The legal profession is wrestling with data and information overload to meet legal E-Discovery obligations and client expectations and may be able to benefit from significant advances provided by Social Media platforms and Content Resonance.
Do your clients need cost effective discovery or do they want you to run an E-Discovery Factory?
E-Discovery and Out of Control Costs
“Electronic discovery (or e-discovery, eDiscovery) refers to discovery in civil litigation which deals with the exchange of inform ati on in electronic format (often referred to as Electronically Stored Information or ESI).[1] Usually (but not always) a d i g i tal forensics analysis is performed to recover evidence. A wider array of people are involved in eDiscovery (for example, forensic investigators, lawyers and IT managers) leading to problems with confusing terminology.[1]“ from Wikipedia
Simply put discovery related to civil litigation is very costly and in our experience the costs may be decreased significantly by shifting the discovery approach away from what I described as a 50 year old factory at a recent IADC event. The tendency for E-Discovery vendors to approach discovery with a data warehouse and Business Intelligence concept is even more troubling, though it provides even more opportunity to innovators who will come from other professions to boost E-Discovery value and cut costs.
Factories are built to create a product that has been designed precisely and the objective of the factory is efficiency and maximizing the ROI or return on investment in the factory by selling the products manufactured.
The product is secondary to factory investors.
Vendors Shift focus from Discovery to Software Factory
E-Discovery software vendors offer compelling arguments and documents to justify ROI or return on investment to law firms or corporations so that they feel good about buying a factory that is not designed to create a specific product.
Indeed the specific design of E-Discovery ‘factories’ offered by traditional database vendors or E-Discovery application providers use software to facilitate or accelerate manual processes add costs to the discovery process but must be executed for the factory to function.
Now we look at how Social Media platforms deal with content to explore opportunities for law firms or corporations around E-Discovery innovation.
Social Media and Content Resonance
The concept of resonance is usually connected with sound though it is a relationship between sound and a RESONATOR that is a container. As sound enters the container’s space its natural resonance, the frequency at which it vibrates at a sub-atomic level, is influenced by the sound.
When sound vibrates at the same frequency of the container it resonates with it to augment its natural frequency whereas sound of a different frequency modifies or dampens the container’s natural frequency. The same happens to content as it travels in and between Social Media platforms or the Internet.
Content resonance creates significant value with two quite distinct uses;
- Navigation — content helps people find things and is expendable afterwards
- Learning — content helps people learn and becomes less valuable afterwards
Content Resonance and E-Discovery 2.0
To illustrate the use of content resonance to quickly improve the speed and quality of discovering relevant documents we chose a clear and simple article from SLAW to;
- Create a SpeedSynch Resonance Map
- Direct Yahoo to find documents of similar ‘resonance’
SpeedSynch Resonance Map for E-Discovery 2.0 Search
Looking for content on the internet to match a particular document pattern is like looking for documents in an E-Discovery process, so many documents and so little time and creating a resonance map or pattern of a target document helps us find documents that traditional searches cannot uncover.
Note that resonance maps complement tradtional search by finding content that cannot be described precisely but rather by the phrase ‘show me something like this’ or with the use of semantic algorithms where ‘any words used in similar spaces share meaning’.
Legal E-Discovery and SpeedSynch Resonance Maps
We then create a resonance based query which Yahoo processed to return the results below after searching its internet index where the top 50 documents closest to the Slaw article E-Discovery\SLAW E-Discovery and Data Dumps.pdf were selected and finally the 8 results below or the cream of the crop were summarized and delivered.
24 Frost Brown Todd – Publications – Court Finds Waiver of Attorney-Client Privilege & Work Product, Notwithstanding 2006 Amendments to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
Court Finds Waiver of… Attorney-Client Privilege & Work Product,… amended rules, the defendants waived privilege… had begun with production of paper documents… and undertook to review ESI materials for… searches for 70 keywords, plus a review…
http://www.frostbrowntodd.com/news_ca_dibertjune08/
23 Trial Court Violated Attorney-Client Privilege by Ordering In Camera Review :Electronic Discovery Law
Wholesale Corp. Superior Court, S163335 (Cal. Electronic Discovery Law Firm : K&L Gates : Electronic Discovery Court Violated Attorney-Client Privilege by Ordering In
http://www.ediscoverylaw.com/2009/12/articles/case-summaries/trial-court-violated-attorneyclient-privilege-by-ordering-in-camera-review/
23 Document Review « Bow Tie Law’s Blog
Knotty Issues of e-Discovery D4 LLC: SmarterDiscovery The Producing Party claimed they had… rolling agreement to review and produce discovery… followed-up with a motion to compel the original… The Defendants hired a 30 person…
http://bowtielaw.wordpress.com/category/document-review/
21 Finding Waiver of Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product Protection, Court Orders Production of Attorney Notes of Employee Interviews Concerning Intel’s Compliance with Evidence Preservation Obligations : Electronic Discovery Law
In re Intel Corp. decision, the district court adopted the Special K&L Gates LLP Protection, Court Orders Production of Attorney Notes… with Evidence Preservation Obligations marketing group employees with instructions…
http://www.ediscoverylaw.com/2008/06/articles/case-summaries/finding-waiver-of-attorneyclient-privilege-and-work-product-protection-court-orders-production-of-attorney-notes-of-employee-interviews-concerning-intels-compliance-with-evidence-preservation-obligations/
14 Data Dumps: The Bane of E-Discovery — Slaw
Slaw is a cooperative Canadian Canadian Forum on Civil Justice Is Moving to York… Nelson and John W. been in private practice ever since. Data Dumps: The Bane of E-Discovery
http://www.slaw.ca/2010/11/26/data-dumps-the-bane-of-e-discovery/
12 : Attorney-Client Privilege : North Carolina Business Litigation Report
North Carolina Business Litigation Report : North Carolina Business Litigation Lawyer… About This Blog Home > Attorney-Client Privilege > onclaimed grounds of privilege. North Carolina”s District Courts… http://www.ncbusinesslitigationreport.com/tags/attorneyclient-privilege/
11 E-Discovery Bytes : E-Discovery Lawyer & Attorney : Quarles & Brady Law Firm : Electronic Discovery, Data Preservation, Conversion, Computer Forensics
Common themes
COURT, COURT ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY, E-DISCOVERY, PRODUCTIONE-Discovery Bytes : E-Discovery… Brady Law Firm : Electronic Discovery, Data Preservation,… Archives Ninth Circuit”s Court of Appeals retreated… Tags: BALCO, Case Law,… Trackbacks //ediscovery.quarles.com/
11 Law Practice Today | The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Amended Federal Discovery Rules
Common themes
ATTORNEY, ATTORNEY-CLIENT, ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE, COURT, LAW PRACTICEmanagement,federal rules, attorney-client, privilege, federal discovery rules, discovery,… and privilege waiver. http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/mgt12062.shtml
Resonance and Hidden E-Discovery Value
The results above clearly provide multiple perspectives of E-Discovery inferred in the SLAW E-Discovery article which would have never been found with traditional searching techniques.
Application of Resonance Pre and Post E-Discovery
We have applied the concept of resonance for over five years to deliver value to corporations and our learnings may be applied to E-Discovery quickly because of the common processes and approaches that are promoted by E-Discovery vendors and appear to be employed within E-Discovery projects, the notion of the factory, 50 years ago.
Call us to see how Resonance and Social Media platform innovation in content navigation may help you.
Cheers,
Nick Trendov @SpeedSynch