Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Join Me Today for E-Discovery Webcast

Today at 1 p.m. Eastern time, I will participate in a webcast on e-discovery trends for 2010. The webcast is sponsored by Fios and hosted by Mary Mack, corporate technology counsel for Fios and author of the blog Sound Evidence. While e-discovery will be the focus of the webinar, Mary and I plan to talk about a range of topics related to trends in legal technology and the legal profession.

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Thursday, February 26, 2009
Blog Takes Clever Approach to E-Discovery

Thanks to the shameless plugging of Frank Gonnello Jr., I learned about the e-discovery blog e-Lessons Learned. The blog is overseen by Fernando M. Pinguelo, a New Jersey attorney and Seton Hall law professor, and written using contributions from law students from all over the country.

The blog takes a clever approach to the topic. Each post discusses an e-discovery case that involves an e-discovery mishap, generally by a company employee. It discusses the conduct that constituted the mishap and then offers its "e-lesson" -- a suggestion on how to learn from the mistake and avoid it happening to you.

The blog is hosted by DiscoveryResources.org, a site sponsored by the e-discovery services company Fios Inc.

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Updates on Two E-Discovery Sites

Updates to two of the sites I discussed in my recent two-part article, "Discovering E-Discovery on the Web" (Part One, Part Two):

First, I wrote in the article that DiscoveryResources.org "may be the leading e-discovery portal" and that its Sound Evidence blog, written by e-discovery expert Mary Mack, is "one of the best known e-discovery blogs." Tomorrow, the site will be relaunched with a number of updates and improvements. According to Mack, changes to the site will include:
Meanwhile, one of the blogs I discussed in the article, Information Governance Engagement Area, has been discontinued in favor of a more ambitious project. Its author, Rob Robinson, a marketing veteran who has worked with several e-discovery companies, has just launched Complex Discovery, which he describes as a source for "information, tools and tactics relevant to the growing discovery market." The site is organized around key e-discovery stages, including collection, processing, review and production, and already has a number of useful resources. In addition to the "standard" articles, news items, guidelines and the like, Robinson has incorporated several innovative features:
Robinson invites suggestions of relevant RSS feeds to add to his Yahoo! Pipes aggregator.

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Saturday, December 29, 2007
Part Two: Discovering E-Discovery on the Web

[The following column originally appeared in print in October 2007. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

Second of two parts. (Part one.)

As I wrote last month in the first half of this two-part column, no lawyer today can afford to ignore e-discovery. No matter the case, digital data is likely to be implicated. That means lawyers urgently need to understand e-discovery and keep abreast of developments in the field.

In last month's column, I looked at some of the more useful Web sites for learning about and keeping current with this essential area of practice. This month, I survey blogs about e-discovery and look at some vendors' sites that include useful resources.

E-Discovery Blogs

As I write this column, at least two e-discovery blogs have launched within the last two weeks, attesting to the significance of this field. Of the 19 blogs surveyed here, some focus on e-discovery law and practice and others on the e-discovery industry, but all are potentially useful for keeping current with the field.
Vendors' Sites

A number of companies that market e-discovery services also provide useful resources on their Web sites. In part one of this article, I described DiscoveryResources.org, an e-discovery portal sponsored by the company Fios. The company's main site at www.fiosinc.com provides an array of resources in its own right, some that overlap with its other site and some that do not.

Other companies whose sites include useful resources for lawyers include:
An update: After the first part of this column went to press, a new e-discovery organization came into being and, with it, a new Web site worth checking out. Women in eDiscovery focuses on women in law and business with an interest in legal technology.

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Part One: Discovering E-Discovery on the Web

[The following column originally appeared in print in September 2007. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

(First of Two Parts. Part Two.)

Last December's revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, addressing discovery of electronically stored information, underscored the fact that no lawyer today can afford to ignore e-discovery. No matter the case, no matter the court, digital data is likely to be implicated.

That means lawyers urgently need to understand e-discovery and keep abreast of developments in the field. In this month's column, the first of two parts on e-discovery, we look at some of the more useful Web sites for learning about and keeping current with this essential area of practice. Next month in part two, we will survey blogs about e-discovery and look at some vendors' sites that include useful resources.

Getting Started

For all it offers, DiscoveryResources.org, may be the leading e-discovery portal. Even though the site is sponsored by e-discovery company Fios, it foregoes commerce in deference to its mission, which is to provide news, information and resources about e-discovery. Through both original content and outside links, the site provides timely news stories, substantive articles, tutorials, seminars, podcasts, legal forms and other tools.

Another useful entry point to resources on e-discovery is the American Bar Association's Legal Technology Resource Center. The site devotes a section to courtroom technology and, within that, a guide to e-discovery resources. While not extensive, the guide is a good starting point.

If you want to know what federal judges know about e-discovery, you will find no better source than KenWithers.com. In his former role as education attorney for the Federal Judicial Center, Withers taught judges about EDD and technology. Now director of judicial education for The Sedona Conference, Withers' personal site archives his many articles and presentations, discusses e-discovery rulemaking, and provides links to e-discovery resources elsewhere on the Web.

California lawyer Richard E. Best started posting his civil discovery outlines on the Web in 1999 and has continued to update them ever since at California Civil Discovery Law. From his home page, follow the "electronic data" link for his extensive collection of resources covering state and federal e-discovery, as well as related issues such as e-discovery ethics.

The Electronic Evidence Information Center, is a fairly modest collection of links to resources and conferences relating to e-discovery and computer forensics. Worth noting is the site's page collecting links to mobile phone forensics tools.

Research and Practices

The rapid growth of e-discovery in recent years has left the horse often trailing the cart. A number of organizations are now working to develop standards and practices with the goal of harmonizing e-discovery across courts and industries.

A leader in this research is The Sedona Conference, a non-profit organization devoted to innovation in antitrust law, complex litigation and intellectual property law. It has devoted substantial work to the establishment of best practices in e-discovery. In June 2007, it released the second edition of The Sedona Principles on e-discovery. This document any many others are available through the Sedona site.

Given its goal of enhancing the administration of justice, the National Center for State Courts, is immersed in issues surrounding e-discovery in state courts. In August 2006, it published an extensive set of e-discovery guidelines for state trial courts, which is available as a download from this site. Elsewhere, the site compiles research and resources on e-discovery and houses a variety of articles on the topic.

Directed by legal technology consultant, writer and speaker Tom O'Connor, the Legal Electronic Document Institute, is a non-profit organization devoted to the development of education and standards related to legal electronic documents. Its areas of focus include practice management, electronic trial practice and litigation support, e-filing, e-signatures and e-discovery.

Similarly, the Electronic Discovery Institute describes itself as a public-interest organization conducting research into the efficacy of various methods of e-discovery. According to the site, the institute's inaugural study is underway, testing the reliability of search and retrieval technology. Once completed, the study will be published here.

While the foregoing entities focus on e-discovery practices, Socha Consulting takes a different tack with its annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey. Think of it as the Consumer Reports of e-discovery vendors. The survey ranks the top e-discovery companies and provides information on many others. The full survey is pricey – $5,000 for 2007 – but a free summary was published in the August Law Technology News. Socha's site includes various free resources as well.

From the publishers of the Socha-Gelbmann survey comes this related site, The Electronic Discovery Reference Model. The site originally was devoted to development of a model set of standards and guidelines governing e-discovery. With the model now in place and in the public domain, the site focuses on its deployment.

EDDix is a company devoted to research, analysis and reporting on e-discovery. The "ix" in its name stands for "information exchange." Through this site, it sells various publications containing its research and also provides links to news and resources relating to e-discovery.

Reading Up on E-Discovery

A number of sites house original news stories, practice pieces, white papers, seminar presentations and other materials devoted to e-discovery.

Law.com's Legal Technology Center, for example, maintains a useful section devoted to Electronic Data Discovery. It features news articles and expert commentary written for the site and drawn from legal newspapers and magazines. An "E-Discovery Roadmap" lets you navigate your way through steps in the e-discovery process and learn about their requirements and best practices.

Craig Ball is a board-certified trial lawyer and a certified forensic examiner, a combination that uniquely qualifies him as an e-discovery consultant and prolific writer on e-discovery and computer forensics. His Web site collects his regular column together with a variety of his articles and presentations.

LLRX.com has long been a superior site for articles and resources on law technology and practice. From its main page, click on "E-Discovery" in the right-hand navigation column or use the site's search feature to find a library of articles and updates covering e-discovery.

A collection of e-discovery materials from the Federal Judicial Center can be found by following the "materials on electronic discovery" link from its front page. The collection focuses on civil litigation and includes FJC workshop and seminar materials, research and publications, along with links to selected external materials. A link points to a separate page of materials focused on search and seizure of electronic data in criminal cases.

FindLaw's Electronic Discovery Center provides substantive articles and white papers on e-discovery along with vendor press releases. An "E-Discovery Wizard" provides checklists and links to articles regarding specific provisions of the federal rules.

Law Journal Newsletters, a division of ALM, publishes the newsletter E-Discovery Law & Strategy, which can be reached through this site. Subscribers can view the full text of articles as well as download the entire newsletter in PDF. Non-subscribers can view article summaries and purchase individual articles.

Michael Arkfeld's book, Electronic Discovery and Evidence, is a leading treatise on e-discovery. The book is available for purchase through Law Partner Publishing. Purchasers get password access to Web-only resources available here, including updates, forms and checklists.

A unique e-discovery resource is the Litigation Support Vendors Association. This site is home to multiple, free discussion forums covering such topics as e-discovery, computer forensics and best practices. All are moderated by industry experts and representatives of legal-technology companies. Also posted here are jobs within the litigation support industry.

[In Part Two: Our review of e-discovery sites continues with a survey of blogs on the topic and a look at the sites of some e-discovery vendors.]

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Monday, November 26, 2007
Keeping Up With EDD Blogs and Tools

Law.com today features the second installment in my two-part column on useful e-discovery sites and resources. The second part, Keeping Up With EDD Blogs and Tools, focuses, as the title suggests, on EDD blogs and also on vendor sites with useful information. The first part, EDD Bytes to Feed Your Firm, looked at general EDD Web sites.

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Discovering E-Discovery via the Web

Available now in Law Technology News is my latest column, Discovering E-Discovery, the first of two parts surveying e-discovery sites on the Web. (Free registration required.) This month, I look at some of the more useful Web sites for learning about and keeping current with this essential area of practice. Next month in part two, I will survey EDD blogs and look at some vendors' sites that include useful resources.

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Sunday, September 30, 2007
New E-Discovery Blog

I am extremely proud to join with an esteemed group of e-discovery and legal technology experts in the launch of the blog EDD Update, a joint project of Law Technology News and Law.com Legal Technology. As LTN Editor Monica Bay and Law.com Technology Editor Sean Doherty explain in their welcome message:
"Our concept of this blog is to provide a venue where we can post breaking news, key verdicts and judicial rulings, articles from Law.com and LTN, vendor press releases, and more -- and most importantly, where our expert authors will offer their fine-honed analysis and comments."
Check it out, add it to your feed reader and let us know your thoughts.

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Sunday, January 14, 2007
Use this desktop search tool in e-discovery

Electronic discovery. This was the use that kept coming to my mind as I tested dtSearch, an immensely fast and powerful desktop and enterprise search tool. Its marketing tagline is, "Instantly search terabytes of text." I can't vouch for terabytes, but after testing it on a single laptop, I can say it is the fastest desktop search tool I've ever used. More importantly, it has the broadest range of search options of any desktop search tool I've used, with more than two dozen indexed, unindexed, fielded and full-text search options.

Its power and versatility were the reasons I kept thinking of e-discovery as I tested dtSearch. The Dec. 1 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure underscore the obligation of parties in litigation to provide electronic data in discovery. That means finding the data. And finding it requires a powerful and versatile search tool. Obviously, for large-scale e-discovery projects, lawyers would want to bring in professional consultants. But for e-discovery on a smaller scale, a tool such as dtSearch could prove invaluable.

The variety of search types is impressive. dtSearch allows:
dtSearch is capable of searching more than 50 types of files, including common law-office and business formats such as Adobe Acrobat, Eudora message files, HTML, JPEG, MHT archives, MIME messages, all Microsoft Office types, OpenOffice 2.x and 1.x files, TAR, TIFF, WordPerfect, WordStar, XBase, XML and ZIP.

On top of all that, dtSearch includes features specifically designed for corporate and forensic applications. These include e-mail filtering; automatic parsing of text segments in large data blocks, such as those recovered through an "undelete" process, from unallocated computer space, or from partially recovered file fragments; language recognition algorithms for detecting text in a variety of languages; a filtering algorithm for scanning recovered data blocks using multiple text encoding detection methods; and automatic recovery of text from corrupt forensically-recovered documents.

Installation of dtSearch is quick, but before you can use it, you must create a search index. A nice feature of dtSearch is the ability to create multiple indexes. You could index your entire hard drive, if you wish, or create separate indexes for different types of files or data, such as an Outlook-only index. Initially, I chose to create an index of everything in the My Documents folder and in Outlook. This took about 30 minutes, after which dtSearch reported that it had indexed 9,145 documents and 10.9 million words.

Once the index is created, searching is every bit as fast as the company promises -- virtually instantaneous. Results are displayed in a horizontal split-screen. The list of matching files appears in the top pane. As you click on each file name, the document appears in the bottom pane, in its native format, with the search terms highlighted. Search results can be sorted by relevance, date or hit count. As you search, you can enter Boolean denominators manually or select them with the click of a button. You can choose whether to use fuzzy, phonic and synonym searching. You can also filter results by file types and dates.

dtSearch comes packaged with two additional search tools: CD Wizard and dtSearch Web. The CD Wizard is a handy tool that creates searchable indexes for backup CDs and DVDs. The index is stored directly on the disc and autoruns whenever the disc is inserted in a computer. The Web tool converts searchable files into HTML so that they can be viewed using a Web browser.

For me, a minor inconvenience is that dtSearch does not continually update its indexes. You have to update the index manually by selecting "Update index." This means, for example, that a search would not find e-mails you received subsequent to the last update. On the plus side, you can schedule dtSearch to perform these updates automatically. An update to my original index, run about a week later, took less than three minutes to finish.

For someone used to the simplicity of, say, Google Desktop Search, dtSearch is a bit more daunting with a less user-friendly interface. For example, the first time I attempted to update the index, I ended up recreating it from scratch. I could find nothing in the help manual to explain why. Only after tinkering a bit did I found that I had to uncheck an option that came checked by default.

Another big difference is price. While Google Desktop Search is free, dtSearch is $199 for the single-user, desktop version. The network version starts at $800 for five users. Before you buy, you can download a fully functional, 30-day evaluation version.

But the trade off is a far more powerful and configurable search tool. As I said at the outset, more than a search tool, dtSearch is an application that lawyers can use for electronic discovery and management of electronic documents. For anyone interested in a powerful, versatile desktop search tool, dtSearch is worth considering.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Quick guide to new e-discovery rules

Major revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure take effect Dec. 1, governing discovery of electronically stored information. I wrote a quick guide to the new e-discovery rules, which is available at this link from the Web site of IMS ExpertServices.

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