According to the article, artificial intelligence and machine learning has been around since the 1980’s but a recent US ruling regarding the use of machine learning technology in legal review has stirred up trouble in the eDiscovery community. As a result of this ruling, one can expect a dramatic increase in Predictive Coding, Concept Search or other terms relating to TAR capabilities being a requirement for eDiscovery software buyers.

When discussing some of the detriments of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the article states:

“Machine-learning requires significant set-up involving training and testing the quality of the classification model (aka the classifier), which is a time consuming and demanding task that requires at least the manual tagging and evaluation of both the training and the test set by more than one party (in order to prevent biased opinions). Testing has to be done according to best practice standards used in the information retrieval community (e.g. see the proceedings of the TREC conferences organized by the NIST). Deviation from such standards will be challenged in courts. This is time consuming and expensive and should be factored into the cost-benefit analysis for the approach.”

So the short of it is, before using Technology Assisted Review make sure that you do your research and figure out what is best for your business.

Jasmine Ashton, May 25, 2012

Sponsored by PolySpot

Predictive Coding has been hailed a technology which provides lower costs with lighter burdens. The unfortunate results that deem it myth fall to the process necessary for it to function. It is an evolving technology.

Its reality is evolving as:

“With the promise of transparency and simpler workflows, predictive coding technology should eventually live up to its billing of helping organizations discover their information in an efficient, cost effective and defensible manner. As for now, the “promise” of first generation predictive coding tools appears to be nothing more than that, leaving organizations looking like the cash-strapped “Monopoly man,” wondering where there litigation dollars have gone.”

Reality is that Predictive Coding can’t exist without human’s providing the data, and then the program optimizes it. The process combines people, technology and workflow to find documents referencing keywords. The three basic components are:

1. To predict utilizing predictive analytics.
2. To code, utilizing a keyword to locate relevant documents.
3. To process a proven workflow.

Improvements are possible given the technological advances in the industry. This new technique has potential and may yet evolve into a functional, efficient means to acquire data. For now, Predictive Coding is stuck in between myth and reality.

Jennifer Shockley, May 23, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The article, “New Study Says Cost is Most Frustrating Factor in eDiscovery,” reveals the results of a survey by consulting company FTI Technology. The survey covered ways to streamline and reduce the cost of eDiscovery. The company interviewed 31 in-house counsels with eDiscovery responsibilities and asked them for their thoughts. The verdict? Users are not happy. The article reports:

“*94% of respondents found the cost of e-discovery “frustrating”

*87% of respondents used an early case assessment to try to resolve matters earlier

*81% of respondents brought software in house, which helps to cut costs on law firm or service provider fees

*52% of respondents brought staff in house to help reduce fees spent on law firms or service providers

*32% of respondents used clustering or visualization tools to speed review along (down from 34% in 2010)”

A full copy of FTI’s report is available here.

In our view, what matters in search is cost and user satisfaction. There does not seem to be much progress in the last few years, especially considering that the report also comments that most companies are not even aware of their spending habits.

Andrea Hayden, April 30, 2012

Sponsored by Ikanow

Recommind received some fantastic publicity after this:

“On February 8, Peck ordered the parties in open court to adopt an e-discovery protocol devised by Recommind that implements its technology. He memorialized this order by a written opinion two weeks later.

Recommind called the opinion an instant sensation and a game-changer. In one fell swoop, Judge Peck likely had as big an impact as thousands before him who spent years working to lift the eDiscovery industry out of its inefficient, antiquated, overly manual and keyword-centric past.”

Though eDiscovery was initially having some issues, this magistrate’s positive re-enforcement of their policies seems to be providing them with a more solid reputation. Peck has went to bat for them by speaking publically at events and supported their programs without hesitation.

Even though Recommind is also receiving some negative publicity, Peck seems to be evening out the odds. It has been said, no publicity is bad publicity, and that saying rings true concerning the eDiscovery suits. The fact of the matter is Recommind is getting a boost from a magistrate’s ruling.

Jennifer Shockley, April 27, 2012

Sponsored by Ikanow

“The product provides the flexibility necessary for cross-border eDiscovery cases typically faced by Japanese customers, where litigation often demands multi-jurisdictional support and requires data to be processed in Japan and other countries such as the United States. For instance, Symantec’s Clearwell eDiscovery Platform can be deployed on a hosted basis or onsite, which allows eDiscovery to be conducted in Japan without having to send data to the U.S. for processing. This enables customers like Nikon to maintain control over potentially sensitive data and avail themselves of business hour support in-country.”

Strong benefits, indeed. The need for eDiscovery strategies are escalating around the world, and it is important that any company that does business internationally develop a robust plan. Immediately.

Founded back in 1982 and headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Symantec now operates in over 50 countries and employs more than 18,500 souls. The company provides organizations large and small with security, storage, and systems management solutions. Naturally, airtight security is a primary focus, but ease of use is also important to the software giant.

Nikon is not just about quality cameras. The company was founded almost a century ago, in 1917. Perhaps its stated commitment to integrity, along with an enthusiasm for the study of light, have allowed the company to prosper. Their products have become essential to customers in many fields.

Cynthia Murrell, April 25, 2012

Sponsored by PolySpot

Vault helps protect your business with easy-to-use search so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations. With an instant-on functionality and availability of your data a few clicks away, Vault provides access to all of your Gmail and on-the-record chats and can provide significant savings to your business over the traditional costs of litigation and eDiscovery,” Jack Halprin, Google’s head of eDiscovery, added.

Vault uses the same architecture as other Google Business Apps and it can easily be added to clients’ accounts for another $5/month. Vault can also record IM messages and G-mail accounts, but it cannot capture any data outside the Google platform. It does prove that Google is dedicated to expanding their capabilities, especially their cloud-based software. Google has been lauded as the business model of the IT world with a jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt approach to business, but now Google is serving enterprise niches and it suggests a more disciplined approach to the enterprise market. Will a suit and tie be next?

Whitney Grace, April 4, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

For many law school graduates, scouring documents for material of value to a case has long been a secure if somewhat tedious means of entering the legal profession. This will no longer be true, however, if a new type of software lives up to its creator’s claims Known as predictive coding, it can supposedly do the same job, faster, cheaper, and as well as humans. But lawyers live to bill, so perhaps software may force law firms to get rid of staff and trust the algorithms.

We learn:

There has been a long-standing myth in the legal field that exhaustive manual review is the gold standard, or nearly perfect, but that has been shown to be a fallacy, according to Maura R. Grossman, a New York City attorney. Research has shown that, under the best circumstances, manual review will identify about 70 percent of the responsive documents in a large data collection. Some technology-assisted approaches have been shown to perform at least as well as that, if not better, at far less cost.

Attorneys, paralegals, unpaid interns, and experts in India will miss 30 percent of the pertinent documents. Smart software is the path to the future.

Some observers worry about the legal defensibility of predictive coding. But such concerns are unfounded, so long as both sides agree to its use. That’s according to Craig Carpenter, a marketer for Recommind, a software development firm focused on the legal and corporate market

But even sophisticated programs don’t actually think. Without that capacity, they cannot understand the subtle nuances and informal connections that underlie written documents. It’s unlikely that predictive coding will live up to the sales hype surrounding it. But what’s new about search vendors’ marketing is that reality is often different from Spock’s world on Star Trek.

Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

The article reports on Walton’s session:

’E-discovery has been a very expensive, painful process in America over the last 15 years and some of that has started to happen in Australia. The same trends of over-collection, having to sort through duplicates, being at the mercy of outside service providers and their bills, and generally not owning the process,’ she said. Walton aims to accelerate that ‘painful process’ in Australia, by giving those who own information within law firms, power over it. ‘That’s the information governance message I want to get across,’ she told Lawyers Weekly.’

Information governance, she says, should take the form of end-to-end archiving across an “electronic discovery reference model” she supplied. See the article for an illustration of that model.

Hoping Aussies learn from the mistakes of US companies, Walton emphasizes that organizations need to let go of the old. Fearing the very real danger of being prosecuted for deleting data they should have kept, many firms just refuse to delete anything. This approach, however, can hamper a system so that retrieving relevant information quickly might be impossible. That’s not much help. Furthermore, it can mean that “tons of different pieces of sensitive information end up getting all mixed up together and probably don’t have the right security parameters around them.” Even less than unhelpful.

Walton informed her listeners that a number of US companies have been very heavily penalized for being unable to produce required records. She cautions that if businesses wish to have offices in the US, they must understand and follow US laws. They should lay the groundwork for efficient compliance from the beginning.

So, now we understand about the cost to lawyers of unkempt information systems, but what about to the clients? Oh, clients. Yep, they can be important. . . .

Cynthia Murrell, March 26, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

According to the article, the company has released the first in its series of new ZyLAB Cloud Collectors to capture email from Microsoft Exchange Online.

the article states:

“With this release, ZyLAB becomes the only end-to-end eDiscovery company to offer both traditional email collection and integrated collection of cloud-based email systems via a hosted or on premise application. This capability enables ZyLAB clients to easily migrate previously collected and processed email from their SaaS-based ZyLAB eDiscovery system to a fully-featured ZyLAB eDiscovery system that is behind the firewall and poised to manage multiple litigation or regulatory matters as well as corporate governance.”

With the increase of mobile technology users, the use of Cloud computing becomes more and more vital. ZyLAB’s new products are an excellent addition to the array of products currently in circulation.

Jasmine Ashton, February 27, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com

We noted the Instant Technologies’ Integrys Archive Viewer’s tweaking of its archiving, compliance, search, and discovery solution. The enhancement makes it possible to “discover” instant messages. According to the announcement:

Instant Archive Viewer is the leading archiving and compliance, search, and discovery solution for Microsoft OCS and Lync 2010. Instant Archive Viewer helps organizations enforce internal IM usage policies and quickly respond to compliance audits and legal discovery requests. Instant Archive Viewer is a highly scalable, and stable, OCS/Lync 2010 archiving application and is in use at many of the leading financial service organizations.

Several observations:

The solution appears to be just the ticket for outfits embracing Microsoft and IBM solutions. The Instant Technologies’ solution calls my attention to this question, “Aren’t Microsoft and IBM already providing these functions with their cornucopia of components?”

Then I realized, “If Instant Technologies has an innovation, what does that suggest about the native Microsoft and IBM solutions or the functions now available from other third party solution providers?”

Finally, I wondered, “How will companies buying older solutions such as Clearwell, Stratify, and similar vendors going to respond?”

In short, traditional key word search seems to be going the way of the dodo. In its place are traditional key word search systems with tweaks and some features. The task of deciding “which system” gets more difficult each day I conclude. Perhaps an azure chip consultant will aim its intellectual fire power at this market niche, roll out a crazy matrix, and estimate that add-ins are worth billions in 2016”? One can only wait with bated breath.

Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2012

Sponsored by Pandia.com