It was an interesting conversation, and I hope these conversations can help us in the eDiscovery industry think about employee wellness, mental health, diversity, and other issues that can result from doing things the way we’ve always done them. It’s time for this conversation to be had across the industry. If this can spark more of that, I would be very happy.
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the industries I have worked in has been this idea that remote and asynchronous work is something that makes it less likely that the only people we can hire are the ones who are both willing and able to dedicate their entire days to be in the office and also willing to jump in and do more work at any hour of the day and weekends. That eliminates a whole bunch of people from even applying, especially women with kids, neurodiverse and disabled candidates, and underrepresented groups without a large presence in the area where your office happens to be. (When you start a company in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, or some other “hot” area, your candidate pool is limited to the people who live there now or are willing to move immediately.)
Essentially, if you’re not familiar with email threading, the idea is that if a group of people is sending emails back and forth by hitting the Reply button, and the previous email is copied into the body of the previous email, you don’t really have to read each individual email. At some point, later emails have the entire conversation in them. This means that it’s not necessary to read the “lesser included emails” because you already read them as part of the thread. But, the problem Judge Aaron describes is that while the text is there at the end of thread messages, you’re missing important metadata that is unique to the individual message.
As I said, having worked with Teams messages often I have seen this, where a transcript doesn’t have all of the message metadata, especially the time/dates of each message versus the beginning or end of the chat. If you’re creating those transcripts and not including each message in your production, you might be running afoul of your production requirements.
But, as I said, IANAL, so don’t take my word for it, do your own testing.
I mean, it seems so simple, and yet so genius. But also so very unethical:
“In a program called ‘Communicate with Care,’ Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privileged label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel’s advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does not respond at all,” the DOJ told the court. The fact that attorneys often don’t reply to the emails “underscor[es] that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence,” the DOJ said.”
This post is a little specific to Nuix users, which I know is not something I’ve been posting for a while now, but I had the opportunity to talk to Bill Potter from Rampiva about a week ahead of the release of their new tool and wanted to share some of that conversation with you.
You can read about Baseline here.
In essence, the idea is to solve an interesting problem that has existed with Nuix Workstation users for years, finding an elegant tool that lets you know just how much work your people and your technology are doing.
I tuned into a webinar yesterday put on by ACEDS, and then saw today that Jared Coseglia, from TRU Staffing Partners, had posted an article with many of the same points he mentioned on the webinar. If you’re in the eDiscovery space or want to get into the eDiscovery space, this is worth a read: