Recommind | Out Predict. Out Perform.

Authored by: Howard Sklar

eDiscovery is Just Discovery

If there’s one thing I learned in many years of litigation, it is that on the whole, the lawyer with a better command of the facts wins. I was recently reminded of this truism reading a post by Ralph Losey. I’m a regular reader of Ralph Losey’s blog, although this doesn’t necessarily distinguish me from the masses of eDiscovery professionals. Ralph’s genius is usually right out there on display; take, for one example, his Secrets of Search series (Part I, Part II, Part III).

I’ve just read a recent Losey post: Bottom Line Driven Proportional Review. It’s not like Losey to bury the lede, but I think in this one, he does. Deep into the article, when he talks about attorneys estimating legal costs, Losey makes the following observation: “[y]ou have to know your case, know your ESI, to make a proper estimate.” In context, he’s talking about knowing whether your ESI comprises easy-to-read emails, or massively long documents that might take 5 minutes each.

Let’s expand on this a bit, because there’s more here to mine.

If we really wanted to say it true, knowing your ESI is everything. People often get confused when you add the “e” to anything. Once, when I was a fledgling prosecutor, I wrote and the NYPD executed the county’s first search warrant for computers and computer data. We were all excited to do our first “high-tech” warrant...

Authored by: Derek Schueren

Enterprise Email Management

Email: we all use it, we all have it, and we all have a hard time managing the flow of it. Worse, enterprises use it, store it, and have difficulty managing it. When I talk with business and technical people, they tell me that the most important and challenging problem they face today is how to effectively manage email.

Current solutions to the email management problem have all failed:

•   Email Archives – Archives fail to add any intelligence to email; essentially, archives are just document warehouses that help offload server capacity stress. Management of important business communication falls to the person who received the email , never to be shared or managed by the organization. If that person leaves the company, their email remains as an orphaned silo of information where no one will likely go until there is a lawsuit. Risks are not mitigated and efficiencies in sharing information are thwarted.

•   Inbox Management Solutions – Designed to help individuals better organize their own emails, these solutions fail to centralize email and fail to allow information sharing across users. Inbox management solutions are essentially consumer solutions, not enterprise solutions. Users may have a slightly more organized inbox, but they do nothing to help the enterprise organize and manage their important business communications.

•   Enterprise Content/Document Management Systems – Document management solutions were never designed to solve the email problem. Originally designed to handle documents, the management of email was an...

Authored by: Howard Sklar

Risk Appetite: No Thanks, I’m Full

I had several reactions on reading Chris Dale’s excellent blog post on futile attempts to eliminate risk, and the collateral---and sometimes absurd---consequences those efforts often impose on society. My first reaction, frankly, was that someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Chris is unusually harsh. Although, as the piece goes on, you begin to share his righteous frustration with the inanity of bureaucracy. I also thought he made a major error in the piece: he seems to think we’re better at less-intrusive government here in the US. I’ll take his cobblestone street and raise him a trans-fat free New York City. Or the “do not eat toner” warning on a printer cartridge. Or, one of my personal favorites, “Remember, objects in mirror are actually behind you,” on a motorcycle helmet-mounted rear-view mirror. While the UK may have perfected the nanny state, we’re not all that far behind here.

I always say that the perfectly compliant organization does no business. Simple. You’ve eliminated all risk; just stop manufacturing anything, processing anything, or selling anything. Done. As soon as a business makes, processes, or sells anything, the question becomes one of risk mitigation rather than risk elimination. The common phrase here is “risk appetite.” Or, how much risk are you willing to swallow?

As applied to eDiscovery, the concept of risk generally pertains to two questions: “what can I destroy?” and “when do you stop searching?” The first question is more one of risk appetite, the second more one of cost...

Authored by: Howard Sklar

Quality Control and Contract Attorneys

As humans, and particularly lawyers, we like to believe the work we do is of the utmost quality. However, besides being time-consuming and expensive, human linear review is consistently inaccurate. In one study, human beings only made the correct relevant/non-relevant call between 25%-75% of the time. For the “gold standard,” human linear review is significantly tarnished.

For those who use linear review, any effort to improve recall and precision is worthwhile. If not always achieving the highest quality, humans are forever striving for that goal. Those who realize they are at a disadvantage when up against the burdensome amount of electronic information being produced, have found that working hand in hand with better technology, such as Predictive Coding, gives them an advantage to push their quality higher.

Quality control for any document review is a crucial, but often overlooked, step. Putting to the side the ethical and professional requirements to do QC before producing documents to the other side in a litigation or to the government, it just makes sense to ensure that the people you have coding documents are doing a good job. This becomes more difficult, however, if you’ve outsourced the review to a third party, possibly even offshore.

A law firm recently has been accused of forgetting this lesson. J-M Manufacturing has accused McDermott Will & Emory of failing to supervise its contract attorneys, leading to the disclosure of supposedly privileged documents.

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Authored by: Craig Carpenter

Why Is HP Buying Autonomy?

This monster transaction is all about a single word: growth. HP is buying Autonomy so that it may capitalize on growth, especially at a time when HP shareholders, partners and customers, and the analysts covering HP, are becoming increasingly critical of the company’s stagnation. (To be fair to HP, the global economy continues to suffer from its own case of the growth blues...but we digress.)

First, we need to put this transaction in perspective: this is a big deal for all concerned, but none more than HP and its leaders. HP is paying almost twelve times trailing revenue for a technology company that is itself an amalgamation of many acquisitions, from Verity back in 2005 to Neurodynamics, Zantaz, Interwoven, CA’s information governance unit and earlier in 2011 Iron Mountain’s Digital division. HP is using fully 80% of its available cash to seal the deal. Thus, HP is clearly betting its software division’s future – and perhaps all of HP’s future, given the company’s other news from Thursday – on Autonomy and what it can do to help HP grow again.

That one of the world’s largest technology companies would be willing to make such a move is, in a nutshell, the power of growth. In this case, HP believes it will be able to cash in on growth in four ways: