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Welcoming a New Blog and a New Champ: eDiscovery Trends

OK, I admit that only one of these topics is completely about eDiscovery – the other is somewhat about eDiscovery, sort of…

When I attended Relativity Fest last week (here’s a recap of some of the highlights), one of the highlights of the conference was the ACEDS happy hour on Monday evening, where I got to visit with everybody from my CloudNine colleagues to Kelly Twigger to Bill Hamilton to Andy Sjeja to Tom and Gayle O’Connor to George Socha to Jim Gill.

I had never met Jim Gill before, but I have been a fan of his work on the Exterro blog.  So, I was delighted to find out that Jim was joining the ACEDS team to manage marketing for them.  And, now – not surprisingly – ACEDS has announced a new blog called the ACEDS eDiscovery Voice!  Jim’s first post discussed one of the panels at Relativity Fest, where David Horrigan of Relativity moderated (how many panels did he moderate, just sayin’) and Mary Mack Executive Director of ACEDS, Patrick Burke from Cardozo Law School; Wendy Collins Perdue, Dean of the University of Richmond School of Law; William Hamilton, Professor at the University of Florida School of Law; and Hon. Xavier Rodriguez, US District Judge and Professor at St. Mary’s Law school all participated as panelists.

Jim’s post discussed how the legal profession is changing and how legal project management is causing traditional training of attorneys and paralegals to shift (there’s that word again).  Good post and I look forward to more good posts in the new ACEDS blog.

In my years of providing litigation support and technology services to clients, I’ve worked on my share of high-stress and high-deadline projects.  One project from the early 90’s stands out during my “Big 6” (as it was known back then) consulting days – I was recruited to join the project on a Friday the 13th (which should have been a clue) and worked ungodly hours (and most weekends) for the next three months to manage data related to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy re-organization and submit a reorganization plan to the court (that hearing was also on a Friday the 13th).  Our working pattern was two to three nights of working late (typically between 10pm and midnight) and then one night of hanging out at the hotel bar, which is the only bar I’ve ever been able to go into and request “the usual”.

Anyway, imagine working a project like that for seven to nine months, with many nights working late, some under the most extreme stress, with the whole world watching and a city (devastated by recent floods) counting on you to give them a big lift and bring them joy.  When some of them have never experienced that joy in up to 55 years of waiting.  No pressure, right?  :o)

With all due respect to my friends and readers of the blog from Los Angeles, I’m talking about the Houston Astros, who won their first ever championship Wednesday night in the last game – winner take all – in the season.  While I celebrate the Astros’ championship (while at the same time wishing that my mother and father had lived long enough to see it), it occurs to me that a baseball team is much like a project team, doing what they can to come through in the clutch to meet deadlines.  While those of us who don’t play major league baseball will not get the headlines that they do, the satisfaction of meeting a goal is much the same.  Congratulations, Astros and congratulations Houston!

So, what do you think?  Do you have any extreme project stories to share?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Copyright © ESPN

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

That Was Random: eDiscovery Best Practices

This may be the shortest title ever in this history of this blog.  In the first year of the blog’s existence (when we had a lot fewer subscribers and readers than we do now), we did a three part series on how to perform an iterative random sample of a search result set to evaluate the results.  As we have discussed the topic recently in two webinars, I thought I would revisit it here for those who didn’t attend the webinars (though you can still check them out on demand) and weren’t readers of our blog back then.

Searching is part science and part art – there are too many variables to make assumptions about your search results, so you must test your search results to determine whether your search criteria is valid or needs revision.  Often, you’ll find variables that you didn’t anticipate that force you to revise your search.

It’s not just important to test the result set from your search, it’s also important to test what was not retrieved to look for result hits you might have missed.

How many documents should you review in your test of each set?  How do you select the documents to test?  Initial testing can help identify some issues, but to develop a level of demonstrable confidence in your search, your test should involve random sampling of each set.

To determine the number of documents you need to sample, you need three things:

  • Size of the Test Set: This would be the size of the result set OR the size of the set of documents NOT retrieved in the result set;
  • Confidence Level: The amount of uncertainty you can tolerate in your results. A typical confidence level is 95% to 99%;
  • Margin of Error: The amount of error that you can tolerate (typically 5% or less).

The good news is that you don’t have to dust off your statistics textbook from college.  There are several sites that provide sample size calculators to help you determine an appropriate sample size, including this one.

Here’s an example.  A search retrieves 100,000 files, with 1,000,000 files NOT retrieved:

Retrieved: Size of the test set = 100,000; confidence level = 99%, margin of error = 5%.  You need to review 660 retrieved files to obtain a 99% confidence level in the resulting test (goes down to 383 retrieved files if a 95% confidence level will do).

NOT Retrieved: Size of the test set = 1,000,000; confidence level = 99%, margin of error = 5%.  You need to review 664 retrieved files to obtain a 99% confidence level in the resulting test (goes down to 384 retrieved files for a 95% confidence level).

As you can see, the sample size doesn’t need to increase much when the population gets really large and you can review a relatively small subset to check the results.

Once you have determined the number of documents you need in your test set, it’s best to generate a random selection of the documents you plan to test to avoid potential bias in your results.  This site has a random integer generator which will randomly generate whole numbers.  Simply supply the number of random integers that you need to be generated, the starting number and ending number of the range and the site will then generate a list of numbers that you can copy and paste into a text file or even a spreadsheet.

You can then apply those randomly generated numbers to your result set to review those selected documents to test your search.

In our Best Practices for Effective eDiscovery Searching webcast earlier this year, I walked through an iterative example of testing and refining a search until it achieved the best balance of recall and precision.  The example is based on a real-life example I once performed for a client.  You can check it out on the webcast or via this old post here from our first year.

So, what do you think?  Do you use sampling to test your search results?  If not, why not?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Welcome to 2016! The Age of eDiscovery Automation is Upon Us!: eDiscovery Trends

It was not that many years ago that if we wanted to buy something, we had to go to a store.  If we wanted to withdraw money from our bank account, we had to get it from a bank teller.  If we wanted to buy music, we had to go to a music store – today, we can download the music we want instantly.  If we wanted to rent a movie, we had to go to Blockbuster or one of the other movie rental stores now rendered obsolete by streaming services like Netflix*.  And, we can get just about anything else from Amazon and other online retailers that sell pretty much anything.

Did you know that, on this most recent Black Friday, where retailers have numerous discounts designed to get shoppers into their stores, online sales still outpaced in-store sales for that day.  Even on the “biggest shopping day of the year” more people would prefer to purchase Christmas gifts from the comfort of their home than to fight the crowds and wait in line at the stores.  My wife, Paige, and I did quite a bit of shopping that day for the kids and for friends – all online.  Your gift is “still in the mail”… :o)

Let’s face it, many services for which we used to rely on other people for are now automated in such a way that people can take care of that need themselves.  Most people love to be self-sufficient and do things themselves – as long as it’s reasonably simple to do so.  Why haven’t self-check lanes at grocery stores completely replaced those with an attendant that performs the check out for you?  Because the grocery stores haven’t figured out a way to make it easy enough (there are still many people who don’t like to use the self-check lanes at grocery stores because they find it to be too complicated).

What about in our industry – eDiscovery?  Are we an automated industry?  We’re becoming one – a lot faster than you think.

It’s hard to believe that next month will be the fourth anniversary of Judge Andrew J. Peck’s ruling in Da Silva Moore, which is widely considered to be the first case that considered technology-assisted review (TAR) to be an acceptable way to conduct review for ESI in discovery.  Since then, we have had numerous cases where TAR was approved for use during the review process and the technology and best practices associated with TAR have come a long way in a very short amount of time.  Automating the majority of document classification from a small subset classified by humans has become an accepted practice to significantly reduce review costs without sacrificing quality (if anything, quality has been found to have been improved in many instances).

Is that the only place where automation has been implemented in the eDiscovery process?  Nope.  Now, providers, including my company CloudNine (shameless plug warning!), have begun to automate many tasks from Identification to Production within the eDiscovery life cycle, with the biggest benefits gained in the Processing phase.  Now, you can point to a collection of Outlook PST or other files on a hard drive, upload them and an automated process will unpack them, extract attachments from emails, render all files to an HTML format, capture metadata, capture text, OCR image-only files that don’t have text and HASH the files for de-duplication (that’s what you can do with our software, anyway).  Many of these processes used to be manually performed (at least in part) and expensive; now, they can all easily performed with a few keystrokes from the comfort of your desktop – for free.  Automation has touched every phase within the EDRM model and will only continue to do so more as time passes.  It’s inevitable.

It’s time for all of us to accept that the age on eDiscovery automation is upon us.  As my boss likes to say, “you can get on the bus, or get run over by the bus”.  It’s here, and it’s here to stay.

*By the way, did you know that the CEO of Netflix once tried to sell his company to Blockbuster?  And, was turned down?  I’ll bet the executives at Blockbuster had that opportunity to do over again.

So, what do you think?  Do you think that we’ve reached the age of eDiscovery automation?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Why the Blog was Down — eDiscovery Downtime
 

If you’ve tried to access the blog for the past couple of days, you’ve experienced a lot of difficulty and, for parts of Monday and Tuesday, got an indication that the URL didn’t exist.  Here’s why:

According to Typepad, our platform for hosting the blog, “Beginning Thursday evening, Typepad was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) off and on through today. A DDoS attack is an attempt to make services unavailable, but in no way was your Typepad account compromised. All information in your Typepad account is secure, including billing information. The attack on Typepad was similar to an attack on Basecamp which you can read about here.

The Typepad blogs and application have been restored. We put in place some roadblocks to mitigate the attack, but we are on high alert as attackers change their tactics regularly.”

Typepad reported that originally on Friday, then was hit with another attack on Sunday that left our blog down until yesterday afternoon.  It has been up since then.

Hopefully, the blog will continue to be up and accessible.  We’re continuing to monitor the situation and will provide an update if anything changes regarding the DDoS attack that Typepad has encountered.  Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading the blog!

Not a Typical Blog Post Today

Since we started eDiscovery Daily back in September 2010, we have yet to miss a scheduled day to publish a blog post.  I’m not sure if today counts, but I feel compelled to talk about my dad.  Please excuse this one day departure from our normal topics.

My dad passed away on the morning of July 4, peacefully, in his sleep.  His name was Doug Austin too.  His funeral is today.  Dad never met a stranger and loved family and friends above all.  He would always tell us “be careful” when we left, even if it was just to go to the store 5 minutes away, and would say “no use to rush off” even if we stayed with him all day.  He loved spending time with family and numerous long-time friends.

He was a talented artist who loved to paint and create stained glass artwork.  All of our family has at least one of his beautiful stained glass pieces and dad typically welcomed each new member of the family with a stained glass piece tailored to them.  He was a great cook and I still prefer his steaks over those of any restaurant.

He had quirky sayings like “I’m still able to take nourishment” and “It’s time to get up and pay for your bed”.  When he farted, he would say “oops, I stepped on a frog”.  When he was really tired, he could snore loud enough to peel the paint off the walls.

He survived over 21 years after quadruple bypass surgery and survived over 2 years after being in the hospital for over three months.  He had congestive heart failure, COPD, kidney issues, lymphoma and a terrific, up-beat attitude that enabled him to not only survive all that for years, but to thrive.  He was always there for those he cared about and truly felt blessed by the love of his Lord Jesus Christ, his family and his friends.

I feel blessed to have had such a terrific father.  Dad, I love you.

Back to typical eDiscovery topics tomorrow, I promise.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Craig Ball Interview Postponed Until Wednesday

To accommodate our two-part interview with Ralph Losey, we have postponed publishing our interview with Craig Ball until Wednesday.  Fear not!  Craig’s interview delayed is not Craig’s interview denied.  🙂

Announcement: Trial Solutions is now CloudNine Discovery!
 

In addition to today’s regular blog post about eDiscovery case law, we have an important announcement: Trial Solutions is pleased to announce that we have officially changed our name to CloudNine Discovery!

After much discussion, we determined that a more accurate name was needed to represent our expanded products and services which have developed over the years, particularly in the areas of online data and document review hosting

We selected our new name, "CloudNine Discovery" with two goals in mind: 1) to continue providing customer service that puts our clients "on cloud nine" and 2) to lead the world in combining self-service with managed hosting and "cloud" storage.  Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties, rather than being hosted on local servers.

Our mission will continue to be to simplify the discovery process through innovative technology, transforming data hosting into a world-class experience that is easy and affordable. CloudNine Discovery will offer the same products and services offered by Trial Solutions, and our core leadership will remain intact.

As for the eDiscovery Daily blog?  While the name of the sponsor has changed, the blog will continue to provide daily eDiscovery news and analysis each and every business day, just as we always have.  We haven’t missed a day yet (knock on wood!) and will do our best to continue to provide useful information from an eDiscovery perspective.

As always, please share any comments you might have or if you'd like to know more about a particular topic.

CORRECTION: Announcing Thought Leader Interview with Jeffrey Brandt, Editor of Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest
 

As eDiscovery Daily has done in the past, we have periodically interviewed various thought leaders in eDiscovery and legal technology to provide insight as to trends in the industry for our readers to consider.  Recently, I was able to interview Jeffrey Brandt, Editor of the Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest and columnist for Legal IT Professionals.

With an educational background in computer science and mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh, Jeff has over twenty four years of experience in the field of legal automation working with various organizations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  I believe you will find he has some unique insights to share with the readers of eDiscovery Daily regarding legal technology trends.

I had stated that Jeff's interview will be published this Friday, April 22, but forgot that this Friday is Good Friday (no blog post that day, sorry!).  So, Jeff's interview will be published next Monday, April 25 instead.  Mark your calendars!

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