Companies large and small continue to grow the size of their in-house departments to manage litigation.  The recent 8thAnnual Litigation Trends report from international law firm Fulbright and Jaworski found that 53% of larger companies have 5 or more in-house attorneys managing litigation, up from 46% last year.  The growth is far more significant in smaller companies, where 16% now have at least 5 litigation attorneys, more than triple the number from last year.

Why are companies increasing the size of their in-house litigation departments?  The survey does not try to answer the question, but our anecdotal evidence shows that companies are trying desperately to better control their costs and risks in litigation, particularly in the area of electronic discovery.  Although it’s been almost five years since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, eDiscovery remains a difficult and expensive process for most companies.

As companies add in-house lawyers, they often look to have…. Discover the Full Article!

By James Shook, Esq., EMC SourceOne eDiscovery Expert

James D. Shook, Esq., CIPP

Having an Early Case Assessment (ECA) capability is absolutely imperative for corporations to deliver rapid insight into a potential or pending litigation, so that the corporation can determine risk and exposure quickly and accurately.   What are the top five considerations corporate counsel should investigate prior to making an ECA investment?

1. Ability To Immediately View Data In-Place – Some systems touting “ECA” cannot actually view data until it has been collected.  When looking at ECA capabilities, you need to determine whether such delays really meet your needs.  With recent cases like Pension Committee, which discuss how critical it is to quickly identify key players, the capability to immediately start reviewing email, desktop files, SharePoint data, etc. in the production environment can be extremely important.
2. Scope of Data Available — Determine what the system can actually access for early case assessment purposes.  For example, systems that can view only “archived” data can be of extremely limited value when a case first starts and you are trying to determine key custodians and where they are storing relevant data, etc.  For example, in a straightforward trade secrets case — is it more likely that relevant data would reside in or outside an official archive?
3. Search, Culling and Reporting Capabilities — A good ECA system will enable access to a lot of data, so the ability to rapidly cull the important from the mundane is critical.  Capabilities such as email threading, proximity searching and rapid searches — where a search is run against an index and returns results in seconds instead of hours — are all critical.  Similarly, visual maps of data — how much data, how old is it, who are the custodians, what types of files are present — can be critical to fast case evaluation.
4. Concept and “Smart” Search Technologies – Having the system do some of the work for you can also be critical, so solutions that employ concept searching, fuzzy search and other “smart” technologies can identify data and people that might not ordinarily be found.  For example, concept search can make code words jump right out, and also group common concept together (location, people, etc.) making evaluation faster.
5. Ease of Use — None of the technologies are very useful, if they cannot be used by the actual investigators who may not have strong IT backgrounds (lawyers, paralegals, etc.). Easy-to-use web-based interfaces, allowing click-throughs instead of requiring users to memorize lists of arcane commands make solutions much more accessible to the investigators.

Discover More at Kazeon

J. David Morris, EMC

All corporations need to find and manage content for litigation, compliance, and internal or regulatory investigations. Responding in a quick and cost-effective manner is directly related to how effectively an organization can identify and act on potentially responsive information. Today, most business communications and activities take place electronically; subsequently, the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) is growing exponentially. This information exists in a wide and ever-expanding variety of disparate systems and locations across the enterprise. Many of these sources are unmanaged, unorganized, and continually changing. As a result, the eDiscovery process—the identification, collection, preservation, processing, analysis, and review of potentially responsive ESI, can be an extremely time-consuming and costly endeavor if not properly planned for and managed.

The adage “Look Before You Leap” is a well known and a much heeded piece of advice.  It also applies to eDiscovery.  Performing analytics and an early case assessment can deliver valuable information on document volume, document type, repositories, custodians, document ownership, key date and timelines. With the insight provide by initial analytics and early case assessment, corporate attorneys can better determine litigation risk, legal strategy and eDiscovery scope, as well as litigation related expenses.  Initial analytics and early case assessment should be a standard part of a corporation’s eDiscovery processes.

Why? Realistically, the work must be done anyway, as the courts expect companies to be ready for litigation.  This includes having fluent knowledge of the IT infrastructure, content repositories and network architecture, so that the pretrial conference leads to consensus on what ESI is discoverable (FRCP 16).  Despite the legal necessity and overwhelming value, most corporations don’t conduct initial analytics or early case assessment before collection begins.

Corporations, more often than not, find themselves in a reactive eDiscovery situation, i.e. “Leap before You Look.”  After litigation is initiated, the legal clock starts (FRCP 26(a)(1)(c) & 26(f)) driving the eDiscovery timeline.  Due to the tight timelines and often lack of eDiscovery capability, legal and IT are faced with deploying eDiscovery capability, constructing policies and collecting relevant documents for the litigation proceedings all at the same time. The aforementioned tasks are each projects in and of themselves.  Trying to solve them all at once forces corporations to sub-optimize and over collect, which wastes time and money, as well as forces the corporation to accept more litigation risk than necessary ((FRCP Rule 26(b)(5)(B)… we have a clawbacks provision, but they aren’t a given.).

How can corporations avoid the “Leap before you Look” challenge and deploy the necessary capability to heed the “Look before you Leap” advice?  The answer is to deploy eDiscovery capability that delivers the ability to conduct initial analytics and early case assessment and construct your IT policies prior to the initiation of a litigation event.  According to Fulbright & Jaworski’s 6^th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report, 89% of companies face litigation and 40% of the largest companies spend over $5M annually on litigation. So, it is not a question if you are going to have a lawsuit; it is only a question of when you are going to have a lawsuit and be forced to conform to FRCP16.

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon delivers a robust suite of capabilities across the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) from information management, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis and production, as well as an initial analytics, early case assessment and legal hold capabilities.  The ERDM model below highlights Kazeon’s capabilities across the eDiscovery model:

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon capability model (see interactive EDRM):

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery - Kazeon EDRM+

Furthermore, Kazeon’s application connectors allow corporations to perform eDiscovery on the most common enterprise applications to deliver electronically stored information (ESI) no matter where it is in the enterprise.  EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon delivers your corporation the capability to “Look before You Leap.”   To Discover more visit www.kazeon.com/discover.

Excerpt from Law.com’s Legal Technology Blog

Matthew Nelson, Esq., EMC eDiscovery Expert

By Matthew Nelson, Esq.

Fresh off the heels of yet another LegalTech New York event in early February, it remains clear that the promise to make a fortune from e-discovery continues to lure more and more companies to the table to claim their fair share of the feast. Working in the legal technology space for a decade as a lawyer and e-discovery consultant, I like to think I know most of the e-discovery players, but the emergence of countless new companies, partnerships, and technologies would probably leave the head of even the most seasoned e-discovery veteran spinning when trying to figure out who’s who in the e-discovery zoo.

After slogging through the LTNY vendor exhibition hall, past hundreds of e-discovery vendors, I felt dazed by a roller coaster of emotions. I asked myself if it was normal to feel enlightened, confused, annoyed, and sometimes downright scared, by aggressive marketing after only a brief waltz through e-discovery land. Should I be worried about feeling a bit overwhelmed or was everyone else just as confused by all the hype? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: “What the heck is ECA?”

Discover More @ Law.com