Document Management Is Ripe For eDiscovery
July 18, 2012
If you work in any aspect related to the legal community, you should be aware that eDiscovery generates a great deal of chatter. Like most search and information retrieval functions, progress is erratic.
While eDiscovery, according to the marketers who flock to Legal Tech and other conferences, will save clients and attorneys millions of dollars in the long run, there will still be some associated costs with it. Fees do not magically disappear and eDiscovery will have its own costs that can accrue, even if they may be a tad lower than the regular attorney’s time sheets.
One way to keep costs down is to create a document management policy, so if you are ever taken to court it will reduce the amount of time and money spent in the litigation process. We have mixed feelings about document management. The systems are often problematic because the management guidance and support are inadequate. Software cannot “fix” this type of issue. Marketers, however, suggest software may be up to the task.
JD Supra discusses the importance of a document management plan in “eDiscovery and Document Management.” The legal firm of Warner, Norcross, and Judd wrote a basic strategy guide for JD Supra for people to get started on a document management plan. A plan’s importance is immeasurable:
“With proper document management, you’ll have control over your systems and records when a litigation hold is issued and the eDiscovery process begins, resulting in reduced risk and lower eDiscovery costs. This is imperative because discovery involving electronically stored data — including e-mail, voicemail, calendars, text messages and metadata — is among the most time-consuming and costly phases of any dispute. Ultimately, an effective document management policy is likely to contribute to the best possible outcome of litigation or an investigation.”
The best way to start working on a plan is to outline your purpose and scope—know what you need and want the plan to do. Also specify who will be responsible for each part of the plan—not designating proper authority can leave the entire plan in limbo. Never forget a records retention policy—it is legally require to keep most data for seven years or permanently, but some data can be deleted. Do not pay for data you do not have to keep. Most important of all, provide specific direction for individual tasks, such as scanning, word management, destruction schedule, and observing litigation holds. One last thing, never under estimate the importance of employee training and audit schedules, the latter will sneak up on you before you know it.
If, however, you still are hesitant in drafting a plan can carry some hefty consequences:
- “Outdated and possibly harmful documents might be available and subject to discovery.
- Failure to produce documents in a timely fashion might result in fines and jail time: one large corporation was charged with misleading regulators and not producing evidence in a timely matter and was fined $10 million.
- Destroying documents in violation of federal statutes and regulations may result in fines and jail time: one provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act specifies a prison sentence of up to 20 years for someone who knowingly destroys documents with the intent to obstruct a government investigation.”
A document management plan is a tool meant to guide organizations in managing their data, outlining the tasks associated with it, and preparing for eventual audits and litigation procedures. Having a document management plan in place will make the eDiscovery process go quicker, but another way to make the process even faster and more accurate is using litigation support technology and predictive coding, such as provided by Polyspot.
Here at Beyond Search we have a healthy skepticism for automated content processing. Some systems perform quite well in quite specific circumstances. Examples include Digital Reasoning and Ikanow. Other systems are disappointing. Very disappointing. Who are the disappointing vendors? Not in this free blog. Sign up for Honk!, our no holds barred newsletter, and get that opt-in, limited distribution information today.
Whitney Grace, July 18, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
LinkedIn and Desperation Marketing: The State Farm Case
July 13, 2012
I am all for making sales. What I found interesting this week (July 8 to July 12, 2012) was a flurry of four spam emails from what I believe to be LinkedIn’s marketing operation. I poked around a little and realized that I had signed up for a Louisville (Kentucky) sales discussion group. When I say “I”, one of the goslings who manages my social presence on LinkedIn joined the group. We are researching the local market for a project, and I assume joining a LinkedIn group of local businesses was a good idea. Wrong.
Is this State Farm’s favorite marketing department lunch meat? Yummy, spam.
The sender was a person who believed that I would be interested in an “Entrepreneurial Career Opportunity” with State Farm Insurance. Now anyone who runs a query for me on Bing, Google, or Yandex will be able to conclude that I probably am a long shot for this type of work:
After reviewing your LinkedIn profile, I was impressed with the experiences you’ve had in your career and would love the chance to chat with you regarding our career opportunities!I am expecting several openings in 2012/2013 in Louisville and surrounding areas. I am looking for qualified candidates to become our next State Farm Agents. We offer a 7 month paid training program at your current salary (subject to a cap of $144K). Following your training you would earn renewable income from an existing book of business, $30,000 in signing bonuses, retirement benefits, worldwide travel incentives, office set-up assistance and more. We are not a franchise, so there is NO franchise fee to start a business with State Farm. We have an 85% success rate on all new agents and the support system that we offer to our agents is the best in the industry. This is a great business opportunity!I’m not necessarily looking for someone who is looking for a job; I’m looking for highly successful individuals…
The job is to earn six figures selling insurance in Louisville. Okay. Now Louisville is in my view wallowing in the economic hog slop. There are quite a few people out of work. I know because we are adding staff to Augmentext, so I have a pretty good sense of the level of desperation in the job market. I don’t understand why State Farm is having such a tough time finding door to door, hammer dialing, bright white teeth and big smile workers. Unemployment is about 15 percent, maybe as high as 20 percent around Harrod’s Creek. What’s up?
I did some poking around and the sender is a State Farm insurance person is based in Nashville and has a colleague named Jerry D. I wrote Ms. Swing, suggesting she do a better job of screening her spam. I also requested that she not spam me with four identical emails in a span of minutes. One works just fine, thank you. She apparently told her boss, “Jerry”, whom I had a tough time understanding on his panting and nerve-tinged voice mail. Jerry wanted me to call him so he could explain the process used by State Farm. He gave me a phone number to call too: 615 692 6149. I did not call. You feel free to call.
The Huber Affair: Demining Now Underway
June 26, 2012
Google is working overtime to keep attention focused on technical issues. You can wallow in the smart software encomium in the New York Times. (See “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000” in the June 27, 2012, environmentally unfriendly newspaper or you can give the newspaper’s maybe here, maybe gone link at http://goo.gl/Twl9I.) The Google I/O Conference fast approaches, so there are the concomitant write ups about a Google hardware and news in “Google’s I/O Conference: New Operating System, Tablet”.
But there are two personnel stories which seem to haunt the company at what is the apex of the Google techno-promo machine: Larry Page’s minor voice problem and a person few people outside of Google have heard about. Both of these are potential “information minefields.” Google does not, as far as I know, have an effective demining system in place.
I have avoided commenting directly on the health thing. You can get the story or what passes for a story in “Google CEO Larry Page and the Healthy Way to Answer, ‘What’s Wrong?’” But I do have an opinion about the wizard responsible for Local Search, Maps, Earth, Travel, Payments, Wallet, Offers, and Shopping. I read more about about one Google executive than I expected in “This Exec May Have The Hardest Job At Google, And His Colleagues Are Tired Of Seeing Him Get Trashed In The Press.”
The basic idea, as I understand it, is:
Last week, we [Business Insider] published a story headlined: “Depending On Whom You Ask, This Google Exec Is Either ‘Weak’ Or He Just Drew The Short Straw?
The publication did some digging and learned from “senior sources”:
Their view is that Huber is a top-notch Google executive who asked for the hardest challenge his boss could give him and he got it – in the form of nascent, unproven products and an executive reporting to him that ended up being vastly under-qualified for her job.
The weak link in the Google brain mesh was a person from PayPal. Yikes. A female goofed with some PayPal type projects. The story wraps up:
Smart Folks Found to Think Like the Addled Goose
June 25, 2012
After reading the New Yorker’s “Why Smart People are Stupid,” our publisher Stephen E. Arnold is delighted that he is an addled goose living in rural Kentucky. Must be because his IQ is 70, which is dull normal for a human but okay for a water fowl. (I say that with the greatest respect, Steve.)
[Editor’s note: The guy’s IQ is closer to 50 on a good day and with the wind behind his tailfeatures! Sure, he was mentioned in the Barron’s blog here, but that was obviously a fluke.]
The blog post discusses findings from a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto. The study builds on the work of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, who has been studying the human thought process, including when, why, and how it can fail us, for decades.
Researchers posed classic bias problems to almost 500 subjects and studied the results. Like Kahneman, they found that most people usually take the easiest route to an answer rather than the most logical. We refuse to actually do the math. Most of us are also susceptible to “anchor” bias, where we are likely to base our answers on a factor supplied within the question. See the post for examples (and a more extensive discussion), and try the bat-and-ball and lily pad problems for yourself.
The researchers went beyond Kahneman’s work to study the ways in which such thinking errors are linked to intelligence. They found that they are indeed linked—but perhaps not in the way one would expect. Blogger Jonah Lehrer writes:
“The scientists gave the students four measures of ‘cognitive sophistication.’ As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, ‘indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.’ This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.”
So why are smarties so dumb? No one knows just yet, but I theorize it has to do with the sort of laziness smart kids learn in elementary school—they can get top marks without fully engaging their brains. Perhaps that means when they come across a slippery question as an adult, they fall right into the trap.
Cynthia Murrell, June 25, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
The Case for Reasonable Hours: Fact or Fiction?
May 10, 2012
Inspired by Sheryl Sandberg, Inc.’s Geoffrey James calls for us to “Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week.” Though Facebook COO Sandberg has been leaving on time to get home to her kids for seven years, the powerful executive only recently felt she could admit the fact in a culture where long hours are now required for workers to be considered dedicated and, by extension, worthy of raises and advancement. James points out that the excruciating trend has gained the upper hand despite longstanding evidence that working over 40 hours per week actually decreases performance. He writes:
“In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the ‘sweet spot’ is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.
“Anyone who’s spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today. People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours.”
This logic has shades of Henri Poincaré to be sure, but the advocates of balance have a point. People who just keep on keeping on past their 40 hours are at risk for burnout, which makes them far less productive. Just because you’re at your desk typing or clicking away does not mean you are doing a good job. Anyone who has had to redo work they (or worse, their colleague) did the night before, when intellectually numb and aching to get home to loved ones, can attest to that.
We think that opinions about how long to work are okay. The reality is that hard work often contributes to success. In fact, for some, work is play so it continues around the clock. We prefer the work mode. It validates self concept, generates revenue, and seems more productive than watching random YouTube videos.
Cynthia Murrell, May 10, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
IBM Embraces Social
May 2, 2012
I wonder what happened to Watson. Surely that next-generation search technology has not been marginalized by Vivisimo’s “big data” antics or the “New IBM Business Integration Software [that] Helps Enterprises Accelerate Adoption of Social, Business, Cloud, and Mobile Technologies.” Wow, that’s like a digital Popeil pocket fisherman.
Now the secret sauce for this digital cornucopia is the new version of IBM’s WebSphere Application Server. According to the write up, WebSphere Application Server includes a business process manager, operational decision management, and the Cast Iron Live service.
What’s Cast Iron? It is an Application Programming Interface (API) which:
allows companies to extend their services to support the emerging community of developers who are building new social, mobile and cloud applications. This new purpose-built offering provides a comprehensive solution to deliver, socialize and manage business API assets.
Search, I presume, is baked in and based on Lucene, not the newly acquired Vivisimo “big data” system. How does this new server help me? Easy. The story reveals a use case:
One client – The Ottawa Hospital has already begun testing how these new software and services from IBM can dramatically change their business model. Working with IBM, they are building a new system that improves the quality of patient care and helps them to better manage the flow of patients throughout the hospital…the attending physician can send an electronic request to the patient’s physician for clarification on past diagnosis. The patient’s doctor receives the consultation request immediately on their most accessible device – a tablet, smart phone or a computer. They respond directly to the specific consult questions electronically, so the attending physician can correctly diagnose the patient.
Just the ticket for auditing data required for RAC, MIC, and ZPIC matters. I like the social touch too. Just what’s needed when walking the patient confidentiality tightrope.
Stephen E Arnold, May 2, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Buried Alive by Data
May 1, 2012
This recent blog post on the Search Technologies’ Web site makes some amusing and thought provoking comparisons between the reality TV show “Hoarding, Buried Alive!”, and the state of unstructured data within some organizations.
This phrase—I am absolutely overwhelmed by this, I just don’t know where to start” — is attributed to both a hoarder on a TV show. The speaker is contemplating how to tackle a sink piled with dirty dishes. The phrase also applies to an enterprise search program manager contemplating how to begin a project.
The article, Buried Alive by Data is worth a read for the amusement value alone. However, it also makes some important points. Discipline and due process are key part of the success recipe. For enterprise search, the award-winning search assessment methodology is cited as a proven approach to project discipline. The comparison made between the lawlessness of a hoarder’s kitchen and the average corporate file share may seem somehow familiar to many readers.
Iain Fletcher, May 1, 2012
Sponsored by Search Technologies
More Googley Legal Action
April 17, 2012
We find more legal hassles for Google in “TQP Sues Another Round of Companies on Cryptography Patent.” TQP claims Google uses a patented method (patent ’730, filed in 1992) for transmitting data as a sequence of blocks in encrypted form over a communication link. According to the allegations, this patent is broken every time someone connects to one of Google’s Web sites. See the article for the technical details.
TQP is no stranger to patent lawsuits. In fact, the write up tells us:
“TQP has been very active since late 2008, suing hundreds major corporations in multiple lawsuits. TQP, a Texas company, has filed each case in the Eastern District of Texas, a popular venue for patent plaintiffs. While some of the defendants have settled with TQP, others are continuing to litigate the patent.”
Patent wizards are experts that we feed and nurture. Will common sense prevail, or will the patent wizards continue to grow more important? I suppose it is good for Acapulco condo brokers and Mercedes dealers. For innovation, well, maybe not so useful.
Cynthia Murrell, April 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Love Lost between Stochastic and Google AppEngine
March 30, 2012
Stochastic Technologies’ Stavros Korokithakis has some very harsh words for Google’s AppEngine in “Going from Loving AppEngine to Hating it in 9 Days.” Is the Google shifting its enterprise focus?
Stochastic’s service Dead Man’s Switch got a huge publicity boost from its recent Yahoo article, which drove thousands of new visitors to the site. Preparing for just such a surge, the company turned months ago to Google’s AppEngine to manage potential customers. At first, AppEngine worked just fine. The hassle-free deployments while rewriting and the free tier were just what the company needed at that stage.
Soon after the Yahoo piece, Stochastic knew they had to move from the free quota to a billable status. There was a huge penalty, though, for one small mistake: Korokithakis entered the wrong credit card number. No problem, just disable the billing and re-enable it with the correct information, right? Wrong. Billing could not be re-enabled for another week.
Things only got worse from there. Korokithakis attempted to change settings from Google Wallet, but all he could do was cancel the payment. He then found that, while he was trying to correct his credit card information, the AppEngine Mail API had reached its daily 100-recipient email limit. The limit would not be removed until the first charge cleared, which would take a week. The write up laments:
At this point, we had five thousand users waiting for their activation emails, and a lot of them were emailing us, asking what’s wrong and how they could log in. You can imagine our frustration when we couldn’t really help them, because there was no way to send email from the app! After trying for several days to contact Google, the AppEngine team, and the AppEngine support desk, we were at our wits’ end. Of all the tens of thousands of visitors that had come in with the Yahoo! article, only 100 managed to actually register and try out the site. The rest of the visitors were locked out, and there was nothing we could do.
Between sluggish payment processing and a bug in the Mail API, it actually took nine days before the Stochastic team could send emails and register users. The company undoubtedly lost many potential customers to the delay. In the meantime, to add charges to injury, the AppEngine task queue kept retrying to send the emails and ran up high instance fees.
It is no wonder that Stochastic is advising us all to stay away from Google’s AppEngine. Our experiences with Google have been positive. Perhaps this is an outlier’s experience?
Cynthia Murrell, March 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Perils of Googley Beta Testing
February 28, 2012
A recent, scary security flaw in Google Wallet has prompted Extreme Tech to explore “Google and the Death of Beta Testing.” Writer Ryan Whitwam laments Google’s rejection of real beta-testing in products from the embarrassingly buggy Google Wave, to the privacy faux pas that was the Google Buzz release, to this latest mishap that left users’ financial information vulnerable. He summarizes:
“There is just no such thing as a real beta at Google. A product is either tested internally by Googlers, or it’s blasted out to large numbers of users. This is great when you want to get immediate access to an awesome new service, but when that service leaks your email contacts, or allows crooks to get at your pre-paid credit cards, it’s a disaster.”
Agreed. Whitman suggests Google return to the best practice of beta testing products before they go out. Seems like common sense, but we wonder: since Google users are not the same thing as Google customers, does the company believe we don’t deserve such common courtesy?
Cynthia Murrell, February 28, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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