Joint Post With Ron Friedmann On The Best Approach to EDD Search
Comments (2)This is a two-part, joint blog post. As Ron Friedmann explains “I recently spent some time looking at Xerox’s new CategoriX EDD tool and writing a post about it. After reading it, I realized it would be helpful to set my discussion in a broader context. So I turned to my friend and e-discovery expert Tom O’Connor and author of the docNative Paradigm Blog . What follows is a combined post; we wrote each section individually and are cross posting this. “
Xerox CategoriX and Musings on the Best Approach to EDD Search by Ron Friedmann
In early October, Xerox Litigation Services released a new e-discovery search and review tool called CategoriX. How should EDD professionals think about this and other new search technologies?
A Xerox PR firm offered me phone time with the CategoriX product manager, Svetlana Godjevac. Always curious about new litigation document review tools, I accepted. I also read the CategoriX product sheet and a statistics-heavy Categorix white paper explaining how Xerox tested the product.
The CategoriX approach sounds interesting and useful. Xerox R&D in Grenoble developed the product and the company appears offers it beyond the litigation market (see the page Text Categorization and Clustering housed under Xerox Technology and Brand Licensing.) The product combines ‘probabilistic latent semantic analysis’ (document clustering) with iterative machine learning.
It sounds powerful but I can’t evaluate its effectiveness. This is by no means a criticism. Both search approaches have been around for years so it’s hard for me to assess how they work in CategoriX. Learning more about Caterorix confirms what I’ve suggested before: mere mortals can no longer evaluate EDD platforms, at least not by assessing the underlying algorithms.
I lament that I don’t know enough statistics to fully comprehend the white paper but Xerox appears to have tested the product (though the nature of the 2 document sets studied and human reviewer groups is not described). One finding I did focus on is that Xerox used this tool to quantify inter-reviewer variability. Not surprisingly, humans are not all that consistent, a fact that lawyers routinely overlook. In my conversation, Ms. Godjevac reports that Xerox does explain the statistics to lawyers and works with them to understand the problems of human review.
How a litigation team should choose among the available advanced tools is a real quandary. The investment to run a “bake off” among competing choices is enormous; moreover, the outcome may well depend on the nature of the documents. What does this say about defensibility in general? Would it be defensible to use product A if an objective study showed that product B was 20% better? And what exactly does 20% better mean anyway?
Courts seem a long way off from considering this question but the leap from the current standard to one that requires comparing tools seems more a matter of degree than of kind. Are litigation support professionals obliged constantly to evaluate new tools to make sure what they now use is adequate?
Of course, I may be way off base here. Which is why I am surprised and dismayed that I haven’t found much commentary on this tool. Many other bloggers comment on EDD but I did not find much blogging (or Tweeting) about CategoriX. I would like to see more discussion of products, comparisons of them, and the future standard of what courts will rule is defensible.
[I felt this did not stop at quite the right spot so am glad Tom stepped in....]
The Challenges of Evaluating EDD Search Tools by Tom O’Connor
Ron, your comments about the problems facing anyone attempting to evaluate ED applications are right on target. First of course is the fact that one needs an engineering degree to even read some of the white papers in this field. But it seems to me that the problem starts even before that with several fundamental problems.
The first, as you mention, is that there is never enough detail given about the document sets being studied. Understanding the documents is a crucial part of any automated litigation process and evaluating products which don’t sufficiently describe the universe of documents they are working with is simply impossible. This is not a failing of Xerox alone but really all the reviews I have seen. It is nearly impossible to cross compare applications if they are “tested’ on widely divergent data sets.
In addition, some search engines use a standardized thesaurus such as the publicly available WordNet Lexical database, an open source thesaurus from Princeton University. It has over 100,000 English words and associations. As an open source resource, the WordNet database is available for download and examination if needed for litigation validation purposes. If, however, the comparison is between one program using this database and another one that uses an internal or closed database, does that really help us?
Even the widely touted TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) study suffers from this failing in my opinion. The TREC study used a test set of 7 million documents available to the public pursuant to a Master Settlement Agreement between tobacco companies and several state attorneys general. Attorneys assisting in the study drafted five test complaints and 43 sample document requests (referred to as topics). The topic creator and a TREC coordinator then took on the roles of the requesting and responding counsel and negotiated over the form of a Boolean search to be run for each document request.
The problem is those documents were not in native format and did not include attachments. Given that typical collections today consist largely of massive volumes of e-mail, many with attachments (and attachments to attachments), this is , a huge issue when evaluating search capability for email.
A second problem I see concerns what type of search is best. We all agree that computer searching is more accurate than human review. The Sedona Conference Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery, released in August 2007, states that “Human review of documents in discovery is expensive, time consuming, and error-prone. There is growing consensus that the application of linguistic and mathematic-based content analysis, embodied in new forms of search and retrieval technologies, tools, techniques and process in support of the review function can effectively reduce litigation cost, time, and error rates.” So the assumption that concept search is better than Boolean searching, although widespread, may be wrong.
In Disability Rights Council of Greater Wash. v. Wash. Metro. Area Transit Auth., 2007 WL 1585452 (D.D.C. June 1, 2007) Federal Judge Facciola stated that “concept searching, as opposed to keyword searching, is more efficient and more likely to produce the most comprehensive results.” Judge Grimm made a similar statement in Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc (Civil Action No. MJG-06- 2662 (D. Md. May 29, 2008).
But the TREC study results, however, don’t seem to support these judicial positions. In that study, computer scientists from academia and other institutions attempted to locate responsive documents for a number of topics using 31 different automated search methodologies, including concept searching. The result? Boolean searches located 57 percent of the known relevant documents. None of the alternative search methodologies had better results.
In fact, a Boolean search generally equaled or outperformed any of the individual alternative search methods, but those alternative searches also captured at least some responsive documents that the Boolean search had actually missed. The lesson? Manual review misses many documents but so does keyword searching, Boolean searching and concept searching – but they all miss different documents. The best approach is to use multiple applications to do iterative searches which winnow down to the best possible results.
This isn’t late breaking news. Ron, you started a discussion in May 2008 in Concept Searching in E-Discovery. Some of the info above I gleaned from reports on web sites and reports by people like Herb Roitblatt or Gene Eames who know a whole heck of lot more about this than do I. But the point is, one product isn’t going to do the job, no matter how good the product or convoluted their documentation. And irrespective of the tool, the “operator” better be well trained or who knows what the results will be.
I share Ron’s concern about emerging standards of defensibility. Given the technical complexities and the lack of statistical certainty, I don’t see how a clear, stable defensibility standard will emerge other than what we’ve seen, namely, have a plan, apply some smarts, and document what you do. As we’ve seen in other arenas, developing standards by judicial opinions is a long and messy process. Well, I suppose the upside is that consultants will stay busy!
Kellner Say Cooperation Now The Law in 7th Circuit
Comments (2)The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin and all the federal district and appellate courts therein, including of course Chicago) has begun an Electronic Discovery Pilot Program. It was, according to the report itself “Developed as a result of (a) continuing comments by business leaders and practicing attorneys, regarding the need for reform of the civil justice pretrial discovery process in the United States,(b) the release of the March 11, 2009 Final Report on the Joint Project of the American College of Trial Lawyers Task Force on Discovery (“Task Force”) and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver (“IAALS”),1 and (c) The Sedona Conference Cooperation Proclamation. The stated intent of the Pilot Program is to “take action to reduce the rising burden and cost of discovery in litigation in the United States brought on primarily by the use of electronically stored information (“ESI”) in today’s electronic world.”
The Seventh Circuit Electronic Discovery Committee , which developed the program, is a group of trial judges and lawyers, including in-house counsel, private practitioners, government attorneys, academics, and litigation expert consultants headquartered primarily in the Seventh Circuit. Committee members met for the first time in May 2009 and consulted with Ken Withers, the Managing Director of The Sedona Conference. Over the next four months various E-Discovery Committee members working in sub-committee groups continued to work on developing the Pilot Program and the result was the Seventh Circuit Electronic
Discovery Pilot Program’s Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information (“Principles”). Those Principles will be implemented and evaluated during Phase One from October 1, 2009 through May 1, 2010.
What does this mean in practical terms? I asked that question of Chuck Kellner, the Vice President of Consulting for eDiscovery at Anacomp’s CaseLogistix and he replied: “The Sedona Principles on Cooperation and more, including references to Early Case Assessment, are about to become the law of the land in the Seventh Circuit”
Chuck went on to explain: “Basically what it says is that attorneys will learn about ESI, will come up to speed on their clients’ electronic discovery matters, will assess their cases, and will cooperate effectively and will negotiate scope of electronic discovery, and they will be monitored while doing it. Later phases of the program will turn the screws tighter on requirements of cooperation, disclosure, and proportionality. The meat of this starts on page 9 and the principles themselves on page 13. The back half is a proposed standing order, which the judges can use in every case filed in every federal court in the Seventh Circuit. “
“I think what it will mean for us is increasing emphasis on reading the data early. The EDRM as a way to describe various litigation support tasks might still be useful, but the EDRM as a linear workflow is under stress, as we predicted, in favor of piling up more concurrent tasks atop each other, and to “the left”. Everything that we have been discussing and what we are now doing in ECA about mining metrics, about finding the significant documents quickly, and about estimating the size and cost and time of the review, these are all quickly becoming legal requirements, not just good strategy. “
Echoing statements we have heard all year from federal judges, Chuck also said. “ The tone of the judges there was that they were no longer bearing attorneys’ unpreparedness for meet-and-confer, and were prepared to start a rigorous program of enforcement. To place this more broadly than the Seventh Circuit, the theme echoes what we’ve seen in case decisions in the last few months.”
So if you haven’t read The Cooperation Proclamation, this is a good time to do so. Especially if you practice in the Seventh Circuit.
Quick Report on ECA from The Masters Conference
Comments (1)Ron Friedmann sat in on a session at The Masters Conference called Early Case Assessment: Looking to the Future – From Early Assessment to Early Awareness. His notes included the following key points:
What is ECA? It’s getting an early look at the facts of your case and at the scope of discovery.
Where are the immediate savings; how is this different than past? It’s not a tool per se, it’s a method (a process, the right people, and technology). ECA does not generate savings very early – it’s not about upfront savings. You have to invest at the outset to learn about the case. Clients typically want to delay spending, so ECA is counter-intuitive to many lawyers.
Other than cost, are there other limits that hold back ECA? Clients are the main barrier. We are moving beyond linear review and search terms to a more subjective approach.
Tools that are better at ‘understanding’ data are in the ECA bucket… how do these emerging technologies affect the process, especially if clients bring the tools in-house? To start, who should operate the tools? It depends on organizational structure. It can be IT, Legal, Info Security, other corporate departments.
Ron’s comments on the session include the observation “What struck me most about this discussion is how much education is required “ and he goes on to comment that it seems we’ve been talking about these issues for over 20 years. Remember that in 1990, early tools such as scanning and OCR’ing led to full-text databases which could be searched by both conceptual and Boolean tools.
So why are we still trying to convince people to do iterative searches of data to pare down document populations? Ron notes that “The vendor challenge here is that clients are reluctant in this environment to spend upfront. So you need to educate your client – let them know that ECA will reduce the volume of documents that require human review. “
Fascinating comments as always from Ron and you can read more on this and his other reports from The Masters Conference at his blog, Strategic Legal Technology.
A Few Recent Happenings in the ED World
Here’s several interesting topics that have developed in the last week:
- The discussion about ED standards that I broached in my post of Sept. 21 continues to percolate. The most recent take on the debate is a posting on EDD Update by Seattle lawyer and technologist Eric Blank who raises some interesting points about data exchange protocols, capture rates and the use of consultants.
- You can expect those points, and many others, to be discussed at The Master Conference this week in Washington, D.C. Chuck Kellner will be there speaking on Information Cooperation, a subject on which Chuck and I also presented a webinar several months ago: the recording of that event is available on the Anacomp web site here.
- The EDRM web site has a new look and feel and has added a great deal of content, including a link to the E-Discovery Zone, the series of interviews with luminaries of the e-discovery profession conducted by Browning Marean and myself and hosted by TechLaw.
Project Management Redux
The most recent Socha-Gelbman survey stated that “project management has grown in prominence as a means to minimize missteps and deliver more predictable, reliable, and cost-effective results.” And PM is certainly getting attention these days thanks to a good discussion at The Delaware E-Discovery Report and the results of a survey released by Applied discovery. But the discussions are not all positive. In the Delaware ED Report, Paul Easton said, “implementing project management software does not equal implementing project management” and the AD survey found that although 87% of respondents considered project management a critical component of their ED projects, only 8% were satisfied with the clarity of objectives and plans defined in their last e-discovery project.
So if we all know that PM is good why aren’t we doing it better? Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that we are lacking a specific definition of the phrase. As Brett Burney points out in his article The Emerging Field of Electronic Discovery Project Management, “ Formal project management, however, is a recognized professional discipline, complete with educational requirements (Project Management Professional or PMP) and an oversight body called the Project Management Institute (PMI).” Yet I have never heard of a law firm utilizing those standards in designing a project scope or specifications.
Why? Well as Conrad Jacoby says in his article on LLRX called Applying Project Management Techniques to Litigation Discovery, litigation team leadership “often only has time to focus on the highest priority projects and problems.” This dichotomy really highlights the fact that technology tools are just one component of success in e-discovery. Every case is different and there is no cookie cutter application or device that meets the challenges of each of those cases.
The fact is that advice from a good consultant ( like those mentioned here or well myself) is necessary for assistance with project planning, including data scoping, choice of document review methodologies and project training. Given the rise in number and complexity of ED specific applications, the need for good consulting services is at an all time high in order to select the best choices for the workflow of your particular matter. So take a look at the articles mentioned above, start assessing your projects and get the advice of a good consultant to help you decide how best to proceed.
Top Ten Tips for E-Discovery
Yesterday morning I spoke on a webinar for The Masters Conference called “Top 10 Tips for Working with E-Discovery” in which I shared the 10 tips I give to clients at our first meeting. The idea is give a better understanding of e-discovery and basic obligations under the current state and federal rules. Hopefully this begins my consultative engagement with the first step towards best practices e-discovery and a better discovery strategy.
My top ten tips are:
1. Read The Rules
2. Read The Decisions
3. Know The Terms
4. Know Where The Data Is
5. Talk To The IT Staff
6. Talk To The RM Staff
7. Help Clients With RM Policy
8. Develop A Litigation Hold Strategy
9. Enforce The Litigation Hold Strategy
10. Talk With Your Clients
You can hear a recording of the prsentation by going to the Masters Conference webinar page to and don’t forget to stop by the Masters Conference itself, Oct. 13th and 14th at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.. I’ll be there as will Chuck Kellner and all the Anacomp folks, who will be happy to answer your questions about e-discovery and how best to handle the challenges you are facing.
Certification ALSP Style
Joe Howie, an old friend and prinicpal at Howie Consulting, is active in the Association of Litigation Support Professonals. In that capacity, her recently posted the following about the ALSP Certification Program.
This posting is being submitted on behalf of ALSP by Espe Rebollar, Windy Brown and Deborah Coram
There’s widespread recognition that certification would be a positive step forward for litigation support in general and e-Discovery in particular, for both the certified individuals and the organizations that employ them. However, not all certifications are created equal and the value of any particular certification process is directly related to the rigor of the certification development process and the characteristics of the sponsoring organization. As co-founders and leaders of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals (ALSP) we’d like to describe the value that ALSP brings to the certification process and share our vision of certification.
About ALSP. One of the primary reasons that ALSP was formed was to provide for certification. This is set forth very clearly in our by-laws which, in keeping with the ALSP policy of transparency, are set forth on the ALSP Web site (www.alsponline.org). Recognizing that we had to build credibility before we presented ourselves to the industry as a qualified certifying agency, ALSP has spent the first year of its incorporation building our organization and laying the groundwork for a rigorous and thorough certification program. Milestones we have completed include:
· Became a not-for-profit, legally incorporated 501(c)(6) corporation.
· Contracted SmithBucklin, the world’s largest association management firm, to provide administrative support and guidance. This means that the staff reports to the ALSP board as part of the contractual relationship and that the staff receives guidance, training and oversight from their employer, Smith Bucklin which manages 320 trade associations, professional groups, technology user groups and government institutes/agencies, thereby assuring quality and continuity.
· Established over 15 local chapters including several in Canada.
· Developed membership benefits including a monthly newsletter and free educational Webcasts.
· Completed the organizational governance framework like electing officers, assisting chapters in becoming separately incorporated, setting up bank accounts, accounting systems and auditing processes.
· Obtained liability insurance for the benefit of ALSP officers, directors and staff.
· Developed the framework and plan for the independent certification process (more below).
ALSP has an inclusionary membership policy which specifically encourages participation from the entire litigation support industry. Our members come from leading law firms, corporate legal departments, government legal offices litigation support software development companies and service providers from all over North America, Europe and . ALSP encourages this inclusionary policy as it believes a certification process must be appropriate, valid and approved by the entire industry. We believe that the skills, knowledge and experiences gained by working in the various sectors vary considerably and the only valid certification process would be one that actively incorporates the views of all sectors.
Australia
Statistically-Valid and Legally-Defensible Certifications. SmithBucklin has guided several professional and industry trade associations through the certification process and has experts in certification on staff. Their advice and guidance for this process has been invaluable, particularly around the specifics of certification. We have learned that as certification becomes increasingly valuable to individual professionals and the organizations that employ them, certification applicants who fail to become certified could file law suits challenging the validity of the certification process, exposing the sponsoring organization and potentially its officers and directors to liability.
Accordingly, it is essential that the certification process has to be statistically valid and legally defensible. While everyone would like to have a certification program in place now, the reality is that building a proper certification program is a four-step process that ought to involve the services of a highly qualified psychometrician from a specialized test development company.
Here is a brief summary of the steps in a certification development process which conforms to guidelines established by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies and the National Organization of Competency Assurance:
1. Job Analysis: A panel of subject matter experts from a broad cross-section of industry writes up what they do at their jobs, what they need to know, how often they do it and how important those tasks are.
2. Test Specifications: The results of the job analysis survey are tabulated and analyzed by the psychometrician and subject matter experts to create a final report —the basis for the test specification or the exam content outline.
3. Test Development: Working from the exam content outline, a panel of subject matter experts prepares items or questions and answers for the topics on the outline. After the initial items are prepared, the test development panel meets as a group to assess the various items to check for ambiguity and correctness of answers so that one optional answer doesn’t tip off the correct response, make it easy to eliminate an incorrect answer, etc.
4. Cut-Score Study: After the exam is administered the first time, another panel determines the cut-score; i.e., the score that will be used to determine who passed or failed the certification.
To read about the development steps in more detail, please visit www.alsponline.org. This process is rigorous, time-consuming and expensive. ALSP issued an RFP to testing companies for the certification process, reviewed the responses, selected several potential companies, interviewed them and selected one which provides a good fit for ALSP objectives. ALSP has also done private surveys of key individuals within law firms, corporate legal departments and software and services providers to validate the interest in certification.
An appreciable amount of money needs to be raised by a certifying body in order to implement this process. When the economic downturn hit with full force early this year, ALSP opted to delay the beginning of a funding drive until the economy started to improve, which it appears it is now doing. ALSP will in the near future be launching a funding drive to cover the costs of a statistically-valid and legally-defensible certification program. We will be asking organizations, individuals and chapters to contribute to this important project; all money raised for this purpose will be kept in separate funds and used only for certification. The funds raised will be reported and administered in a public fashion so as to maintain full accountability to the entire industry.
The training or course work required to pass the certification exam/s is an entirely different area. ALSP will not be offering a “course” that results in certification of those who pass the course; while ALSP will offer educational programs as part of its member benefits, those people who are directly involved in the certification program will not be involved in developing an ALSP program to help candidates pass the exam.
In summary we would like to highlight the following:
· ALSP is an existing, functioning not-for-profit corporation with staff members that are highly qualified in the certification process.
· ALSP has demonstrated its commitment to transparency and inclusiveness; it welcomes the participation of all qualified individuals, groups and organizations in the certification development process and it welcomes any suggestions or guidance on how to ensure the development of a certification process that truly measures the ability of professionals to perform.
· ALSP has spent a long time establishing the correct foundations, administration, expertise and independence to become an independent and accountable certifying body to the litigation support profession.
· ALSP is a long way down the path of creating a certification program including the upcoming launch of fundraising efforts to acquire the funds to commence the certification process — we will be releasing details within the next month and are happy to speak to individuals or companies wishing to contribute.
ECA: The New Buzzword
Early Case Assessment (ECA) is the new buzz word in the e-discovery world but really only the word is new. Attorneys have always tried to identify and collect the specific documents they need for a particular matter soon after talking with their client. The difference now, of course, is the often immense volume and electronic nature of the documents which make narrowing their scope problematic.
The key to ECA, at least to my mind, is recognizing that is a process and not a product. True ECA services should that offer law firms and corporate counsel the ability to gain early insight into cases, help determine case strategy, and predict, control and minimize the costs, risks and time of electronic discovery. Ideally, this would involve metrics, methods and technologies to empower litigators to make optimal decisions as early as possible pertaining to case strategy and budgets.
These services would include defensible search methodologies to reduce the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) required for review, and the means to slash indexing times and nearly all reprocessing prior to review. This, in turn, would offer litigators the ability to bring predictable, reasonable costs to electronic data discovery processes, reduce unnecessary capital expenditures, and eliminate spends typically made under tight deadlines or resource constraints.
Browning E. Marean, Senior Counsel and co-chair of the Electronic Discovery Readiness and Response Group at DLA Piper, says ” The ability to gain early insight into the facts of a case, determine case strategy, and predict, control and reduce costs is exactly what law firms and general counsel departments are looking for. A vendor’s strategy of approaching ECA as a process, and offering the right combination of consulting services enabled by proven technology should be the right one for addressing these challenges and differentiating itself from other providers in the marketplace.”
Chuck Kellner, Vice President of eDiscovery Consulting at Anacomp, explains how his team provides ECA services by saying . ” We realize that ECA can mean different things to various stakeholders, so we offer a consultative approach and a scalable solution that is flexible in how it acquires data. Our services ensure lawyers and litigation support professionals’ satisfaction with the defensibility of search methods, and the speed and continuity of litigation processes. By leveraging our proven processes and technologies, Anacomp’s ECA services offer litigators the ability to gain early visibility into ESI and make smart, budget-conscious decisions about what to review and how to negotiate the scope of data discovery.”
So when you hear a vendor say they “provide ECA services”, ask them if by that they mean a process which provides faster operations, higher capacity processing, intelligent data collection and superior search, analytics and processing abilities to provide defensible, best-practice and cost-effective solutions to eDiscovery obligations. If they don’t, you may be speaking with the wrong vendor.
New Organization to Promote ED Certification
In response to the growing requests for standards in the e-discovery field, renowned legal educator (and old friend) Chere Estrin has formed the Organization of Legal Professionals and asked me to be a member of the Board of Governors. Her statement regarding her reasons for forming OLP and an explanation of the immediate goals is set forth below. I encourage everyone to read this statement and visit the OLP site.
One of the most important single observations from the most recent Socha-Gelbman survey is the shortage of expertise in the market-place with providers, law firms and corporations reported as “fighting each other for the few people who actually understand what is involved in handling electronic documents”. That is significant because the lack of qualified professionals can only grow as a problem. Predictions of 20% or 25% growth in the field does not guarantee that a generation of skilled and knowledgable people are simply going to pop up.
Most litigation support staff learn on the job. Even as a vendor recruiting candidates from major law firms, you run a risk that the candidate does not have core competencies. Many are victims of degenerative on-the-job training. That is to say, the person training them received inadequate training; the new inadequately trained person goes on to train another person who becomes inadequately trained and so on and so on and so on.
For the most part, vendors do not have substantive training programs geared toward the e-Discovery individual. There’s plenty of continuing ed and in-house seminars but no real comprehensive long-term courses nor exams to certify competencies in eDiscovery. Your reputation, career and business remain at risk.
In this tough economy, vendors hesitate to spend money on training. Firms and vendors alike may hire a person from another position i.e., litigation paralegal; computer technician or someone from outside the field, to transition into the lit. support field. Only after plenty of trial and error (possibly on your clients’ cases), are they called an “expert”. There is no test, certification nor standards to enter or stay in this relatively new profession.
As a result of this crying need from judges, law firms and vendors alike, a new non-profit organization, The Organization of Legal Professionals (www.theolp.org ) has been formed for the purpose of providing an exacting and tough certification exam to establish core compentencies for vendors and law firms alike. This organization has assembled a stellar Board of Governors and Advisory Council to assist them. The names of these legal icons are the best in the nation and beyond.
We need your help. We need you to join and support us. We need you to help spread the word. The lack of qualified people in the fastest growing arena of litigation is unprecedented. And now, there is a way to manage and control the problem.
Please go to www.theolp.org and join as a member, sponsor, student member or affiliate partner. We are also in need of Member Benefit Providers. You can also become a Subject Matter Expert and get in on the ground floor of this exciting adventure in solving a major problem in the legal field today.
The enormous challenges that have already been met by lit. support stars and hard-working, dedicated and persistent individuals in this field today should not be underestimated nor dismissed. It’s simply time to take a look at the future and who will be entitled to call themselves an e-discovery expert and why.
I look forward to your thoughts. Please feel free to contact me or anyone on the Board of Governors or Advisory Council directly.
Chere Estrin
Is Your Litigation Support System Stuck in the 80’s?
Your current litigation support software may not measure up to the demands of today’s electronic document based litigation. Why? Perhaps it’s built on 80’s technology and unable to manage large volumes of data. Maybe it can’t handle certain document types or foreign languages. or maybe it’s jut not all that easy to use.
Let’s face it. Some of today’s popular litigation support systems were designed and built back when Milli Vanilli was still riding high on the charts. These systems have attempted to keep up with the times, but, due to their architectures, they struggle under the demands of the ESI productions that firms are seeing today. And while most of us acknowledge these faults, we continue to use the old programs because that’s what they’ve “always used,” and we believe that migrating to a new platform would be difficult or expensive to do.
But leveraging the latest litigation technology does not call for a drastic “rip and replace” of your existing technologies. Instead a migration and/or co-exist strategy can
- Be painless to an organization
- Provide uninterrupted litigation process support
- Easily transfer data back and forth
- Allow users to continue leveraging the features of their legacy system
- Be cost effective
- Lead to rapid litigation process acceleration
Next Wednesday I’ll be moderating a webinar hosted by Anacomp’s CaseLogistix on how to accomplish such a migration and with the economy set to turn around, now is the time to prepare for the inevitable litigation activity upswing by understanding how to handle such a migration.
Presented by Mandi Ross, CEO & Managing Director, Prism Litigation Technology and Jeff Friedman, Senior Product Manager, Anacomp, this webinar will answer the following questions:
- What are the limitations of older litigation support systems?
- What can modern litigation support platforms do that legacy systems can’t?
- How can my firm or legal department migrate to or co-exist with a next-generation platform?
- What are the best practice paths and processes to do so?
- What firms have done so, and what can I learn from them?
- How can data be converted and shared from one system to another?
- How can I maximize my success with a new platform?
Follow this link to find out if your lit support software is stuck in the 80’s or register here for the webinar.
