'll have to really get with it in the morning so I can track some of that live, if possible.

Who schedules any Social Networking session that early, don't they know who they're dealing with here? *L*

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Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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My Ignite Presentation on E-Discovery

The videos are up from the Ignite Columbus 2 back in January, so now you can all see my mistake of changing what I was going to say, getting behind my slides and talking too fast in order to catch up, thus making me appear nervous, which I was, but I usually hide it better.

Anyway, here's 5 minutes of why you should be thinking about e-Discovery.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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A Little Career Warning for Attorneys

Courtesy of Tom O'Connor, who picks up the discussion about lawyers needing to get some tech skills in order to understand how to effectively deal with e-discovery:

Sharpen up those pencils kids ?. it?s time to go back to school. Or fire those luddites and hire people who will.

It's true, when your client needs to deal with ESI, and your firm doesn't have the expertise to help them out, they won't wait around for you to get some technical expertise, they'll find one that already does.

 

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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e-Discovery Summit

I'm not familiar with the BrightTALK service, but I may have to create an account and check it out before Thursday's online e-Discovery Summit, nine sessions covering various aspects of the e-discovery process:

Preserving Data for e-Discovery: Best Practices
E-Discovery: The Litmus Test for IT Governance

o 26 Feb 2009 10:00 am
o Presenting Jeffrey Ritter

Framing the Issues in International E-Discovery

o 26 Feb 2009 11:00 am
o Presenting Nicole B. Boehler and Marla Weston, Partners..

E-Discovery Uncovered: What Vendors May Not be Telling You

o 26 Feb 2009 12:00 pm
o Presenting Stephanie Giammarco Partner at BDO Consulting

Protecting the Privilege in Electronic Discovery

o 26 Feb 2009 1:00 pm
o Presenting David M. Simon: Partner at Wildman,..

Handle e-discovery in-house: Take control, reduce risks and costs

o 26 Feb 2009 3:00 pm
o Presenting Dominic Jaar, Legal Counsel at Ledjit.

Mitigating the Potential for Sanctions

o 26 Feb 2009 5:00 pm
o Presenting Mark S. Yacano, Principal, Wright Robinson

Spoilation: It's Not Always Intentional

o 26 Feb 2009 6:00 pm
o Presenting Warren Kruse: VP, Data Forensics and..

After E-Discovery: Data Security & Privacy

o 26 Feb 2009 7:00 pm
o Presenting Jeffrey S. Follett, Partner at Foley Hoag LLP

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Labels: LitigationSupport

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It's the People, Not the Process

Tom O'Connor posted yesterday about a conversation that has bounced around the litsupport mail list, quoting John Martin in the title of his post, It's the Archer, not the Arrow.

I won't repeat what Tom has written, you can go read it yourself, and frankly, I couldn't write it as well as he did anyway.

But I do want to point out something that I've found to be true through the years, and that held true not just in the e-discovery world, but in every area of technology. It's still all about the people. There's no process, or tech tool, that can stand up to a single person not following the proper procedure. Every security policy, record retention policy, e-discovery or forensic process depends on people doing the right thing, and thus it all has one common point of vulnerability.

Unfortunately, I find far too many people continuing to try and protect this vulnerability with more technology, when the real solution lies in having people who are properly trained and motivated to do the right thing. It's not as easy as throwing more technology, or budget, at the problem, but it's a heck of a lot more efficient.

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Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Friday Night Variety Hour

Basically, a bunch of interesting things too long for Twitter, and dumped into one post. :)

The Typical Mac User podcast this week had an interesting interview covering Mac Forensics. There was some good info regarding the general idea of how forensics works for all OSes, and lots of good stuff about Mac forensics that you don't hear as much about in the e-Discovery world, but which does come in to play!

Speaking of e-Discovery, I was asked to start blogging as part of the day job, and posted my first topic over there yesterday. It feels weird to have a blog post showing up on the firm's site with my name on it. I spent a lot more time and mental energy on that post than I normally do on things here, that's for sure, and I still published with a feeling of abject terror that I was getting something wrong and it would cost me. I guess, as much as we all need to get ourselves more visibility in this economy, actually having more is going to take some getting used to.

One way to create more visibility for yourself is networking internally in your organization. I wrote about that in terms of getting the IT department out of their silo over on Friends in Tech this week, and also heard more about in on the Career Tools Podcast entitled An Especially Important Relationship In A Downturn, referring to your boss's peers. I think there's some real validity to building good relationships within your organization and making sure people are aware of what value you are bringing to the table.

As if we didn't know things were bad all over, they're already trying to decide what to call yesterday, as law firm layoff announcements came fast and furious all in the same day! Those are just the BigLaw firm numbers too, they're not tracking small to mid-sized firms like the one I work for, and all the layoffs that occurred in most of those places lately.

On a more lighthearted note, after ranting about the utter junk that retweet this to win contests were last week, I picked up a few followers on twitter that, I suspect, are following me because of the wording I used. Unfortunately, it appears to be a case of poor use of search terms, as the context of my posts about social media and contests would normally have led people using twitter to promote contests not to follow me. However, they appear to have found the terms in my tweets and followed away!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport, Personal

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Live Blogging from ABA Techshow Boston

There was an ABA Techshow Roadshow in Boston today, and I enjoyed following long with some folks on Twitter. It wasn't until much later in the day that I found out that Jared Correia was live-blogging it using Cover-It Live, and pulling in the tweets to the stream as well. You can read the full day's coverage over at the Mass LOMAP Blog.

I'm not sure I like the interface for Cover It Live, but there's no arguing that the stream being archived as you go in one place certainly makes for good live-blogging!

What do you think? Have you ever used the service, would you?

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Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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New Litigation Support Blog

It's brand new, and it appears to be anonymous, but with so few sites dedicated to Litigation Support, other than e-discovery, when I saw this mentioned on a LinkedIn group today, I just had to share.

http://litsupportman.blogspot.com/

From the site's description:

I am an individual who has held various leadership positions in the Litigation Support Industry spanning close to 20 years. This blog is an account of my life in the Litigation Support Field.

Might be worth keeping an eye on.

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Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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NextGen Law Magazine

I found a copy of the premiere issue of NextGen Law sitting on my desk when I arrived at work this morning. I don't really know how I got on their mailing list, but it's not a very thick magazine so I did spend a little time skimming through it this afternoon. It's not half-bad. Yeah, it's a little on the basic side for those of us coming from an IT background, but I thought the relatively quick-read, to the point, articles are great for passing along to folks who aren't as deeply embedded in the tech world as the rest of us.

The odd thing, however, is that I can't find a website for it. According to the publisher information it's a product of DailyJournal.com, however even on that corporate site, there's nothing. It's not even on the list of Publications.

Wonder if I'll ever see another issue? Does anyone have more info about it?

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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LegalTech Blog Round-up Day 3

Not sure if I'll see any more blog posts tomorrow, since the event ended today, but if I do, I'll post them over on Delicious with the Legaltech09 tag. So you can pop over and take a quick look there!

• LegalTech: Inside and Outside E-Discovery

• Legal Tech New York 2009: Is EDD the New DOS?

• 10 things I think I think on LegalTech, #10 People-Vendors, Vendors-People

• Legaltech Conference : Top 9 for 2009 = Purchasing!

• Day 3 Recap at LegalTech

• Attending LegalTech without being there, thanks to Twitter

• LegalTech 2009 – Post Show “Snapshot”

• Lawyers and mobile technology

• CIO Forum features legal expertise

• When Knowledge Management Is a Waste - A Lesson from Legal Tech

• Top-of-mind customer concerns

• Ambrogi is tuned in to social media

• West author/blogger making her name known

• Bringing E-Discovery In-house (LegalTech NY Coverage)

• Best Practices for Social Networking for Lawyers

• Experiencing LegalTech Brain Overload

• LegalTech NY 2009 and LOC---Fun Fun Fun

• Global focus brings analyst to LegalTech

• The term “early case assessment” has a specialized meaning for litigation support

• Bloggy Breakfast and Day Two of NY LegalTech 2009

• LegalTech New York 2009 Update

• Day 2 Recap at LegalTech NY

• The News at LegalTech

• Tales from LegalTech: Day Two

• LegalTech 2009 Message? ‘Bloggers Welcome!’

• LTNY 2009: Ask EDD Vendors, What Can You Do for Me?

• LegalTech NY 2009 - a set on Flickr

• LegalTech Panel: "Five Things Every Practice Should Know About Web 2.0 Technology"

• Seven dictation software companies at LegalTech NY 2009

• Podcast Special featuring John Lipsey, VP Corporate Counsel Services for LexisNexis and a panelist at LegalTech New York 2009.

• Video: The Future of the Legal Blogosphere (And it isn't Twitter)

• LegalTech New York 2009: Day One in Review

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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LegalTech Blog Round-up Day 2

A few of these cover Day 1's sessions but either they were posted after I went to bed yesterday, or today. Probably has something to do with the Wifi problems I've seen mentioned on Twitter. Can't update the blog without it! :)

• LTNY 2009: Day One in Review

• LTNY 2009: Conference Reports From Legal Bloggers

• E-Discovery Gets Funkier at LegalTech (a review of some vendors)

• What is case management?

• Elite educates LegalTech attendees

• Notes From the E-Discovery Town Hall

• “Think left” for e-discovery

• LegalTech Panel Report: "What is Twitter and How Can I Use It?"

• Oh Social Networking Tools... I Know You're Only Going To Break My Heart!

• "Think Left"- Highlights of LegalTech NYC Keynote Address

• Quick LegalTech Update

• LegalTech NY - Web2.0 morning session

• What is Twitter and How Can I Use It?

• Twitter and lawyers

• LegalTech Keynote on e-Discovery and Imaging

• LT Keynote - Step to the Left.

• TFS at Legaltech New York - Opening Address

• How I visited LegalTech without being there physically

• How Integration Drives Knowledge Management

• Blawg Review: LegalTech New York 2009

• Almost Live Blogging from LegalTech

• Greetings from LegalTech NY

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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This Might Sound Familiar

If you saw my presentation at Ignite Columbus a couple of weeks ago, then this might sound familiar.

Information management is the essential starting point for reducing the risk and cost of the discovery process. Organizations that have adopted an information governance strategy that supports requirements driven by both regulatory obligations as well as the needs of the business managers inherently will have an advantage because content has been created, shared and categorized according to its purpose in a business process.

It's from one of the blog posts recapping Monday's Keynote at LegalTech. Naturally, Fred Borchardt spoke about it much more eloquently than I could, and from a much more educated legal background than I have, but I think the gist of what I said at Ignite fits:

The whole idea behind EDRM is getting from all that volume of data you have stored all over the place, to just the relevant data you need, and it all starts with Information Management.

I, of course, was not speaking to a legal audience, much more a tech one, but the best way forward is the cooperation of both audiences. Lawyers need technological solutions to records management, and IT folks need legal/compliance direction from counsel. Will they be able to work together?

Labels: LitigationSupport

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LegalTech Blog Round-up Day 1

Quite a lot going on today, thanks to everyone who has been blogging and twittering up a storm to keep the rest of us in the loop! If I missed anyone blogging the conference, drop a link in the comments!

More thoughts on the ground LegalTech 2009

On the ground at LegalTech NYC 2009

LegalTech NY: Stephen Hawking’s question on search

Legal Tech NY: eDiscovery Issues and Trends

LegalTech report--KM from a Practicing Attorney Perspective

LegalTech: KM from a Client Services Perspective


LTNY 2009: Twitter Topples Electronic Discovery

LTNY 2009: Early Reports Say Show Is Packed, in Spite of Economy

E-Discovery Gets an Upgrade at LegalTech

LegalTech 2009 » Live from the Incisive Media Booth

Legal Tech E-Discovery Town Hall

Legaltech NY: Multi-matter management environments?

Blogging at LegalTech--A Different Environment

LegalTech KM Session--"How Integration Drives KM"

LegalTech® New York 2009 opens with keynote presentation entitled Enterprise Records and Information Management Considerations

LegalTech 2009: Executing eDiscovery Inside the Corporation

The recession presents a great opportunity to transform Legal IT

LTNY Day #1 - Keynote Key Points

Executing eDiscovery Inside The Organization

Clio’s big announcement: Client Collaboration!!!

Case in Point: LegalTech2009

New York LegalTech 2009

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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LegalTech RSS Feed

Here's the feed to the Yahoo Pipe I'm using the track stuff from LegalTech this week. If you subscribe to this it'll keep up with things I might change during the next few days, for example if I add Flickr photos or some other service that I see folks are using once the conference gets started tomorrow.

Regardless of what happens with that though, as I mentioned previously, I'll be posting a link round-up of blog posts as well, so if you see any, or are writing any, let me know!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Tracking Legal Tech NY 2009

Much like I did last year with the ILTA Conference, I'm working with some search feeds to track the various things people are putting up online about the Legal Tech Conference this week. At this time, the feed is still a work in progress, pulling in lots of duplicate items, so I don't want to share that with you all until I feel like it's something worth sharing.

If I don't get it, rest assured I'll be putting up a post with links to any blog posts covering sessions each evening, and know that you can also follow along the twitter conversations on the LexTweet collection of attendees.

If you're going to be blogging about LegalTech this week, drop a link to your blog in the comments, so I can be sure to follow your blog and link to anything you have to say about your experience. Hopefully, I can pull together enough information so that those of us unable to attend, can still get something from the sessions!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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IPRO Jumping on the Social Media Bandwagon?

It would appear that way. The IPROTech Twitter account showed up in my Twitter followers today, and they pointed to the brand new IPROTech blog. It's always interesting when the folks behind a product you use on a regular basis join the SM fray. I'm going to be paying attention, and see if they put out anything useful!

If you use any of their products, you should do the same.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Cloud Computing and E-Discovery?

Charles Skamser predicts Cloud Computing will be a big trend in eDiscovery in 2009.

My reaction? Maybe, but from my experience trying out a couple of online document repositories, there needs to be some performance improvements! We get attorneys complaining about the speed a PDF displays in Summation over a LAN, which is nothing compared to the wait for a document image to display online!

Now, I can certainly understand the move toward online repositories. If I'm a client, I love being able to deal directly with the host/vendor, let the outside counsel access the documents, and then cut off the access when the case is done, as opposed to giving my data to a law firm and hoping they delete it when they're done. That's a great way for a client to keep control of their own case and manage the outside counsel. There's promise in cloud computing to help simplify things for clients, but I don't think, at current performance levels, too many attorney's are going to be excited about that.

Labels: LitigationSupport

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No Link Posts in the Feed

Those of you who subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog haven't been getting the daily summary of Del.ico.us links that is usually included in the feed, because, apparently, the new and improved Feedburner, broke that feature.

Also, the Photography and Lit Support pages, which normally incorporate those posts into the page by using the RSS feed to republish those tags, are missing them.

Hopefully, it will be working soon. In the mean time, all the things I've posted to del.ico.us are over there on the site.

Update: Apparently, according to Google, they can't fix it, Yahoo/Delicious is blocking them.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport, Photography

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LegalTech New York

I was talking just the other day with someone on Twitter about creating some sort of tracking RSS feed for the LegalTech conference Feb 2-4 in New York. Much like last year's ILTA conference, since I won't be there, I am going to try and use the resources available to me to track the online conversation as well.

Well, turns out, at least on the Twitter front, I won't have to work too hard to track it. Kevin O' Keefe and LexTweet are going to be creating a tracking group of Twitter users attending LegalTech. Nice!

Hopefully it'll have an RSS feed that I can dump into a Yahoo Pipe along with blog search terms, and track the conference pretty easily. If I get something useful, I'll be sure to share.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Solutions to the Law Firm Training Problem?

Tami Schiller was kind enough to present a few ideas in the comments to that last post, and I definitely agree with what she had to say.

In fact, the survey results themselves show some growth in the areas of alternative learning, with more firms using webcasts, podcasts and other time-shifted training tools. That will help with attorneys who can't take time to sit in class, and it's something firms should be experimenting with.

On the other hand, as much as we are seeing more attorneys and law firm staff embrace new technologies, like Google Docs and various other Web 2.0 tools, they are still in the minority. Most attorneys do not know anything about RSS, Twitter, or colloboration tools like Sharepoint or Wiki's. The consideration of using tools like this in the firm comes from the IT department, or from individual users who are less tech adverse than the norm.

The bottom line is still that attorneys, and staff, don't make learning a priority, because firm management does not make learning a priority. Revenue and billable hours are a priority, as well they should be, and attorneys and staff do everything they can to meet their goals in those areas. Some firms make community service a priority, or charitable giving, or practice development things like getting published, getting speaking engagments, etc. and all of those goals get met. Learning how to take advantage of technology is not a priority.

So we've got a growing number of firms starting to dedicate staff time and resources to developing training programs, but hardly any of them doing anything but pay lip service to measuring whether their users actually develop any skills because of it. Until someone comes out and says "you are going to held accountable for developing tech skills, it's a part of your professional development, and this many hours should be dedicated to it", it's never going to be a big priority for attorneys, and if it's not a big priority for attorneys, they won't be encouraging their staff to do it either.

But, the legal industry doesn't really work that way. As Tom O'Connor said today in regards to a recent decision:

No, the real problem is one that Browning Marean and I have been trying to combat for over a year and that Ralph himself so accurately pointed out in a recent column: legal education involves no computer education. Why? Because legal education still has it’s own old paradigm. The one that working with a keyboard is not “professional” and is best done by support staff and hourly employees.

Read that again. Does your firm see technical skills and legal skills as two different things, or do they see technical skills as part of good lawyering? If it's the former, how does firm management, which is made up almost entirely of lawyers, even know how to measure the technical skills of their staff? And if they can't, or won't, measure those skills, what hope does a technical training program have? It's doomed from the start!

The only solutions I see are a combination of things. One, IT must get on track with not just teaching how to use the tools, but also explaining the why. Teach people what they can do with the tools, how they can use the tools to do their jobs, or to do things that they aren't doing now. Help them be innovative! Also, IT must continue to increase the number of training options. Not everyone is suited to sit in a classroom for training. Give them some other options.

Secondly, firm management must get out of the dark ages. It's 2009, technology is not going away. In fact, technology is changing the way every industry in the world works, and the legal industry is no different. Just having a law degree isn't enough any more. Good lawyers use technology to their advantage in a great many ways, to educate themselves, to network, to engage clients and to collaborate. Good firms support that, and great firms will demand it from their lawyers. If that means making technical training hours a requirement on par with CLE credit, then so be it. If that means placing less emphasis on billable hours, or even moving away from billable hours to an alternate rate structure where that makes sense, so be it.

Your firm won't be an innovative leader in the industry if management doesn't make it a priority to be there. Innovation requires developing some technical skills all across your organization, and having the leadership ability to take advantage of those skills.

Or, you can keep doing the same thing and see if you survive in the current economy. Good luck!

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Further Thoughts on ILTA Survey

I briefly mentioned the woeful numbers when it comes to actually measuring the technical skills of law firm staff when I posted the link to the 2008 ILTA User Support survey.

Tonight, I'd like to dig into those thoughts a bit further. First, let's look at the top answers of some of the relevant questions to this post:

• Does your firm conduct skills assessment? 65% -No
• If your firm does skills assessment, who do you test? 59% -Prospective Staff
• Does your firm have any ongoing technical training requirements for attorneys? 87% - No
• Does your firm have any ongoing technical requirements for staff? 67% -No
• What incentives are offered at your firm to support training? 52% -Food at sessions
• Does your firm have an official budget for your training department? 62% -No

So, let's take those numbers and create a typical law firm staffer.

When you were hired, there's a less than 50% chance that anyone actually bothered to test your technical skills, other than looking at your resume, but there's a chance that someone would have, so let's suppose you do actually have all the requisite skills for your job, currently. Over the years, as technology changes at a great pace, you'll be given the opportunity to take some classes, mostly as part of large roll outs of new tools. There will be other opportunities for training, but no actual budget for it, and no one will be tracking whether you go to training or not. In fact, your skills will never actually be tested again, no matter how long you work with the firm. So long as you can continue to do the important stuff, you'll be fine. If, however, you decide you'd like to learn more about taking advantage of technology, and be more efficient through using it, you'll be richly rewarded, with a pastry.

Of course this is all different for the young associate attorney. For you, not only is your reward a lovely pastry, but you also get the lost hours of billable time that you'll need to make up, and, if you really learn a lot, you'll also be treated to missed billable hour minimums because your efficient use of technology allowed you to get work done quicker, and left you scrounging around for more work to make up your hours!

Which leads me to my last number:

• What are the biggest challenges facing training and user support efforts? 73% -Lawyer Participation

No kidding...

Next, some ideas on correcting this problem. In the meantime, I'd love to hear yours!

Labels: HelpDesk, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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ILTA 2008 User Support Survey

The survey results are out, and there's a ton on information about how law firms are doing training and user support. I haven't had time to do more than give it a cursory glance, but there's definitely some interesting discussion points. Download a copy.

Also, there's a white paper available with some analysis of what these numbers might mean, and which I need to read through as well, before starting any blog posts discussing the numbers, though the fact that 65% of firms do no ongoing skills assessments, and 63% don't require ongoing technical training for staff (87% don't require it for attorneys) is a little bit mind-boggling. As much as technology changes, you don't have any requirements for people in your firms to continue learning anything technical?

It's no wonder clients think law firms are so behind the times.

Labels: HelpDesk, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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New To Me E-discovery Blogs

This evening, I followed a link that Tom Mighell posted to Twitter, and discovered that Tom O'Connor had started a blog a few months ago! I had no idea. Tom is one of the leading speakers and experts on e-discovery so it was very exciting to see his name attached to a blog.

Coincidentally, also this evening, Josh Gilliland looked me up n Facebook and mentioned that since leaving his post at CT Summation, he had started blogging as well, at Bow Tie Law.

Needless to say, my RSS subscription numbers went up by two tonight.

But remember, all these social networking sites are just a waste of time, no serious business gets done there. ;-)

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Cost of Storage and Processing

Aaron asked a good question in the comments from last night's post:

Given the (low) cost of storage, is it worth the time/hassle of keeping track of 1GB vs. 15GB? I have no idea what typical volumes of data are for your organization, but as you noted, the client will end up paying more for the larger quantity of data reviewed... does the storage and machine time really make up a large actual cost?

I started to reply to Aaron's comment in the comments, but then it occurred to me that I'd be better off making this a new post, because I want to get into some of the nuances of e-discovery in my explanation.

First off, yes the cost of storage being what it is, there's not that much cost to us to store data, especially when comparing 1GB to 15 or 20GB. Processing that much data, however, is a bit different. For example, let's take 3 cases where clients are presenting us with PST files where we will need to use processing software to extract each message, each attachment and all corresponding metadata so that we can load it into a review database. The first is a 1GB PST, the second is a group of PST's totaling 20GB, the third 100GB.

With billable hours being the determining factor in cost of in-house processing, you are going to be billed for the time I spend connecting up the external drive to our processing machine, setting up the new project parameters, labeling the appropriate information, doing a quality control check after it processes, and finally starting the export process. There's no difference in my time for 1GB or 20GB, but how long the machine is in use is vastly different. Granted, we don't have the most robust processing tools, but 1GB can be kicked out in a couple of hours, 20GB takes a couple of days! Keeping in mind that during those couple of days, anything else that comes in has to wait to be processed, there may not be a fixed "cost" of machine time, but there is definitely an opportunity cost of tying up resources that might be used to otherwise be working on billable work. Especially if it's time-sensitive and we end up having to outsource it, losing potential revenue, in the interest of getting in done on time.

The 100GB case, given our resource limitations, would almost certainly be shipped to an outside vendor, and that cost (which may very well be a per GB charge by the vendor!), is then passed directly to the client.

At the end of the day, two of the clients are billed the exact same amount for processing and the third is billed a cost that may be higher or lower because it's based on a completely different factor than the first two. Throw in the very real possibility that these are actually three different collections from the same client, coming in at different times, and what you have is a lack of clarity in billing/costs that is the essence of the argument against billable hours!

So while the firm, as a whole, really does make up the difference when it comes to the longer review process, it might be clearer to people if we simplified the process when it comes to certain tasks, and moved away from time as the factor and toward volume. My point is less about the actual cost in dollars, it's more about how to make the process clear and fair to all clients.

Secondly, the cost of storage actually works in the other way too. As organizations struggle with the amount of data they have, it's cheap and easy to "throw more storage" at the problem, as opposed to making the hard decisions about what they need to keep, what they don't, and how to enforce that policy. I call it the Gmail theory, "don't worry about deleting or organizing, just keep everything and we'll search it!". That may work great when Google is indexing everything in your email constantly, it might not work so great when you're keeping everything on servers, on shared drives, and not indexing or organizing it in any way.

When these organizations are then party to litigation, the amount of data that needs to be searched, or possibly reviewed, continously grows. There may be no real difference to our firm in the cost of a 1GB versus 15GB case right now, but when you start talking about Terabytes of data? As the cost of storage declines, the amount of data being stored by organizations grows, and the more storage we have to incorporate in order to store the relevant data to our cases. That cost will need to get passed on somehow, and right now that is through the review process, but it's an indirect method of passing the cost along. If you want something clearer and easier to understand perhaps we should have a small per GB charge for storing data? Tie the amount of data directly to their costs, and perhaps that would even encourage them toward better document retention and organizing behavior as well, in turn leaving us fewer documents to review, and attorneys more time to work on other, much more interesting, endeavors?

Possibly, but that's a discussion for another time, and one that, being a non-lawyer, I wouldn't even know where to begin with. :)

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Is the Billable Hour Feasible?

Nicole Black's new endeavor Legal Tweets is keeping track of a conversation about whether the billable hour is still feasible for law firms.

It's an interesting discussion, and I think it wouldn't hurt for you to go check it out and follow the links to the different ideas.

Now, I definitely think there are places where law firms should think about something other than the billable hour as a revenue model, but then again there are other areas that simply don't translate well. Let me give you an example from the e-discovery/lit support world.

Let's say you have two cases, one involves maybe 500MB worth of data that needs to be processed, stored and loaded into a Summation database to be reviewed, the other has 20GB of data. Since we only bill by the hour, and don't bill machine time, or network storage, your processing costs as a client are going to be basically the same for both of these cases. You'll pay for the time it takes me to setup the project in the processing software, to setup the export, and to setup the load into Summation. Obviously, all of the machine processes will take much longer in the second case, but you won't see any difference in my time, therefore you'll pay exactly the same for the processing.

That hardly seems fair, does it? Of course, the larger case is going to see many more hours billed by the attorneys for reviewing the documents, as well they should. It takes longer to review 20GB of data than it takes to review 500MB of data! That's a good example where the billable hour makes sense.

Certainly, we've seen vendors and some firms switch to a per-GB cost for processing and hosting, and that makes perfect sense, even if most firms have not recognized it yet. Does it make sense for document review to move to that model? I would say no, because all gig's of data are not equal when it comes to review. I think we can all agree 1GB of video files is not going to take near as long to review as 1GB of Word documents, can't we? Whereas a GB of data that needs to be extracted from emails, transferred and stored is a GB of data regardless of the type of information in that GB, that doesn't hold true in other areas of e-discovery.

If you're not going to use the "hour" as the measurement for review, what are you going to use that makes sense?

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Georgetown Law School's E-Discovery Academy

Certainly, the fact that the event is being put on by the Georgetown Law school adds quite a bit of legitimacy to what you're going to learn, but that $2750 price tag, in this legal industry economy? Wow.

As much as I'd love to go to Georgetown and learn, or even get a couple of attorney's to go who should know more about e-discovery, when we're looking for ways to save money every way we can, it just isn't going to happen. (There appears to be some scholarships available, but I have my doubts about anyone from here qualifying, and the deadline is today, the same day I saw a mention of the event posted to the ILTA email list.)

Of course, if someone reading this is going, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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LexTweet

An interesting new tool from the fine folks at Lexblogs, LexTweet is:

Lextweet is a new website developed by LexBlog showcasing members of the legal community who are using Twitter as well as what they are tweeting.

Lextweet community members include lawyers as well as other professionals serving our legal profession. I have learned equally from marketing professionals, publishers, service providers, law students, and other professionals as from other lawyers during my time on Twitter.

Interestingly, when I first looked at LexTweet, the language on the site left me thinking it was just a list of lawyers who were on twitter, however as Kevin's blog post makes clear, and the fact that I found myself already listed on there, it is not limited to lawyers, but to everyone in the legal industry. It looks like something that is going to continue to improve and develop some new features, so I'm looking forward to watching this grow.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Remaking the Legal Industry

Jordan Furlong has an interesting look at the current economic malaise in the legal industry. He's convinced the downturn is part of a "regeneration" of law,

People will always need lawyers, and lawyers will still be here to do what we do best: counsel, advise, advocate, analyze, facilitate and connect. The legal profession will be transformed, but if we do this right — and I know we can — the transformation will be a regeneration: stripping away the obsolete and counterproductive and elevating the best of what the law and lawyers hold at their heart: service to clients, the community, and the greater good.

I don't know if that's how things will turn out at the end of the day, but there is definitely something going on. Firms with over century of history suddenly going belly-up? Associates, not to mention non-lawyer staff getting cut by the hundreds at others? This isn't just a downturn in the economy, this is something larger. I haven't been in the legal world long enough to really know what it is, but I suspect we are seeing a change in the way many other industries work, as Jordan states in the post, I don't see why the law should be any different.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Carrer Path Blocked?

As someone who works as non-attorney staff, I found this article really interesting, and probably much closer to the truth than I might want to admit.

Legal Secretaries Find Door to Advancement Shut

Now, to be fair, I've seen this sort of thing play out at places outside of law firms as well. You have someone who's very good at their job, getting that job done properly is very important to you, so you want to do everything you can to keep them in that job. Unfortunately, that sometimes includes blocking their ability to advance, possibly into other areas that they are more interested in. Certainly, there are plenty of legal secretaries who would rather work in IT, or legal marketing, etc. but are good secretaries with partners who depend on them. That may mean the only way to advance their career is to leave the firm, which hurts the firm at the end of the day.

In another organization where I worked in the distant past, we actually had something similar, but every so slightly different. We called it being promoted to the level of your incompetence. Typically, if you were good at a specific job, they wanted you to stay there. But if you weren't very good, you'd be more likely to get promoted, and pushed out of the way of people actually getting the work done. Naturally, the more incompetent you were, the higher up the org chart you had to move in order to be out of the way of the day-to-day operations.

Obviously, this is somewhat exaggerated, but it's easy to imagine this sort of thing going on when you are constantly told how good you are at your job, but find every attempt to advance out of that job to be fruitless, especially when, as the article says, someone half-jokingly refers to blocking your attempts to leave because you are good at it!

This is really one area that shows how short-sighted people are. How much good does it do your law firm, or other organization, to try and keep someone in a job they are very good at, but ultimately not happy staying in? If you've got people looking for new challenges and different career paths, they are going to leave if they don't find them within their current place of employment. So, while blocking them may keep them in that job you depend on them to do for a little while, they'll be completely gone soon enough, and you'll be the one looking to bring in new people, and hoping they are as competent as the person you just lost.

Maybe you'd do well to have enough of a relationship with the people who work for you to know where they want to go with their careers, and help them get there?

Labels: Career, LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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What Do You Want to Know About E-Discovery?

Some of you may know, that there's another Ignite Columbus event coming up on Jan 21, and I've already submitted a talk proposal. I wanted to take 5 minutes to talk about what I do for a living, at least in terms of trying to explain electronic discovery to people who are not in the legal field. Now, granted, I am not a lawyer, so I have no plans to turn this into any sort of legal advice, (that would be very, very bad for my career) but I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what e-discovery is, and why people are so freaked out by the concept. Basically, I want to spend 5 minutes covering what happens when your stuff is discoverable from a technology stand point. What's going to happen to your PC, your phone, your data, etc.

So, nearly a month out from this event, I am seeking some advice. What do you, as an IT professional, internet guru, or just personal tech geek, want to know about electronic discovery? Conversely, what do you, as a lawyer, want to know about the technology side of things? Any and all input will be considered for the talk, depending, obviously, on the ethics of me talking about it. :)

Of course, one other aspect of e-discovery that I am also contemplating presenting on is the career path from IT to Lit. Support. How much technology we deal with, how my IT background comes into play, and how important technology has become as part of the practice of law. Any thoughts on that front?

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

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ABA Journal Survey Results

Back in November I told you about an ABA Journal Survey of lawyers regarding the impact of recession on their practice. Today, as part of the special recession issue, they've shared the results.

The numbers that jump out at me, and not just because they are front and center of the page, are that 31% of attorneys expect to see attorney layoffs at their firm, and 19% expect to lose their jobs because of the economy.

Wow, think about that for a moment, 1 out of every 5 attorneys expects their own job to be cut because of current conditions in the legal industry. That's sobering for lawyers, for legal staff that has to be more than sobering. After all, non-lawyer staff is probably more likely to see layoffs!

That's why it's so important to be out growing your network and making connections. The more people you know, the more options you have if you need to turn to your network. Get out and cultivate those relationships now, before you find yourself looking for work!

Check out all the articles in the Special Recession Issue, seems like there's a lot of good information in there that might help you deal with what's going on, including advice on what to do if you do find yourself laid off.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Resume Metadata

I had a random thought today while I was processing some e-discovery documents. I stumbled upon a resume, and noticed that the author name didn't match the name on the resume. That got me thinking.

Now, certainly there are plenty of reasons why the author name would not match the name on the resume, things like borrowing a computer, having a shared computer at home, or simply having someone else type it up for you. But still, I wondered if any hiring managers out there have ever looked at the metadata of a resume, and whether that influenced how they felt about that resume.

As the hiring manager, how would you feel about a resume with an author that's a resume writing service? Would that make you question how much you're reading the thoughts of the candidate or the words of someone else?

Or, what else could the metadata tell you? What if the author is listed as the company they currently work for? What if the edit/save information showed they were working on this document on that work PC during work hours? How would that change your thinking on a candidate, or should it? Heck for that matter, how would you feel about someone sending you a resume from their work email address during work?

Of course, speaking of email, just like you shouldn't have a questionable email address, like hotmama98@hotmail, you probably don't want to write your resume signed on as Weedsmoker, or something similar. That just might show up in the author field, and well, what are people going to think of you?

Then again, maybe most managers and HR people never even take any of this into consideration. I think I would if it was me. If Googling people is part of due diligence now days, why wouldn't something like checking out the metadata of an electronic document? Never know what it will tell you. (Especially if someone was silly enough to use track changes...)

So, anyone want to start sending resumes as PDF's? :)

Labels: Career, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Unsolicited Advice on Marketing Demo's

In my short time working in Litigation Support, I've been through a number of product demo's from vendors and there are a couple of pet peeves of mine that could easily be avoided. I felt the need to address a couple of them here, in the hopes that someone out there will take the time to do this right!

First, and foremost, do your homework on my firm! If you have scheduled a product demo with me, you know where I work. Tthere are certain facts about the firm, facts which are easily found on the firm's website and thus I shouldn't have to tell you. Things like how many attorney's we have, how many offices, their locations, etc. If you had spent 5 minutes looking at the firm's site, you'd know these things. Lord knows I spent the 5 minutes looking at your site before the demo, please have the courtesy to do the same.

This goes double if there are any attorney's sitting through the demo with me. Again, 5 minutes on the site can tell you what area of law they practice in, wouldn't it be great if you knew what it was, and modified the demo "script" accordingly? Why yes, it really would!

Moving on to the scripted demo, it goes a long way with me if your sales guy can get through the demo without having it appear as if he's never done this before. Case in point, if your hosted review solution requires popups to be allowed from that site for a certain function, and the popup gets blocked when he/she uses that function in the live demo, I can only conclude that they've never used the product before. Is that what you want me to conclude?

Another example? I have done a lot of training in my time, both in IT and Lit. Support. Whenever I run through my training "script", I always make sure that I know exactly what is going to happen when I use a function. If I am teaching a class about Excel formulas, I make sure I know exactly what that formula will do in my training spreadsheet before I do it in front of an audience. In database training, I know exactly what my searches are going to return before I do them live. It only makes sense to do this. I don't want to have to stumble around while the people I'm training watch and wait. It's embarrassing. When you run a search to show me how the search works, and it gets no results, and you stumble around trying to get results, I'm embarrassed for you.

Lastly, if there's a feature of your product that you don't know how to use, or may not quite be ready, don't try to show it to me. If it doesn't work, that doesn't look good.

So, in short, do your homework and practice your demo. Your demonstration of the product should come across like you have done it before, in fact like you do it every day.

Edited to add: If you promise me something during the presentation, I will not follow up with you to remind you to send it to me. Waiting to see how long it takes you to follow through is part of the test...

Edited (part 2): When you create a demo case for us and provide me with a logon to test drive your tool for myself, when I login and get an email 1 minute later telling me how you saw me login and to let you know if I have any questions, followed up by a phone call when I don't immediately respond to your email, I don't find it helpful, I find it creepy. It makes me want to do anything but login and test drive the product again. Is that what you want?

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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10 Years of Lit Support

I noticed today on the Lit Support Yahoo Group that the email list is celebrating it's 10th birthday. Wow, I can't even imagine what working in this field would have been like 10 years ago. So much has changed just on the tech side of things in that time that keeping up through all the changes must have been exhausting!

Of course, I doubt the pace of change will slow down much over the next 10 years either, so assuming I'm still working in this industry, I'll be one of the folks who's exhausted trying to keep up.

If you're not currently checking out the email coming in from that group, I highly recommend it, some of the best minds in Litigation Technology are over there, and it's a pretty helpful group to turn to when you're in a bind!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Competing Interests

Last week when I talked about my concern with the concept of "if you can't manage it, ban it", this was exactly the sort of clash of priorities I was thinking of.

2008 ABA Tech Survey Sees More Mobility

Hmm, so attorney's are going to want more mobility, and clients always want more responsiveness from their attorney. Let's face it, clients are not going to accept "I'll get back to you when I'm back in the office next week". They'll find a new attorney, one who can respond to their email, review a document, and send a letter on their behalf without waiting to be "in the office" to do it.

All that requires mobile technology, and the attorney's are going to demand the freedom to use whatever mobile technology is easiest and most convenient for them. That includes thumb drives, Blackberry or iPhones, VPN connections, etc. (Eventually this will probably include "cloud" storage too.)

Of course, of the other hand you have two interests on the opposite side of all this mobility and accessibility. One, obviously is data security. How do you keep confidential information, well, confidential?

The other is the possibility of electronic discovery. What happens when you're party to litigation, and the people of interest have been using a blackberry, maybe a thumb drive or two (or 3-4?), working on some documents on their personal PC? A mess is what happens, that's what.

So, the question for law firm IT folks is how to you balance these two seemingly competing interests?

To me the answer lies in policy and education. Unfortunately, that's not going to be easy. There are no shortcuts. You've got to figure out what is going to work best in your situation, and then do the hard work to find the correct balance. I'm still not sure what it would be.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Tech

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E-Discovery Webinar Notes

I spent some office time today listening in on the 10 Things every Corporate Legal Department Should know about Discovery webinar sponsored by Mimosa Systems today, and had a few notes that I posted to Twitter, and want to talk a bit more about here.

The speaker for this webinar was Bill Savarino, Partner at Cohen Mahr LLP in Washington DC. His points were mostly aimed at corporate legal departments more than law firms, but I wanted to get a sense for what he was telling those folks, because those are the same issues facing our clients and it's good to have some idea of where they are.

The first thing Bill said was that corporations that do not have a retention policy covering their electronic documents, are already behind the curve and are keeping much more than they need to. Couldn't agree more. I saw this when I worked in IT, and I see it with clients all the time. There is just so much stuff to go through and review, simply because they've kept everything. Years worth of emails, documents, database records, backup tapes, etc. add up to quite a large legal bill for e-discovery purposes. The more "stuff" the harder it is to find the relevant documents to any litigation, and the harder it is to find, the longer it's going to take, and the more it's going to cost.

He suggested working with your legal team, and taking a look at ARMA for samples of policies.

The next point Bill made that I mentioned on Twitter was that there should be a good relationship between your legal department and IT department. It's not the first time I've heard this advice when it comes to e-discovery. This was also the tweet that got the most response, because I added that it's not something I've seen very often at all! Obviously, I'm not alone in that opinion. Of course, the importance of it is obvious whenever you stop to think about how you respond to litigation. One of the first steps your legal team is going to do, is have to figure out where the relevant Electronically Stored Information is. Who knows that better than your IT department?

Case in point, last year at another conference, speakers referred to the "IT guy with backup tapes in his trunk." Since I used to be that guy, it certainly rang a bell to me! Let's face it, when your legal department gets wind of litigation they're probably going to go to the CEO and other executives to formulate a plan. Do any of those folks know all the places where documents might be stored? I bet not. But I bet there's some random person in the IT department, who's been there forever, and knows where everything is, who no one even thinks about getting involved.

I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough about IT to know that this is probably pretty good legal advice, and I know from experience, and from what I hear in the industry, that lawyers and techies, do not get along very often. But they absolutely should. Lawyers need the techies to locate ESI quickly and correctly, and techies need lawyers to guide them when searching for and working with relevant documents, so that they do so appropriately.

One of the more "interesting" pieces of advice Bill had was for organizations to do this in-house as opposed to outsourcing the collecting and culling of e-discover because of the cost of doing so. I had a bit of a problem with that advice, simply because not every IT department has the expertise to do this correctly. Many medium sized and smaller organizations probably shouldn't be doing this on their own, they need an outside expert. Lord knows when I was a one-man IT shop at a small organization, I had no business doing this! Of course, the webinar was sponsored by a company that sells email archiving and discovery solutions, that help give you more ability to do this in house, for a price. I'm not certain that fact is unrelated to the advice, unfortunately.

He also mentioned, several times, that when it comes to technology like thumb drives, working from home computers, instant messaging, etc. "If you can't manage it, ban it". I thought to myself, that horse has already left the barn. Most of us know there are a ton of people using thumb drives to take work home, logging in from their home PC's, using personal cell phones to conduct business calls, or text messages, etc. I'm not so sure you can put that genie back in the bottle. At best, perhaps you can educate employees on the risk of their home PC's being seized and searched if the company gets involved in some investigation and they've used them to do work. I'm still not sure that would stop it.

Lastly, one suggestion I could get behind was to look for tech savvy attorney's with experience working in e-discovery when it comes time to find outside counsel. This is, of course, where I point out that I'm not an attorney, and none of the advice that I'm sharing with you from the webinar should be taken as coming from me. You should find yourself one of those attorneys with experience dealing with technology, e-discovery and retention policies and talk to them about the best way to protect your business.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Lawyer Survey on Effects of Recession

The ABA Journal is asking lawyers to take a survey about the job market and the current state of the legal economy. I'm not a lawyer so I can't take it, but I'm very interested in seeing how the results work out. I think all of us have seen, at the very least, a belt-tightening in terms of expenses, but I'd be curious to see how things are in firms around the country.

If you are an attorney, you can take the short survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9Dhw2g7bX_2bxfq4mW8eB1Cg_3d_3d

 

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Catch up on the Ethical Problems of ESI

Or rather, catch a up with the recording of a webinar put on by Anacomp featuring Browning Marean and Tom O'Connor by that name. Looks like they have a handful of webinars archived on that page that you can download or play directly from the site in exchange for some contact information.

Depending on how you feel about giving them your contact info, the webinars should prove pretty educational. I plan on checking them out soon, of course they already have my contact information from various other places. :)

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Home Computers in E-Discovery

Simply put, the headline of this post from Gabe's Guide to the E-Discovery Universe describes exactly what you should expect if you are party to a lawsuit at work, and use your home PC to access work information.

News Flash: Yes, your home computer may not be safe from your job’s legal issues

This is yet another area where the line between work-life and home-life is a blurry mess. This crosses over in to all sorts of different areas, business risks, work-life balance, employee expectations, etc. Technology has really changed the way we work, and eliminated the idea for many of us, that we go home at 5 and that's it.

Interestingly enough, on the flight to Kansas City for my wife's cousin's wedding this past weekend, I was reading an article in the online magazine for Northwest Airlines about Best Buy's corporate headquarters ROWE approach. ROWE stands for Results Only Work Environment and is based on the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. The basic idea is that there are no schedules. If you want to go to a movie or grocery shopping in the middle of the day, or don't want to start your work day until 2PM, then so be it. So long as the work you're assigned gets done, you get your results, no one cares how you get it done.

Now, obviously, this wouldn't work everywhere. If you have customers that expect you to be available during certain hours, you kind of have to be, but how many of us work in places that expect us to be in our seats "working" for certain hours during each day regardless of how much work there actually is to do at that point, and then expect overtime during the "rush" times?

In other words, how much less would your Litigation Support staff suffer burn out if they had the freedom to schedule their lives around the workload, as opposed to having to be in the office, sitting at a desk, twiddling their thumbs until 5 every day, only to then have to put in 12-16 hour days when there is a ridiculous workload and deadlines? How much better could their quality of life be if they could leave the office for a few hours in the middle of a slower day and get some errands done?

To look at it a different way, why does your IT staff invest in technology that allows people to access network resources from anywhere, and then you expect them to make sure they spend their 40 hours in the office? Because you want them to be able to work after hours, right? What do you offer in return? That may be why your workplace sucks.

Labels: Career, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Another good example of using Twitter

Brett Burney is at the Master's Conference this week, and aside from doing some blog entries about what he's learning, he's also doing some serious live-tweeting.

I was keeping an eye on Brett's ediscoveryinfo twitter account today. It wasn't quite the same as being here, but I certainly felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

This is the cool part of Twitter, being able to share shorts bursts of information in near real time with others. It helps us share what's going on, right now, as it happens. And it helps those of us who aren't there still take part in the conversation. I highly suggest you give it a try.

If you do, feel free to follow my tweets as well.

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Google's Goggles Feature inspires e-discovery idea

This is brilliant, not that we'd expect anything less from Craig Ball.

How much easier would it be if every email was tagged, classified, and stored accordingly? What if no one from an organization could send an email without classifying it first? We already do things like force them to wipe metadata from attachments before they are sent, why not force them to "tag" it? You could still allow for personal use of email, you just wouldn't keep anything marked personal in your archiving system.

I think it's a great idea, but it's late so maybe there's something I'm not thinking of? What do you think?

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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New Resource for E-Discovery Info

Thanks to The Complex Litigator for pointing me to this new site, ElectronicDiscovery.info. Not only is there a blog at this site, there's an e-discovery news feed pulling information from all over the internet (I located a link to my last post in the feed, that always helps me view the site positively..*L*), and a discussion forum where you can ask your questions and share ideas.

It's all pretty new, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Thinking about e-Discovery?

Ron Miller thinks you should be. I couldn't agree more.

Case in point, recently I've done some work for a client who finds themselves party to litigation. Now, I don't even now what the issues are, or who's bringing the litigation, but this much I do know, the main document custodian involved in the case hasn't deleted an email in at least 5 years. Oh they moved a bunch to the deleted items folder, but that's about it. The rest just got archived to various places, left in the inbox, etc. There are numerous PST files that were collected, and then had to be processed, and much of it has to be reviewed by the attorney. All of this is costing the client money, and taking a lot of time, there's simply no way around it.

Imagine how much less time, and therefore money, would be involved if they had actually gotten rid of emails through the years? Especially all of the personal and junk emails. Most of this stuff coud have safely been deleted a long time ago with no business impact, but it wasn't.

I'm not a lawyer, and I can figure this out. Doesn't take a law degree, just some common sense people. The more "stuff" you keep, the more "stuff" has to be searched through for the relevant records. Period.

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Another Thing I Learned about Robocopy Today

Apparently, if you use Robocopy to copy data into a folder that doesn't already exist in the source directory, Robocopy will create the folder, as I thought it would, but it will be created as a System folder, with Hidden and Read-Only attributes.

Now, that's not a big deal, it's easy enough to make hidden files and folders visible, however it is a problem if you want to include this new folder with other folders within the same directory in a Windows Search. You have to search it on it's own.

For example, if you have a disk with backups dated Jan., Feb. and March, then decide to give Robocopy a try and use F:\April\ as your source directory (Assuming April doesn't yet exist), you will not be able to search for files across Jan., Feb., March and April. April will have to be searched separately. At least that's the behavior I'm seeing. However if you create the April folder before using Robocopy, no worries.

Not a huge deal, but one worth mentioning.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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RoboCopy Weirdness

From time to time I find myself needing to use the Robocopy utility to copy data and retain all of the metadata from the files I'm copying. It's actually quite a nice utility, not only does it maintain the metadata you tell it to, it also is a way more robust and speedy way to copy large amounts of data than just using Windows copy command. It's part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.

The last time I was doing this, I was trying to get a copy of all the data from one external drive to another. (For various reasons, I couldn't remove the drive from it's enclosure, I just needed to copy the data off of it, leaving some important metadata intact.) Using robocopy from the command prompt, it's a pretty easy robocopy F:\ G:\ command, but given the large number of switches that go along with the command, I like to use the Robocopy GUI utility that is available at Technet.

However, the GUI interface wouldn't work properly with drive letters. It's worked before for me copying from a directory, but apparently it doesn't want to recognize the drive letter as a directory and give me anything underneath it. Oddly, I tested another utility I sometimes use for similar work, PathSync, and it didn't recognize anything underneath F:\ either. It's very strange.

As it turns out, it wasn't a huge deal, I went back and figured out what switches I needed to get what I was after, and got my work done using the command line (robocopy F:\ G:\ /e /copyall /r:3, for reference check this blog post with the switches available and what they mean.)

BTW, Robocopy copied about 70GB of data from one USB drive to another in less than 2 hours, in case you don't think it's more robust than Windows Explorer. ;)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Another Good Reason to do Social Networking

On an E-Discovery webinar today, Browning Marean of DLA Piper was talking about the duty of attorneys to be competent to some degree with the technology they were dealing with, when he said the following:

"One way to get competent is to associate yourself with people who are competent."

Now he was referring to vendors, technologists and other experts in the field that they could learn from, or lean on when they need some form of expertise, and I couldn't agree more.

More than that, I'd say this little bit of advice works for just about any professional field or interest you may have! If you need to get competent with something, anything, find someone who already is and learn from them. On-line social networking simply allows us to do that sort of thing on a much wider scale. Now, if I have a question about something, instead of making a couple of phone calls, or asking someone I work with if they might know someone, etc. I can post my query to Twitter, which shows up on my blog, and on my Facebook, and a number of places that I don't even keep track of anymore.

That's a few hundred people, in my case, who I can ask a question of with just a little bit of typing.

I haven't even talked about the benefits of interacting with all these folks and seeing their expertise at work, learning as I go just by reading the things they post about, or being connected to people in locations, and professions, that I might need some information about, etc.

Again, take all that stuff you learned about networking from business school, or law school etc. All that information about the benefits of having an active network, of the sharing of information and contacts. Now realize that social networking tools allow anyone to do that sort of thing, with a much larger reach, even if they are somewhat shy or otherwise socially awkward.

Imagine all the things you can "get competent" at with these tools? Why aren't you?

Labels: Blogging, Career, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Managing Expectations

Last week, when I talked about the questions of having the right adapter for every hard drive type possibly being a reason to consider not doing this sort of work in-house, I responded to a comment with this phrase, "it's a bit trickier when you have to explain why I can image THAT laptop, but not THIS laptop, especially when they're both from the same manufacturer."

As this week has gone on, I've thought more about the concept of expectations, and how do you explain why you can do some things, and not others, or why moving data sometimes takes this long, and other times takes much longer because of the bus speed of the equipment you're using, or the write speed of the media, etc.

Case in point, imaging a SATA drive is much faster than imaging an IDE drive, even if they are the same size. Moving data from a network share to an external drive is slower than moving it directly from a local drive, etc. Most times you may not really think about it, but when you're doing discovery, and dealing with large amounts of data, there is a very noticeable difference, and it's one you have to plan around.

Unfortunately, not everyone realizes that they need to plan around these things. They see that moving a case database took an hour the last time they asked, so they don't understand why they can't take a laptop with the case database with them in a little more than an hour. They can't understand why copying a drive can be done by the afternoon one time, and need 24 hours the next, or why we can print out a set of documents at the office in 30 minutes, but it takes hours using another printer at a client office.

More than that, they can't understand why we could easily grab data from one type of computer, but not be able to grab it from an Exchange or SQL Server the same way, and let's not even get started on RAID arrays! 

Thus, if you're an attorney working with this stuff, you really only have two choices. You can take the time to understand all of the technology, at least to enough of an extent that you can have some idea of how things work and how difficult they are to accomplish, or you can trust the people who do this work for you, whether it be in house or an outside vendor.

I suppose your third option is to not understand it, constantly disregard the estimates given on the time work will take, and spend your working life angry at various litigation support or IT workers (external and internal). That doesn't sound like much fun, though.

I'd love to hear from others about how they manage these expectations without going crazy, so please leave your best ideas in the comments.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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In-House Discovery?

I've seen opinions on law firms doing e-discovery processing or collections in house, as opposed to farming that work out to a vendor that are about as varied and strongly held as the Presidential election. Some people think it's a great value-add for clients, or even a revenue source, while others would never, ever, take the focus away from their legal work, and don't want to deal with the ethical risks involved in handling this stuff incorrectly.

I can't really say that either side is wrong. Many of these folks have worked in this industry much longer than I have, and have more experience dealing with these issues. What I can say, is that if you're going to do more of this work in house, it helps to know what resources you have, and how they can be applied.

For example, we don't do a lot of in-house stuff, but we do a fair share. One of the things we do in house some times is get a forensic "clone" of a hard drive. When I get asked about getting a copy of a drive to work from, I generally say, that yeah, we can do that. Most of the time, that's true. yesterday, it wasn't.

Not because I didn't have time, or I didn't have a cloning tool, but because as technology has advanced, and the ultra-portable market has grown, we've discovered various types of hard drives that we don't have the proper tools for. I can do a SATA drive or IDE drive from any laptop or desktop, but when you bring me an ultra portable with a 1.8" drive with a PATA(ZIF) connector, or even one of the new SSD drives, there's not much I can do. I don't have the proper drive connectors to handle that. At the end of the day, we don't have the resources a forensic expert would have to handle various types of media. That's not our business. On the other hand, if we try to do some of this work in house, we're going to run into the limitations of our resources, and sometimes that's going to be problematic. Might we have been better off simply saying we'd have to send the drive out to be cloned from the very beginning? Maybe. Might our client balk at that sort of cost and find a firm that could do it in-house, and cheaper? Maybe. Is trying to be "somewhere in the middle", being able to do some work in order to limit client costs, but not everything so that we're not doing just that, going to bite us every now and then? Obviously, yes.

Is there a right answer? I doubt it.

Does the fact that I hadn't ever seen the 1.8" drive like that one mean I've been out of the tech loop long enough that my tech knowledge is starting to be irrelevant? Sadly, yeah. :)

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Legal Twits

Adrian Lurssen continues his work connecting legal folks with his list of 145 Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter

Of course, even as I type this, the post has already been amended to include 180 folks now, and I suspect, it will keep growing. There are quite a bunch of folks on there I don't know, so it'll be interesting to surf around, take a look, and add some new legal pro's to my following list.

Looks like we have quite a number of lawyers, law librarians, and knowledge management types, but not so many law firm techs, or litigation support folks. C'mon, I know you're out there. where's the Lit Support social networkers?

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Litigation Too Costly?

That's what the survey's say:

Key findings of the survey of the trial lawyers group's more than 3,800 members include:

? That court pleadings and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure too often are used as leverage to force a settlement, rather than to better define and move a case ahead toward trial.

? That judges don't do enough to control excessive discovery (particularly e-discovery, which can be extremely expensive).

? That the current system works well for some kinds of cases, such as individual tort claims, but is unwieldy for mass tort claims, ERISA cases and administrative law actions, among others.

So if it's going to cost more to go through the discovery process than you would win as a result of the case, what's a litigant to do?

First of all, let me just say that, as a non-lawyer, it seems to me that the Federal Rules, especially regarding e-discovery, seem pretty straightforward. I don't really see any reason why opposing parties can't meet, and come to an agreement on reasonable discovery terms. Maybe there's something I'm missing by looking at them from more of an outsider perspective, but they seem pretty simple to me. If they don't come to an agreement, it's the duty of the judge in the case to make them. I can only assume then that you have attorney's who refuse to be cooperative, and judges who lack the resources, or knowledge, to take control of the discovery process, that both parties are part of the problem right now.

Technology can only do so much. Everyone is waiting for the magic bullet that will make e-discovery costs manageable, but no technology can make up for people not coming to reasonable compromise. Search technology and culling will get better as time goes on, but if you don't agree on search terms, or how to cull documents, the tech is useless!

Here's the thing, if costs continue to go up, fewer and fewer people will even bother to seek justice in the Courts. Why bother? Even if you win you'll end up broke?

Of course, if you're a litigation attorney, that's the last thing you want. Fewer people bothering to bring a suit means fewer cases, fewer clients, and fewer billable hours. If that doesn't provide enough incentive to work on some solutions, I don't know what will!

Any way you look at it, this entire area of the legal industry is very much in flux, and promises to stay that way for a long while.

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Feed No More...

I've retired the ILTA tracking feed. It's been over a week, so I'm assuming that we've pretty much got what we needed from it, and now it's starting to just be pretty empty. Hope it was of some use to all of you who subscribed to it.

Until next year, when I hope to try and talk my way in to going myself....

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Cheating on the Five Blogs Meme

Adrian Lurssen was "kind" enough to tag me for the Five Blogs and Five Blawgers meme. The basic idea is that you suggested five non-legal blogs, and then tag five blawgers to do the same.

I'm going to cheat a little though. After a quick review of Steve Matthews roundup of people who have already responded, I don't know if I can come up with 5 Blawgers to tag who haven't already done this, so I'm skipping that. ;)

Of course, my relative lack of experience in the legal blogging community hinders me there, but it's those years of working in IT, and being part of the tech blogosphere that inspires me to share some of what I know of non-legal blogs. So, without further blathering, here you go.

In no specific order:

1. Career Opportunities - Douglas Welch has taken his weekly column about "High Tech Career Advice" and turned it into one of the best blogs, and podcasts, about managing your career that you will find anywhere. He brings a wealth of experience as a free-lance IT consultant and shares his insights into your career.

2. Download Squad - More information about available utilities and other software that will make your computing life easier than you can shake a stick at.

3. Dumb Little Man -Tips for Life - Need I say more? :)

4. Security Monkey - The content may be a little on the tech/geek side for some of you, but the fascinating stories will keep you coming back, and in the process you'll find yourself picking up little bits and pieces and maybe just understanding computer forensics a little bit, which isn't a bad thing for someone in the legal industry, is it?

5. MS Outlook for Business - You work in the legal field, you use Outlook all day, every day, you should learn more about it. This is a good place to start!

There are plenty more good ones that I could list, but the meme called for 5, so I'll stick to that. On the other hand, maybe I should do something like this on a regular basis? After all, I didn't even get into Photography, Sports, or Child Abuse awareness and advocacy, and I follow a few blogs in those areas too. ;)

Labels: Blogging, Career, LitigationSupport, Tech

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Stuff from Newsletters

A couple of interesting links that came to me from newsletters today.

first, in one of the Technolawyer newsletters, sample E-Discovery Documents from Applied Discovery. There are a handful of samples available, with a few extra available if you register with the site. If you are just starting out with e-discovery and want an idea of what questions to ask about backup tapes, or a good chain of custody log, this wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Secondly, from the September ALSP newsletter, Career Building Through Effective Networking, which if you've been reading here for very long, you know I how important I think this idea is. I like Don's ideas, including being involved not just in person, but on-line with social networking, blogs, and user groups. Some excellent advice.

Just goes to show, even with blogs and RSS feeds dominating my information flow, there's still some good stuff floating around in email newsletters too!

Labels: Blogging, Career, LitigationSupport

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ILTA Links for Wednesday

A few more links from the ILTA conference today:

The Ultimate Legal Technologist (from ILTA )

Web 2.0 Law Firm Adoption (from ILTA)

ILTA 2008

Follow-up on IT Payoff and Project Management Post

The ILTA Grapevine

Project Management Anatomy - Standards, Roles, Responsibilities and Skills (from ILTA)

Legal Aspects of Collaboration Tools (Blogs, Wikis, etc.) (from ILTA)

ILTA KM 4: Wikis in Law Firms

ILTA ?08 - Tuesday

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Important Lesson in Networking

My lunch hour today wasn't anything overly special. I met up with a peer from another firm, to chat and share some information. I had emailed her last week after my unexpected trip forced me to miss the most recent ILTA Litigation Technology Peer Group meeting, because the topic, Trial Technology, was one I had some interest in, and I wondered if she picked up anything useful.

Like I said, nothing really earth-shattering there, but it made me think about how many people approach groups like this one. Seems like there's a small core group, myself included, that is generally there each month, is involved in doing things like the RSS presentation I did a while back, and just know each other pretty well. Then there's a larger group, folks who show up occasionally, depending on the discussion topic. Folks who see the meeting invitation and make their decision to go based on what they might learn from the speaker alone.

There's nothing really wrong with that per se, certainly we're all busy and need to try to use our time wisely. On the other hand, if I was approaching the meetings like that, I wouldn't have developed relationships that allowed me to learn about things that I missed, and I wouldn't have the contacts that I do know. I would have to just accept that I missed an opportunity to learn something last week and done nothing about it, but because I had invested the time in this group, I had another option.

If you have the opportunity to be involved in a group like this, I highly encourage you invest the time. You never know when a contact will help you out the way CB (Not using her name, since she doesn't even know I'm writing this!) helped me out today. Thanks!

Labels: Career, LitigationSupport

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ILTA 08 links for Tuesday

Looks like things are picking up on the blogs and Twitter today. Glad to see it, but it can still be better!

Collaboration Tools and Technologies for Lawyers (at ILTA) Knowledge Management

ILTA talk on Social Networking -- Boon or Boondoggle; Tuesday afternoon

ILTA online discussion : What a difference two years makes

ILTA KM 3: Universal (Enterprise) Search

Social Networking - Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle

Enterprise Content Management (from ILTA)

ILTA ? WestBlog.net - West is doing a number of videos from ILTA 08, you can see them as they are posted here.

LiveNote at ILTA

Enterprise Content Management

Web 2.0 - What is Means to Law Firms

Web 2.0 in Law Firms (from ILTA)

Beyond Matter-Centricity - Full Matter Life Cycle Management (at ILTA)

CIOs on IT Payoff and Project Management

As always, if I'm missing someone that you know about, leave a link in the comments!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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ILTA 08 Blog Links for Monday

Just listing some blog posts I've seen from the ILTA conference that I've seen either in the RSS feed I set-up, or my own surfing around.

Enterprise Search - Impact on How We Do Business

Wikis in Law Firms

Interwoven E-Mail Management; Monday at 2:30

Interwoven Universal Search

Enterprise Search - Impact on how we do business | Knowledge Management

The War For Talent?Revisted @ ILTA

Experience Management - Case Studies in Tackling a Difficult Challenge

ILTA KM 2: Experience Management

Experience Management; Monday, 1 PM

Interaction Portals -- ILTA 2008, Monday morning

Starting a Knowledge Management Program

How to Start a Knowledge Management Program

Also, I found the official conference download site, which is filling up with downloadable versions of some of the presentation materials.

If you know of any other blog posts from ILTA today leave a link in the comments!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Following ILTA 08 even though I'm not there

I've been working on an aggregated RSS feed to keep track of what's going on at the ILTA conference next week, even though I won't be there. Right now I've got a couple of Twitter keyword searches, a Google Blog Search and the RSS feed for that official event blog. As the week starts off, I may add some other things, a Flickr tag feed for example, if folks are tagging their photos with a certain tag, or additional search terms, but for right now you can subscribe to the mashed up feed here. No matter what changes I make to the aggregate, that address will remain the same!

I'll probably leave it up for a couple of weeks, and once everyone's had a chance to return home, and recap their experiences on-line, I'll deactivate it. (Until next year??)

Also, while I'm at it, if there's anyone going to ILTA and doesn't have their own blog that wants to give us some first-hand reports, drop me an email and I'll get them posted as "guest" posts here for you!

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport

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Use What You Have

One of the more interesting, yet completely useful, pieces of equipment I took with me up to Cleveland the other day was something that my boss hacked together to serve as a portable projector stand.

Basically, what he had done was take a piece of black plywood, and drilled a screw through it, that he then attached to one of those pieces of a camera tripod that you screw onto the bottom of your camera. When you snapped that piece onto a tripod, you had yourself an adjustable, lightweight and easy to carry stand, that you could easily place anywhere in the room you needed the projector to be. Just as importantly, it was easy to move out of the way again when you were finished with it.

I even got a couple of comments about it.

Of course, it'd be nicer if we could find something that wasn't so obviously hacked together, but was still just as portable. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Planning for everything!

So, a little more than 7 hours ago, I was at my desk planning on finishing out the work day, and then some "alone" time at home before the wife made her way back from a work event in Akron later this evening.

Instead, at 10PM, I find myself in a hotel in Cleveland.

Seems we have some equipment that needs setup at the court house tomorrow morning, bright and early, and it fell to me to be the guy to haul it up here and do that.

Luckily, one of my suits was clean to wear to court tomorrow, and I could pack up enough stuff for an overnight trip quickly before hitting the road this evening. It does, however, serve as an important lesson. Sometimes you never know where Litigation Support is going to take you, it's probably best to be prepared, especially when it occurs on a night when my wife is out of town and I have to fend for myself in finding the correct outfit. Given that her new job will involve some serious travel, it's good to get this wake up call now, on a relatively easy trip.

Wonder if I shoud ust keep an overnight bag packed all the time? ;)

Labels: LitigationSupport

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GReader Shared Items Question

I was going over that RSS presentation I did a few weeks ago with someone who couldn't make it to the event yesterday at lunch, and an interesting question came up. I talked about how I use Del.icio.us as my shared items because it lets me use various tags, and each tag then has it's own RSS feed, which I can republish elsewhere. Currently, I use that feature to push out items tagged as tech, photography or litsupport to the various sections of my site, all in an attempt to allow folks to pick and choose what kinds of stuff they want to follow.

I noticed, however, that Google Reader does let you "tag" items, so I would think they would possibly be stored that way on your shared items site, but does anyone know if they provide a way to get separate RSS feeds for the tags, apart from the one big "shared items" feed?

I have to admit, I've never used the Shared Items feature in Google Reader, so I don't know much about it.

I also promise to get off this kick of asking questions on my own blog soon, and writing something more informative. :)

Labels: Blogging, LitigationSupport, Photography, Tech

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Legal & Litigation Software Reviews

I saw a mention of this new site from Lexbe on one of the Litigation Support mailing lists today and thought it was worth mentioning on the blog.

http://litireviews.lexbe.com/

Welcome to LitiReviews, the largest collection of free legal and litigation software reviews on the web.  All reviews (100+) are full-text, and have been published in legal magazines, journals, websites and blogs. LitiReview links to copies of reviews available on the internet, or hosted by us at the author's request.

Subscribed to the RSS feed, and bookmarking it as a research tool!

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Book Review - Your Witness

I was contacted a while back by a publicist with Planned Television Arts offering me a free copy of Your Witness: Lessons on Cross-Examination and Life from Great Chicago Trial Lawyers. She explained that even though I am not a lawyer, they really thought the book would be appealing to anyone with an interest in the legal world, including those of us who work on the more technical side of it.

Turns out she was right. Not only are the 50 chapters nice easy to read stories, but they provide some great insight into much more than how to cross examine a witness. Obviously, there are some highly entertaining anecdotes and some great examples of how to cross-examine, but there's also quite a bit to take away about how to deal with people in any situation. Personally, I got some pretty good insight into how to read people, the importance of knowing all your facts, having done all your research, and the importance of having trustworthy people around you when you need to depend on their work.

Surely those are lessons that all of us could stand to be reminded of from time to time, and when you combine that with the experience the various authors bring to the table, and the stores that come from that experience, it makes for a very interesting read.

In fact, reading it sort of reminded me of the "After the Catch" show that has spun off recently from the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch series. (At least the way that show started before they started screwing it up this year with too much planned discussion!) Just get a bunch of experienced fishermen to sit down at a table in a bar and start telling stories. It was seriously interesting and entertaining, much like listening to cabbies, or ER doctors. You don't have to be one of them, or have any desire to be one, to find the stories highly entertaining.

This book is sort of like that, reading it I felt like I was getting to witness some of that story-swapping between attorneys. Obviously, working at a law firm, I found that interesting, but I think anyone with some interest into how trials work, and how attorney's approach them, would find it pretty interesting as well!

As it turns out, my inability to get this book read quickly turned into a timely coincidence, and the publisher is doing a blog for the month of August. It's called your Witness for 30 Days, and it's featuring short quips and tips from the book.

 

Labels: LawFirms, LitigationSupport

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Membership that Pays for Itself?

You may recall that I joined ALSP this year because the membership fee was only $25 for an individual, and while I didn't really know what would happen with the new group, I thought it was worth $25 to be on the inside to find out. Well, in my email today came an interesting invitation, to attend a webinar that would be complimentary to ALSP and Women in e-Discovery members, but cost $50 for non-members.

In today’s litigation support environment, numerous investigations and discovery requests are focusing on electronic media that has bypassed the company’s network including encrypted flash drives, smart phones and data that has been created and stored online. ALSP and Women in eDiscovery invite you to join presenters Pamela Quintero and Julie Wade in this tech-packed hour that will feature an up close and inside internal analysis of a user’s web tracks and data trail. It will also answer the question: “What are the privacy ramifications of the employee’s Internet usage with text messaging and e-mail after the 9th Circuit’s recent ruling in Quon v. Arch Wireless?” The presentation will conclude with a quick review of the latest and greatest in the Enterprise 2.0 technology and all the new API’s that are rolling out.

Obviously, I'm only eligible to be in one of those groups, but if it turns out that I will be able to attend the webinar, I will have saved myself $50 right there, so that's not bad. It sounds like it will be pretty interesting, but I have some work obligations that may get in the way that week, requiring me to not be in my office with web access, so we'll see if I get to take part.

Speaking of ALSP, I owe the folks organizing the local chapter an email about getting involved with that. I should really stop procrastinating that and get involved! Gotta get the most out of my membership before I make any decisions on renewing for next year.

Labels: LitigationSupport

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Darned if you do...

I couldn't help but nod my head reading Brett Trout's post about corporate packrats today.

Does your company still have "floppy" disks in storage?  Is your company storing invoices from the 80?s? If so, it is time for a little spring cleaning. The cost of cleaning your electronic house is actually quite small compared with the cost of reading, searching, sorting and producing all of these "dead" files in event your company is ever sued.

My head nodding came from being involved in a few cases already where a client has tapes that they no longer have a compatible drive for, or database files on removable storage that they no longer have the database software for. Certainly our attorneys would try to make the case that retrieving this data is unduly burdensome, but there's always the chance that the court is going to find differently, so I can't help but wonder why they'd bother to keep this stuff.

Of course, just a few years ago, that was me. Working for a small company, with no document retention policy, and no budget to properly destroy old backup tapes. Back then, and still today, the fear was how much a data breach from improperly disposed of media would kill your tech career. Since there was no budget to pay someone to do it properly, and since there were about 10 more pressing issues, those tapes got tossed into a file cabinet drawer, locked and forgotten. No data breach worries there!

Of course, now it's 2008 and I work in the legal industry. I know full well there is a risk in that file cabinet. It may be small, but it is real, and very expensive! Had I known that then, I might have moved "disposing of backup tapes properly" up the priority list just a tad, not to mention "develop a retention policy", but I surely would have run into issues getting that paid for. Probably would have best just to take a hammer to the cartridge, and a razor to the tape. ;)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Splitting PDF's

Don't you just love it when a court will only accept PDF's of a certain file size and you have to split a file into various sections so that each is below that threshold? Someone on one of the ILTA mailing lists turned me on to A-PDF Size Splitter, and today, since someone was asking about getting this done, I decided to download a trial of it and see how it worked.

In my test, it worked great! It simplifies the whole process and let's you split a PDF into the proper sized parts in seconds, rather than having to guess where to break it up.

They've got a bunch of PDF utilities on their site which also look pretty useful.

Here's hoping someone I can convince someone to let me purcahse a license. :)

Labels: LitigationSupport, Tech

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Knowing Your Audience

Today was the last scheduled Summation training class for this batch of training, and it proved to be one of the most interesting.

Breaking the training up into hour long segments, each focusing on an individual part of the Summation tool, was definitely the right way to go. Instead of trying to cram things into a shorter time, or putting more information into one training session than anyone was going to remember, this allowed me to go in depth into a specific area for a full hour, then give the attendees a week to digest that before getting into the next hour's worth of training.

Of course, the other thing it allowed people to do was pick and choose which areas they wanted to know more about, as well, as opposed to committing to all 4 weeks. That was the case with my students today. As luck would have it, yesterday the class was all folks who are really brand new to using Summation, and I had to spend quite a bit of time covering some very basic things when it comes to using the tagging features. That was ok, because really, even with the extra time to cover the basics, we finished in under an hour.

Today, my luck stayed good. All of the students today were folks who would not need to go over those very basic things, and, quite coincidentally, they were also folks who wanted to learn more about working with transcripts but had conflicts that caused them to miss last week's session over that topic.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you? Naturally, we managed to cover both sessions in the hour allotted for today. Because I knew these folks, and I knew what areas I could breeze through quickly with them, we were able to cover both class outlines, and even have some spare time to answer some random questions for them. It was a great lesson in being able to adapt your training to your audience so that they get the most out of it. (At least I think they got a lot out of it, they could just be lying to me...)

It also occurs to me that the next step in training is not just breaking the sessions down into different specific areas of the program, but also breaking it down by the audience. I had originally planned to cover the same material in both sessions this week, but wound up covering something quite a bit different because of the different audiences of each class. It might be good to keep it somewhat segregated by experience level in the future. At least it's worth considering.

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:45 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

 
Re-certified with a couple of weeks to spare

I believe I've written before that with the release of a new version of Summation iBlaze, they were also requiring everyone who might market themselves as a trainer to pass another certification test, before Aug. 1 in order to not have to go through the whole process all over again.

Today, I completed that exam, with a passing grade. So I am all current on my certification up to version 2.9. I don't currently require it, since I'm only doing in house training, not marketing myself, but you never know what the future may hold, so I figured I'd get it while it was a simple re-certification process, as opposed to going through everything again!

The exam wasn't much different than part 1 of the 2.8 certification, just a few questions thrown into the mix covering the new features of 2.9 out of the 50 questions you need to answer. Obviously, if you've recently taken the exam, it won't seem all that much different.

Still, I'm glad it's behind me, until the next release. *L*

Labels: Certification, LitigationSupport

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Changing face of Litigation Support?

As I've mentioned before, in talking to various folks working in this industry it becomes apparent that the background of the litigation support people in any firm makes a huge difference in how they interact with the paralegals and attorneys.

I come from an IT background, and haven't really had to go on site for a trial. Our paralegals generally handle that part of the Litigation Support process. Other firms that I've come in contact with that have Lit Support folks from an IT background tend to have similar situations.

On the other hand, Lit Support folks who move from a paralegal background have been more likely to see on site trial work, vendor relations, etc. as part of the Litigation Support workload.

When I first made the move into Litigation Support, most of the information I read about it included a whole lot of work that I've never really been called on to do, because the paralegals in our firm have always been doing that work. While we are certainly capable, and should have the capability, to do that work, it's not really considered technical work, and Litigation Support is considered a technical specialty. (In fact, it's part of our IT department)

I wonder, as more Litigation Support folks come into the career from the IT side of things as opposed to the legal side (paralegals and attorneys), if we'll start to see the typical Litigation Support job description change a little to be more of a techie job, or if the handful of firms I've dealt with are the anomalies?

Labels: LitigationSupport

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I'm not the only one with Trust Issues

Last week I wrote about the message you send to employees when you block access to sites that might be helpful to them on a personal level, that they simply can't be trusted.

Today, over at Real Lawyers Have Blogs, I spotted Kevin's similar message about law firms who don't allow lawyers to blog, "We're too scared to let our lawyers blog", in which he links to Liz Strauss and her excellent article about letting your employees blog:

We let employees talk to customers daily - answering email, answering phone call, answering questions at exhibits, and answering letters at the office. We trust what they write on behalf of our company. We once worried in the same way about the telephone and email. Still today any of those customer conversations could be shared internationally or in a court of law.

It comes down to hiring and training employees who make good decisions.

If we trust our ability to choose the right employees and to let them know the values that we hold for our company and our customers, the question of whether we should let them blog falls away as an issue.

I couldn't agree more, and once more, this extends into the dreaded "time wasting" on the Internet as well. All employees are given a certain level of trust, to do their jobs properly, to interact with coworkers appropriately, to handle sensitive information about the organization, or it's customers ethically, all of those things require people who can make good, and proper, decisions. Yet when it comes to the Internet, apparently, all that goes right out the window.

It would be like protecting against possible sexual harassment claims by locking all employees in separate rooms and only letting members of the same sex interact with each other. At some point you have to just lay out the expectations, and trust that you've hired good people who will do the right thing, and get rid of those who cannot.

I'm somewhat lucky, I was already blogging about technology long before I started working for my current employer, and I made it a point to include links to it in my resume. I didn't want anyone to be caught by surprise about me being a blogger. It's a package deal. On the other hand, it's only been very recently that this site, and the firm I work for, have been connected in a few places. I managed to go 6 years without ever having that, until I went to the ABA Techshow as part of my job, complete with my full firm contact information, and blogged from there.

I don't begrudge that happening, it was bound to happen sooner or later, and I knew going in there was a good chance it would happen if I tried to be involved in the legal blogosphere instead of staying over on the tech side of things. It's no biggie, the domain is still under my name, I still make it pretty clear that this is my site, unrelated to the firm I happen to work for, and when I do talk about the work I do, I'm careful to make good decisions about what details I include, and which I leave out. Like I said, I've been doing this for almost 7 years now without incident when it comes to workplace problems, I'm pretty good at it.

That being said, I suppose the day will come at one future employer or another, when I have to write a formal disclaimer (or more likely, have one written for me) so that nothing I say here can be misinterpreted as representing my employer. Frankly, I think the fact that you're reading this from mikemcbrideonline.com makes it pretty clear that this is my site without a disclaimer, but you know how that goes. And when that happens, I'll wonder why it is that I can be trusted to do some very sensitive work and follow all of the legal ethics rules, but not write a few thoughts on a blog.

 

Labels: Blogging, Career, LitigationSupport

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LexMonitor

Looks like the fine folks who run the LexBlog service are also getting into the same Blog Aggregation service that the ABA Journal's Blawg Directory has been in for a little while now, with the "soft" launch of LexMonitor today.

I've been seeing some things on Kevin's blog about the work being done on it, and I've been looking forward to the launch. I'm sure I'll be checking things out over there as time goes on.

One thing I did notice today, was that my blog is listed! (well, the Lit Support part of the blog posts anyway), here. That's pretty cool.

If you go over there now, be aware that, yes, an email has already been sent to the editor about the description. As regular readers know, I'm not an attorney. :)

It's been corrected, nice response time on a Saturday night!

All of these services should make it easier to find good legal blogs, and since I'm going to be doing a presentation at the end of July to the local ILTA group specifically about using RSS, this launch couldn't be more timely!

Labels: LitigationSupport, Personal

Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:52 PM | 2 comments | Links to this post

 
Summation Training class

I don't remember if I talked about the new plan for doing some Summation training, so I'll give you the quick rundown.

Originally, I had tried to cram a whole "intro" to the program in a 90 minute class. I don't think that worked very well. There was simply too much to cover in 90 minutes, so people who were new to the program got lost quickly, and people who were somewhat familiar with the program didn't get enough new stuff. So, we broke it down into 4 hour long sessions(for now, there's 1 or 2 more I might consider later). The first of those sessions, which I'm teaching this week, is the absolute very basics of Summation. In fact, I named the class "Summation: What is is and what does it do?". Subsequent weeks will see me spending an hour talking about Searching, Working with Transcripts, and Tagging/Foldering and other coding shortcuts. I feel like the hour isn't too much to ask, and limiting what we talk about allows me to be a lot more interactive, show off a number of usage scenarios, answer questions, etc.

Unfortunately, the next challenge appears to be actually getting people to class. Today all