A Paralegal’s Role in Electronic Discovery

Tomorrow, I give a presentation to the Houston Chapter of Women in eDiscovery on the Paralegal’s Role in Electronic Discovery.  Hopefully I can convey the collaborative effort betwen paralegals and litigation support and IT in this endeavor.  I am looking forward to the presentation.  If I can figure out who to post the powerpoint I will.  If I’m not able to, you can check out the Women in eDiscovery website in a few weeks and check it out.

email discovery = garbage barge, or storage costs ^

People, we have a new conflict. And I do love a good rumble.

This one’s between the regulatory requirements mandating employers maintain its employees email for a certain number of years, versus the 4th Amendment and the Stored Communications Act (which nobody has bothered to pay attention to anyway), which says that no one but the receiver or sender of the email can access it without permission of the sender.

In Quon vs. Arch Wireliness, the Ninth Circuit has ruled that an employee’s emails and text messages are off limits to the employer if stored on a third-party’s server.

Does this mean that today’s employer can pay to archive its employees’ email in order to remain in compliance with regulatory laws, but never be able to see or access those messages afterwards? Just keep paying the bills until the time clock runs out on the statute requiring their keep? Are emails off limits for discovery purposes in general for civil litigation?

This is sort of analogous to a garbage barge that is always out at sea, with no port to land in. Oooh.

Or the cost of storage is going to go up. I can see a spike in demand here.

Geeze whiz…..

I’ve had this site up for less than a week, and I’ve already had to thwart a spam attack! Someone tried to paste my article on Summation into the Database Manager’s Association blog site. Ha-ha!

Beyond Enterprise 2.0

Okay, today I’d like to help you cross the bridge, to borrow an overtired analogy, so that you might see my point on why we need to jump to the next generation of technologies for reviewing and producing electronic documents for use in civil litigations. The Enterprise has caught onto application gadgets and KM workers’ click click right there next to their sports scores icons or iTunes or Flickr or Facebook shortcuts on their personalized dashboards, and receive the updated work-related info and click click, back it goes in a keystroke, so within a few seconds the pesky little irritating work issue resolved itself and KM worker is back playing games . Am I jealous? Well I wasn’t so spoiled when I was their age. Ok, so we only had 1 game, Pong, back then when the typewriters roamed the earth, but whatever. You can’t discover mashups in Summation and Concordance. You need today’s tech to discover what’s really going on at the Enterprise 2.0.

Got SharePoint?

 

 

I

just want to jump up and down and throw my arms around in the air and turn blue in the face and scream until somebody asks what is causing all this ruckus! Then I can stop and smile and say, why gee Bill, there’s a product finally come out of Redmond that will change my life for the better, and I want you to get it for me. I’m talking about the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint is the ultimate indexing document management tool that’s end use is perfect for Web 2.0 collaborations.  If you don’t know what the heck that means, know this:  AmLaw 100 is well aware of the potential uses of Sharepoint in the law firm.  It can be used for everything from conflicts management, to document management, to house deposition banks, to manage a case docket and calendar, to the end product of housing document productions. SharePoint is “this little engine that could.” 

SharePoint “portals” are completely secure internal Web sites with a central document libraries for accessing shared workspaces and documents, as well as housing specialized applications such as discussion boards, calendars, task lists, alerts, surveys and much more. 

A Microsoft SharePoint portal streamlines your communications process and helps you collaborate on documents by providing a secure place to house large document collections, collaboratively edit any specific documents you are working on with team members, clients and experts, and allows you to replace long strings of email conversations about relevant documents and the whatnot with an efficient use of the discussion board feature of the site. 

 

Other nifty applications that can be used on SharePoint sites are your case calendars and task lists. The bottom line is that you can create just about anything you want to on a SharePoint site.  Because you have 100% control over the access and privileges to the information housed on the internal Web sites, virtually all information is effortlessly managed and shared with the people who need to have access to it.

 

EMC Corporation has created SharePoint applications that allows you to search across platforms and servers, house relevant files and lock them down so you can view the files, but you cannot save over them, or move them away from the site.  This means there won’t ever be lost emails or privileged information leaking out. 

 

Microsoft just released its Search Server 2008, which is an Enterprise search platform based on the search capabilities of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It provides you with the ability to search metadata attached to email and documents as well.  There is a free version available from Microsoft, the Microsoft Search Server Express 2008, that contains all of the same features as the commercial Enterprise edition, but on a stand-alone basis.  I can think of many law firms that could use a free indexing search tool and encourage you to check it out!

 

Summation’s demise?

I guess you would have to say that this blog concerns litigation support and my single emphasis of getting rid of Summation by the year 2010 in the law firm setting.  I’d like to just get rid of it right now if I could.  (The same things goes for Concordance for all you out there using that.)  I mean, why are we doing this to ourselves?  We hate using these awful databases.  They suck.  Nobody likes using them.  But we go ahead and deploy these useless no-good programs anyway on a daily basis that cost our clients plenty of $$$, and from what I can tell from my 20 years worth of experience, for no-good reason that I can think except to keep the economy going?  I mean KA-Ching.  This sh*t is expensive.  I hate to think this, but who else is benefitting from useless garbage databases except the vendors who are making out like bankers?  Hum, who are these vendors who have pathed themselves in a little niche with one little word, “processing,” in the EDRM metrics?  Hum….  Well, I think we should replace this one little word, “processing,” altogether; scrap it in the scrapheap database junkyard where it belongs, and get ourselves around to better words, such as “indexing,” and “migrating,” and “universal viewer,”  where we should have been throwing our clients’ money around since 2000 at least when Microsoft created the first indexing server.  Duh.  So, this is the topic of my blog. No, not the rantings of a lunatic indentured servant who works for a law firm!  But, better “death to the database.”  That’s it.  So, come along into the world of data manipulation, what tools are cool, and how can we start focusing on solutions to make our lives better.   And I need your help.  I wish I had $300,000 for a contest, but I don’t.  I’m just a Werkin Gurl like you.  But I would like a few developers to pay attention, wrap a viewer around a search string or two and give me a line to code.  I’m not asking for too much. 

Best file renamers

What is the best file namer utility you’ve found?  My favorite is http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uh/Main_Intro.php.  I can’t tell you how many times during the day that I’m using this great tool!  If I didn’t have to be shoving stuff into a database, I wouldn’t be renaming files!  But I am, and this one is good.

Hello world!

Welcome to Werkingurl’s Weblog!  This blawg concerns litigation support in the law firm setting for the Enterprise client.  I am seeking to kill the database and resurrect a better system of indexing and search through a review tool that has yet to be created.  So any developers out there looking for a project keep an eye on this blawg.  I hope besides humor you can find something practical to do with yourself and create the tools we need.  Please leave your feedback.  I’m sure I’m not alone in my quest.  So let me hear from you out there.