The Many Faces of Mike McBride

E-Discovery Certification For Litigation Support Folks?

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:48:00 +0000

In all of the recent discussion about creating a certification for Litigation Support professionals to measure their proficiency in working with electronic discovery, I've always felt a strong push against the idea, but could never really articulate what about it bothered me.

Today, in reading Chris Dale's blog post about it, it clicked for me. Here's the relevant part to this discussion, but you should go read all of it, and the post he links to that started this conversation as well.

My own contribution to the article goes more to the distinction between education and the need for a piece of paper to show that you have been educated. I see it as a costly barrier to entry in an area which needs recruits (nursing is the obvious parallel in the UK) and as something which aims at the wrong target. It is not the litigation support people whose actions or inaction cause the problems, but the lawyers.

I've seen Chris write about it being a barrier to entry and thought that, while I see his point, and it's something that will need to be addressed, it didn't quite hit me where my gut was on this, but the second part of this paragraph definitely does.

Here's the situation as I see it. There are folks who work in this industry who want to be taken seriously by the rest of the legal industry. Of course, other areas of the legal industry have certifications, so we should have one too. Let's put together an ediscovery certification to prove that we're experts in this new and exciting area.

There's just a couple of problems with that. Chris points out the first one, many times in a law firm, it's not the Lit Support folks who are advising clients on collection, or writing ediscovery requests, it's the lawyers. Yes, in a perfect world they are including the Litigation Support folks in that process, but we are far from a perfect world. The real world contains plenty of lawyers who don't actually know enough about ediscovery to even realize they should be looking for technical expertise. Having a certified ediscovery person working in Litigation Support doesn't mean anything if the lawyer above them is clueless about ediscovery and doesn't get them involved. From a clients perspective who do you want to deal with, the outside firm that has a Litigation Support person who's certified, or the firm that has an attorney who's an ediscovery expert? It's the attorney who's going to be appearing at conferences, writing your requests and responding to requests, advising you on proper collection, representing you to the court, etc. The Litigation Support folks may have some input into these things, but I know which one of the two I'd want to be an expert! Unfortunately, the push for certification seems mostly to be aimed at the Litigation Support people, which is not where it will have the most impact.

The second thing the post brought to mind, for me, is that ediscovery is not the end-all be-all of working in Litigation Support. In fact, how much of the day-to-day work is dealing with ediscovery can be very, very different from law firm to law firm, or between different corporate law departments. In some firms, a litigation paralegal might be much more involved with helping the attorney with case management, and the Lit Support folks may do the heavy technical lifting, while in other firms, it's the Litigation Support folks who are doing the work with ediscovery strategy while the paralegal works on more administrative things, and the IT department does more of the heavy lifting in terms of handling data. It's not a one-size fits all discipline. I know, speaking for myself, that while I do deal with handling ediscovery and getting it into review platforms and production sets put together to send to opposing sides, etc. that its not the only thing I need to know about to do my job well. My job also involves quite a bit of technical work with Excel, Acrobat, Powerpoint, etc. I do a fair amount of training, and internal marketing. I work with video and audio files, I put together presentations and setup presentation equipment. Being a certified ediscovery expert doesn't guarantee that I'd be any good at any of these other things, which are still very much part of my job as a Litigation Support Pro. Other people in this industry are responsible for some of the same things I am, and some are responsible for doing things like programming, that I don't do at all. It's a real mixed bag.

Do I need an understanding of ediscovery? Absolutely. I also need plenty of other things. Are there resources out there to educate myself about ediscovery? Tons! Does having a certification program offer me anything that these resources don't already? I'm not seeing it, outside of the piece of paper I can take back to my firm as "proof" that I have worked at being educated. Maybe that has some value, in some circumstances, but I don't see that it's a huge priority item for many of us. We're already swamped with work, and do our best to stay on top of things and keep informed. Many of us hold certifications that are directly related to the tools we use, and the way we work. I don't think adding yet another, very broad, certification is going to do more than add another expense at a time when we are cutting them every way we can. Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather spend my educational budget on something else, something specific that our firm can use right now, not on getting a certification that doesn't mean anything to our clients.

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's exactly what our clients want to see, the piece of paper, even if it's not in the hands of the attorney who works directly with them!

Going to be Changing

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:28:00 +0000

In light of last week's announcement of changes at Blogger, I've decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I'm going to be converting this blog over to Wordpress. Of course, with over 8 years of customizations to the site, it's not going to be a simple process to convert everything, so just be aware that it's going to be going on if/when you see some things looking wonky around here. In fact, the site will probably disappear for a few hours sometime later this week, as I move it to a different server in preparation for the Wordpress install.

Of course, since I have to be in court tomorrow, nothing starts until I'm comfortable with the knowledge that I won't be spending any of my evenings and weekends working, at least long enough to see this transition through. Given the industry I work in, you'll forgive me if plans change and I have to put this off a little bit.

Last week, I was fully prepared to be working long hours for the entire month of February, and things changed suddenly. It's the nature of the business really. You never know when, or if, a case that you're preparing to go to trial, will settle. It often ends up with us doing a whole lot of prep work, only to find that it never gets used, but you still have to do all the work the same way for every case, because some of them don't settle and you have to be ready to go in court!

Anyway, consider yourselves warned, and hang on. It's going to be a bumpy ride for a bit, but I think we'll all be better off in the end for it!

FCC Upcoming Rules on Wireless Microphones

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:27:00 +0000

I didn't realize those wireless mics you use in office conference centers, churches, etc. could become illegal soon if they are broadcasting in the 700MHz band. I posted the details over at the Friends in Tech blog.

Blogger Continues to Ignore It's Long-time Users

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:21:00 +0000

Google's Blogger platform rolled out another new feature this week, one that many users of Blogger have been waiting for, and once again, one I can't use.

See, ever since Blogger rolled out "new" templates a few years ago, the ones that support widgets, and began building all sorts of cool widgets for their users to use on their blogs, they have pretty much only worked on adding new features to those templates.

The problem is, if you, like me, use Blogger to publish to your own site through FTP, and not to Blogspot, you can't use the new templates, and thus, all of the new features of Blogger, are not available to you. The Blogger team over at Google seems to be blissfully unaware that, long long ago, many folks actually used Blogger, and continue to use Blogger, so that they could publish static HTML blog pages to their own sites, at their own URL, with their own hosting, without the Ad bar being added to their templates.

As I think about it, the last time Blogger added a feature that we could, you know, use, was ~~categories, or maybe comments~~? (Upon further review, scheduled posts were available regardless of where you are publishing within the last year) Any way, it's been awhile. Almost all of the innovation at Blogger now seems to be around widgets, and other tools for use with Blogspot hosted accounts. Those of us who don't have those, get nothing. I can't help but wonder if the fact that Blogspot hosted accounts have ads on them is the reason?

It's almost enough to make me switch this blog to Wordpress too, except I don't have nearly the time to move 8+ years of stuff to a new platform!

Update: Seems I posted this a bit prematurely, as Rob Fahrni has pointed out that Blogger is actually going to eliminate support for using FTP to publish to your own site. So, it appears I'm going to be spending my time moving this to Wordpress or using some sort of Google hosting/redirect, which doesn't really interest me at all.

Seeing the Details in the Firehose

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:56:00 +0000

Using ReadTwit the last couple of weeks has been interesting. It's enabled me to see more of what people I follow on Twitter are linking to, and that's not always a good thing. It seems that by occasionally looking at Twitter, I might be missing the fact that some of the people I follow actually spend a lot of time sharing stuff I don't care about at all. ;-)

So it was with that in mind, that I found myself nodding my head in agreement with this.

You�re Pissing Off Your Twitter Followers � Stop!

I've already mentioned my complete disregard for all things FourSquare, and how using ReadTwit helped me realize just how often some people "check-in" for no apparent purpose other than to become mayor of their dentist office, or something equally strange. It's also helping me realize that some people I follow have a tendency to promote the same stuff every single day, or just link to hollywood gossip stories that mean nothing to me. In essence, it has helped me see some the things that are normally hidden by the shear volume of tweets.

Of course, if you read the article, you also know they have huge problem with people feeding their blog posts to Twitter. I actually don't mind that, and I do it so I hope most people don't mind it. If you only have one link to your blog posts, and aren't posting 4-5 times a day, it's easy enough to skip on by without too much difficulty. On the other hand, if you repost the link for days on end, well that's just annoying.

So what are your biggest Twitter pet peeves? Do you think if you saw more of the details of what was in the firehose that you would be pretty quick to unfollow. I'm finding the unfollow button a lot more often myself.

Local Columbus "Hope for Haiti" Fundraiser

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:35:00 +0000

The event to raise money for Haitian earthquake relief through the Red Cross is being held tomorrow, at the Ohio Historical Society, and through online donations.

You can find out all the details, and how you can help, from the press release.

What Will an Economic Recovery Mean to your Staff?

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:28:00 +0000

Kevin Eikenberry posts some interesting thoughts in video form about what will happen when the job market starts to recover, positing that your best and brightest will be the first ones out the door.

I actually tend to agree. I've been thinking, for quite awhile now, that when the job market bounces back and people start to feel a bit more secure in looking around, there's going to be a mass exodus, especially from the legal industry. You can't go a week or two without reading about law firms cutting staff, cutting associates, limiting pay, and cutting all sorts of expenses, and legal is hardly the only industry getting hit with cuts like this.

So the question is, in the midst of all these "cuts", what are you doing to keep your best people engaged and on board? If nothing, do you really expect they won't be looking to leave at the first sign of openings?

More on Facebook Photos and Privacy

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:22:00 +0000

So I noticed earlier this week that your profile photo was being sent out to anyone who had you as a contact on through the iPhone app, today F-Secure points out something about private photos that you might not have noticed, that anyone with access to them can share them!

Still, complaints about privacy aside, I think they have the best bit of advice:

There's is a very simple solution. If you absolutely don't want to share it, then don't upload it to a SOCIAL networking site.

I'd have to agree. Ultimately, even if Facebook did fix all the little holes and give you a chance to lock down every little bit of your profile to just a select group, there's nothing stopping that group from doing screen captures, or whatever, and sharing it with the whole world! If you really want to keep something private, don't post it online. Such a simple rule, it boggles the mind that so few seem capable of following it.

Effective Blogging for Business Development

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:36:00 +0000

I was able to spend my lunch hour yesterday taking in this webinar by Kevin O'Keefe, and I have to say, it was pretty good. I thought Kevin did a good job tying social networking and blogging with traditional business networking, and also giving folks who are looking for ways to get their firms and attorney's interested in blogging some good ideas to mull over.

The big takeaway, for me, was that blogging for the firm is similar to blogging here, but also not. Here, I really am just trying to share information, and learn from other folks who either leave comments here or have their own blogs and continue the conversations there. I have developed lots of relationships with people in a variety of areas, most of whom are not potential clients of my firm, but who do have a lot to offer me in terms of ideas and tips. When I talk to an attorney about blogging, for them, it really is more strategic than that. The number of page views don't mean anything if the people reading aren't potential clients that you are connecting with, and no matter how great the content may be, it isn't going to foster those relationships that bring in business if it's not the information these folks want to know. You have to know who you want to reach, and what they want to read, in order for the blog to be useful to them.

Anyway, that was my quick highlight, you can check out the recording and grab the slides for yourself, Kevin has the links, if you're interested.

iPhone Apps and Social Networks

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:28:00 +0000

Being the avid social networker that I am, as well as an iPhone owner, of course I was excited to see that both the LinkedIn and Facebook apps were introducing features that let you sync information from those networks to your phone's address book. However, after I got both updates, downloaded my LinkedIn contacts to my phone and turned on "syncing" in the Facebook app, a curious thing happened.

I noticed that some folks I am connected with on LinkedIn, who don't happen to have a photo on their profile, and who I wasn't even aware were on Facebook, suddenly had photos along with their contact information on my phone. It seems that the Facebook app was grabbing their publicly available information, which now includes the profile photo, by matching up the LinkedIn email address, even if I'm not connected to them on Facebook.

So, if you've got a somehwat questionable profile photo on Facebook, you might want to be aware that it may be getting attached to your LinkedIn info, and sent to folks you connect with there, despite your best attempts to keep your Facebook profile a secret from them! Consider this your warning. :)

The Facebookisation of the Enterprise

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:45:00 +0000

That's the idea that was presented a few days ago by Confused of Calcutta, and one that I kept finding myself considering after reading about it.

You might recall over a month ago that I wrote about non-lawyer staff and the marketing of a firm, and the importance of bringing more to the table than just doing your job, because any good employee can do your job, a great employee becomes a resource for the firm in many more ways than just doing the assigned work.

That could explain why I see much to like in this idea of coming in to a job and bringing your own identity, using the tools you choose, etc. You don't stop being you between the hours of 8-5, and you don't stop being an employee of the firm at 5. That's not the way the world works any more. Certainly there is much to be said for work/life balance, and I am a big believer in having a healthy balance between work and fun, but at the same time the best source of customers for any enterprise are the people your employees are talking to and interacting with. I know my impression of many companies has been based on what the people who work there have said about it, or experienced while working there, but it's something I don't think many companies think about, and dare I say, it's something very few law firms have stopped to consider. Oh, many will take great pains to not get a negative reputation among lawyers, but don't stop to think about all of the potential clients their support staff is also connected with. The wild world of Web 2.0 is starting to change that perspective, but slowly. It's now easy enough to see how connected many of the people who work for you are, and not just the potential damage that can be caused by disgruntled employees, but also the opportunity that having truly engaged employees brings.

Staff members who are proud of the firm they work for are, generally, more than happy to tell the people they know about it. That can't be a bad thing, can it? Unfortunately, too many places will never know, because they live in abject fear of what their employees might say if they were given the freedom to do so. That's too bad, and just might be an indictment of how they treat these non-attorney staff members. Not so much as people, with rich, full lives, relationships, and many things to offer, but as cogs in the machine, there to do your bidding for 8 hours per day and nothing more.

I know which kind of environment I enjoy working in more. I'd bet I'm not alone.

ReadTwit Feature Suggestion

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:50:00 +0000

After a couple of days of using ReadTwit, I do still really find it useful, and I'm working on what hashtags to filter out, and even finding a few people who I really probably shouldn't have been following to begin with, due to the noise/signal ratio they are pushing out.

But today, as I was skimming my ReadTwit links, I really wished there was a way to filter on more than hashtag and username. Specifically, I want to filter out any links that point to FourSquare, as every time I skim the feed there are usually a bunch of "check ins" of Foursquare users on Twitter, with links to that location's Foursquare page. As I've said before, I don't really care about other people's foursquare check-ins, they provide no value to me whatsoever on Twitter, but most of the foursquare noise gets buried and is hardly noticeable. In ReadTwit, it's much more noticeable, and unfortunately, because it comes from multiple sources, many of whom are people providing lots of good links as well, I don't have any good way to filter it. A nice filter by URL feature would go a long way here!

ReadTwit, An interesting Added Value

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:24:00 +0000

I ran across this post about ReadTwit over the weekend and was immediately intrigued. I've watched as Twitter has become a source of interesting links being passed around by the folks I follow, I'm missing some really great information.

Now, as I've said before, I have no desire, nor the time, to try and read every tweet from the people I follow, nor do I have any expectation that I'm going to check out anything close to 100% of the links they are sharing, but I sure would like a way to see more than the 10%, less when I'm too busy to really check my twitter stream at all, that I currently see.

The other downside to trying to follow links to things shared on Twitter, is that most times you just get a link, with maybe a brief description, or the title. It's a lot of work to decide what's worth the click and what isn't, and again, when pressed for time, the title better be darned good to get me to click!

Thus, my excitement about ReadTwit:

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.
Duplicate links in the same time-frame are grouped together. No more retweets overwhelming your link browsing activity.

Naturally, I went to check it out, and added my ReadTwit feed to Google Reader right away. The next morning, I had 97 items waiting for me in that feed, stuff I normally wouldn't have seen as it got tweeted while I slept, with 2000 characters of available items as a preview instead of 140, and the ability to filter out certain hashtags or users. I was able to skim through it right along with the other things I normally browse through in Reader. I haven't started using the filters yet, but I can see where I will start filtering users who send a lot of links to a subject that isn't highly relevant to me. I don't know, it's sort of an experiment at this point, to see just what kind of ReadTwit feed I can come up with that allows me to see more of the links people I'm following are sharing, without having to spend all of my free time catching up with Twitter!

However it ends up, I'm willing to bet it helps me see more links to good information than I'm seeing now.

I also wonder if this doesn't help, at least a little, with the security risks involved with shortened URLs, and not always knowing where they are leading you? Not sure if it's a cure-all for that, but can't see where it would hurt either.

Connecting in 2010

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:45:00 +0000

Since this is the first post of 2010, I thought I'd make it a nice list of all the ways you can connect with me, the content of this site, or both! :)

Blog RSS Feed
Subscribe by Email
Become a fan on Facebook
Comments RSS Feed
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Tech
RSS Feed just for posts tagged Litigation Support
RSS Feed just for Photography
My Flickr
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Friendfeed
Delicious Links

Not to mention the other site I run, for child abuse survivors, and all of the many ways you can interact with that content as well!

So there you go, no matter what services you use or where you like to hang out on the net, there should be a choice for you to keep up with things being posted by me. I thank you for the interest in what I'm doing and talking about, and look forward to connecting with all of you, wherever it may be!

Here's to a getting your 2010 networking goals off to a good start!

Best Photos of 2009

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:00:00 +0000

A yearly tradition around here, highlighting my favorite photos from my Flickr stream that I took in 2009. Hope you enjoy, and Happy New Year!

End of Year Reflections

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:31:00 +0000

Well, it's been an interesting year, that's for sure! Like most years, 2009 didn't turn out the way I expected. Last year at this time, I really had no idea what was headed my way. The biggest surprise, obviously, was being promoted to management. Not only did I not expect that to happen, but I also really had no idea what that would mean for my every day life.

I've mentioned before, management is different. It's no longer about going to the office, doing the work, and going home. I spend so much time planning strategy, evaluating ideas, brainstorming, preparing training materials, reaching out to other areas of the firm, etc. that it can be very difficult to turn that off at the end of the work day. That's not always a bad thing, sometimes I can accomplish much more of that stuff away from the distractions of the workplace, but it has caused some other things to suffer. I find myself with less time to write very meaningful posts here or on the child abuse blog, and I've not managed to blog at all over at Friends in Tech. I simply don't have as much spare mental energy as I used to! :)

On top of that, it's been more difficult to go home and do the social, personal things I'm used to doing. Oh, I may still spend the evening with Angela doing things we've always done, but I may not be 100% mentally there when we are. I may be mulling over an idea I had earlier, or fleshing out details of a plan while also watching The Office or eating dinner. That's not good.

That being said, I suspect that much of the problem lies not so much with a lack of time as much as an undisciplined approach to time. Not that I'm unorganized, I probably have more lists than any three people you know, but when I sit down to write, or brainstorm an idea, it doesn't always keep my focus, and winds up taking much longer than it should. My mind goes in tangents instead of opening up an Evernote page and outlining an idea right then and there while I'm thinking about it.

So that's the plan for 2009. I'm going to be trying to figure out ways to be more disciplined with my time, and learn how to focus on getting all the way through a plan, or activity, then focus on the next one, instead of starting, writing a few ideas, then remembering that I need to email someone about another task, or check the hockey score real quick, etc. Any tips you've gleaned from your own lives are always appreciated!

Have a Very Merry Christmas

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:49:00 +0000

Email Subscriptions

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:08:00 +0000

I have been messing around with some things on my other blogs tonight, and it occurs to me that the current email subscription to this blog, is sort of a pain for me. (Not that anyone really noticed when I quit sending it out, it was never a very popular way to follow the site.)

On the other hand, I realize that Feedburner has an email subscription service that wouldn't actually require me to do much more than turn it on, so in the interest of making the blog available in any way you could want it, now you can subscribe by email to get all the blog posts on the same day they are posted.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program....

Noticing a Trend about eDiscovery Education

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:45:00 +0000

Two things struck me as more connected than it might first appear today as I was reading through my RSS feeds. First, the announcement that Merrill Corp. is going to to partnering with the University of Alabama on an ESI course, and the second that the latest Kroll OnTrack survey shows a steady increase in the number of people who believe eDiscovery strategy is not just a legal department responsibility, but that it is shared with IT, if not the CIO's area outright.

Given the fact that "The findings are in contrast to those of three years ago, when most respondents believed e-discovery belonged entirely to the law department." I think what we see here is a case where legal professionals approached ESI as they have every other legal problem that they come across, mainly as one they can handle without outside assistance, and over the course of the last couple of years, have begun to realize that they might be wrong.

Certainly, electronic discovery as a legal issue is discovery just as it's always been, but in our interconnected, technological world, locating and producing data requires a bit more than a law degree. Law school doesn't teach you how networks work, how mobile devices work, how Web 2.0 technologies work, or how to access data that might be stored in SQL backends. So, in order to develop a full strategy for ediscovery, you need IT's expertise, and oh by the way, it wouldn't hurt if more lawyers had some basic technical skills in this area, hence the push for some new law school classes covering it.

Oh, and yes, I see both trends as a positive. Lawyers, in general, need much more education about technology and ESI. Maybe, armed with that knowledge, they'll also know when they need to ask for help, and where to get it, too!

More Holiday Fun

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:55:00 +0000

Speaking of Friends in Tech and the holidays, Douglas Welch, of the Career Opportunities podcast, as well as many, many other things, sent an email out last night that I thought you might be interested in. So if you're looking for a little of the holiday spirit, check it out. I haven't seen this year's reading yet, but it's usually a pretty good time.

As you may have known, we produced our 4th Annual Live Reading of Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" on Sunday. Below are links to the audio and the video from uStream, too. If you subscribe to my shows, you will see the audio in your podcast downloads, as well.

http://welchwrite.com/cip/audio/2009/live-christmas-carol-2009.mp3

The recording of the live video from uStream is here:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/3294337

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Douglas

More info at http://DouglasEWelch.com

A Geek Christmas Story

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:30:00 +0000

The Friends in Tech group has released our Christmas special, A Geek Christmas Story today.

�Mattie Stevens, a young boy of the early 80�s, dreams of owning a Commodore 64. He sets out to convince everyone this is the perfect gift. But, along the way runs into opposition from his parents and everyone around him including old Santa Claus"

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to participate in this year's Christmas special (A story for another time in itself...), but I know that a lot of hard work went into it, from FiT members and special guests, and that all that work really shows in the final production. Give it a listen and enjoy the geek humor, and if you enjoy this special, check the bottom of the post for links to previous FiT specials, some of which I did play a small part in. :)

I Almost Completely Agree

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:36:00 +0000

Over at the eDiscovery 101 blog there's a good response to the fact that "82 percent of employees use their personal email accounts to send large work-related files when an email attachment exceeds the size limit imposed by IT."

I agree with all of the points Bill makes, except one. Can you guess which one?

First, create written email use policies that forbid employees from ever accessing their personal email accounts at work from employer provided equipment.
Second, Include in the above mentioned policy that company related records are never to be sent or received from personal email accounts.
Third, explain to employees that if they violate the policy, they could be fired.
Forth, explain that if they were to violate the policy, attorneys, including opposing counsel may be reading their personal emails in discovery some day.
Fifth, create a way within your infrastructure to send and receive large files so employees don�t have to fall back to using their personal email accounts to send or receive large business related files.

Here's my thought. If you do steps 2-5, you don't necessarily need to do step 1. Most employees, when they have the resources through their IT department, aren't going to bother to use their personal email account to send work information. Especially if someone explains that it means the legal department might have to go through their personal email account!

Blocking personal email accounts does add an extra level of certainty about employees sending work information, but it also adds another thing to think about. If none of your employees can access their personal email during the 8-10 or more hours they are in the office, their work email address will become their personal email address. You will be storing, archiving, and searching a whole bunch of extra stuff that you wouldn't even have to worry about if they could just use their web-based email account during that time. That can end up being a whole lot of extra ESI when it comes down to it.

It does make me wonder if it's worth it. I don't know for sure, but it's something to consider.

E-Discovery Reading Room Blogroll OPML

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:18:00 +0000

I mentioned the E-Discovery Reading Room site the other day and even suggested it'd be cool to have their blogroll put out as an OPML file for everyone to just load up in Google Reader or some other RSS feed reader. As it turns out, the next day I got an email from someone affiliated with the site asking about that, so I went ahead and created an OPML file for it, and passed it on to them.

Since, I was creating it, I thought I'd share it with you all as well, so go ahead and grab the OPML file and import it to your favorite RSS application.

Do note though, that it is slightly different than their blogroll list in this way. Since Craig Ball is basically blogging at EDD Update, I just have the EDD Update feed in here, knowing that would include Craig's blogging. Also, the Sedona Conference, while having a wealth of information, doesn't appear to have a feed that I could subscribe to. So, there's no way to include them in an OPML file.

Enjoy, and happy reading!

Upgraded to Snow Leopard

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:13:00 +0000

Image by mikemac29 via Flickr

There I was, in the Apple store picking up a couple of gifts for Christmas, when my eyes wandered over to the Snow Leopard upgrade. I hadn't given it too much thought before this, mostly I hadn't seen anything that I really felt was an earth-shattering improvement and worth making the effort to upgrade. Yet, the magic of the Apple Store made me pick it up, and seeing that it was "only" $29, and since I was in the distortion field, of course I bought it! ;-)

Anyway, I upgraded in place, and found some problems. Oh wait, seems there's another 500MB of updates available from the Software Update servers, probably should have checked that before I started running programs, eh? OK, that seems to have taken care of any issues I was having, and things do seem to be back to normal.

So now that I have Snow Leopard, and am outside the distortion field, what are the "highlights" of Snow Leopard that I haven't found yet? What's your favorite thing about OS 10.6, your problems, etc.? Do share with the Snow Leopard newbie.

Can Someone Explain Foursquare to me?

mike.mcbride@gmail.com (Mike McBride) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:49:00 +0000

OK, so I've seen all the "experts" talking about how Foursquare is going to be the next big thing, and I've seen other folks using it, and looked at what it is, and how they're using it, and I'm just not seeing the point.

Oh I see the point for commercial opportunities, isn't having all this data about where someone goes, how often, how much time they spend there, etc. pretty much the holy grail of advertising data? Heck, you can get users to advertise for you, for free, simply by coming to your place of business a lot, and checking in with FourSquare!

What I don't understand is why I, as an individual, would want to use it? To let people know where I am? I can do that with Twitter without checking in and sharing that information with the foursquare database, and even then, how often do you really care where I am? Seriously, it's one thing to share a favorite restaurant tip with folks via twitter, it's quite another to announce via Foursquare and Twitter every time you go to the grocery store, or to your office, or stop at Starbucks. Sharing that I'm a big fan of a local pizza place might be helpful information to local folks, letting the world know every time I go there, is borderline creepy, and completely useless to the people who follow me, unless they really want to stalk me. (But since most of my followers are not local, it's even useless for that!)

As I see it now, the only real "benefit" to using it is that some businesses might be willing to give me free stuff, if I "check-in" on average more than other users. So, again, I'm trading my privacy for a free coffee? No, thanks.

If there's a place I feel really strongly about and want to recommend on Twitter, or my blog, I'll gladly do that, without bugging all of you each and every time I go there, and without allowing a marketing company to track my coming and going.

So, those of you are convinced this is the next big thing, hit the comments and tell me if I'm missing something?