Difficulties producing ‘digital evidence’ cause lawyers to lose cases – SC Magazine UK
The challenge of processing digital information has caused lawyers to lose a case or to be fined or sanctioned in the last two years.
A survey of 5,000 lawyers across EMEA by Symantec found that they are struggling to manage the vast amounts of electronically stored information that play a vital role as evidence in legal matters across the EMEA region.
Half of those surveyed (51 per cent) admitted to problems identifying and recovering e-discovery in the last three months. However the poor availability of ‘digital evidence’, which can also hinder the legal process and the power of technology to identify and collect relevant information among millions of electronic files has had a positive impact on many cases across EMEA.
Almost all of the lawyers questioned (98 per cent) said that ‘digital evidence’ identified during e-discovery had been vital to the success of legal matters in which they had been involved in the past two years.
via Difficulties producing ‘digital evidence’ cause lawyers to lose cases – SC Magazine UK.
Lexology – E-discovery & information governance – do you know where your email is?
If you have ever been involved in litigation, you know that the process of finding, collecting, reviewing and producing the evidence that supports your case is often difficult, lengthy and expensive. As we have transitioned from a primarily paper to an electronic world, the costs of discovery can sometimes threaten to overwhelm all but the largest disputes. One way to minimize these costs is by properly governing your information.
Effective information governance means establishing enterprise-wide policies and procedures for the creation, use and retention of information. If implementing a thorough information governance plan seems daunting, a good first step is to start with your email, specifically, where your email is located. (Governing how to use email effectively and how to decrease the volume of email being saved will be addressed in future articles.) Waiting until you are in the middle of a lawsuit to ferret out the hidden caches where your employees are saving and storing email is often a contributing factor to increased litigation costs.
via Lexology – E-discovery & information governance – do you know where your email is?.
ZYLAB: 88% of FTSE 100 Companies at Risk of Litigation, warns ZyLAB | TradingMarkets.com
88% of the FTSE 100 are at risk of litigation due to their susceptibility to a number of risk factors, including a history of litigation, operating in litigation-heavy areas, and being directly consumer-facing, according to research by ZyLAB (www.zylab.co.uk), a leading provider of e-discovery and information management solutions, with almost a quarter (24%) found to be aEUR~high riskaEUR(TM) across industries including energy, travel and pharmaceutical.
The research assessed each FTSE 100 companyaEUR(TM)s vulnerability to ten key risk factors[1], a mix of industry and company-specific considerations previously known to heighten the chance of litigation, and then each company was given a score out of ten. Key drivers for assessing this risk and preparing effectively include the ability to prevent legal and accounting fees which have cost companies like Siemens AGBP850m[2] in a bid to determine whether it had violated anti-corruption regulations.
via ZYLAB: 88% of FTSE 100 Companies at Risk of Litigation, warns ZyLAB | TradingMarkets.com.
Improving legal records management: harness the DNA of data | CPA Global
Data discovery has played a key role in US litigation for two generations, during which time nearly all forms of information have migrated to the digital realm. Yet, according to Texas-based trial lawyer and e-discovery expert, Craig Ball, few legal departments are addressing this reality. He says that, despite the central role of electronic information in our lives, e-discovery efforts are either overlooked altogether or pursued in such epic proportions that discovery dethrones the merits as the focal point of the case.
Ball believes that, at each extreme, lawyers must bear some responsibility for the failure. ‘Few have devoted sufficient effort to understanding their clients’ information architecture or mastering tools and techniques to manage data,’ he argues. ‘We didn’t know how good we had it when discovery meant only paper. Paper is tangible. It has to be stored somewhere physically accessible, and systems have developed over time to store and retrieve it. Paper holds power of place, whereas electronic data accumulates invisibly.
‘Even if employees label electronic data accurately, they rarely file it consistently,’ continues Ball. ‘Thousands of emails sit ignored in inboxes; their subject lines offering no clue as to their contents. Documents are saved in cryptically named folders on desktops and portable storage media or replicated between work and home computers. There is still plenty of paper around, too, but filing systems, like filing clerks, have all but disappeared.’
Ball adds that there is a standard misconception that evidence can be retrieved simply by running a Googlelike search across a company’s electronic files. ‘That’s rarely feasible, even in high-tech enterprises,’ he emphasises. Similarly, he is frustrated by the attempts by many lawyers to try to convert e-data into paper form. ‘Such is the volume of electronic information that it would be impossible to convert it all to hard copy,’ he says, ‘and yet lawyers seem to overwhelmingly favour this expensive, inferior path over learning to deal with electronic data differently.’
via Improving legal records management: harness the DNA of data.
Audio Files Present Challenges For Computer Forensics and E-Discovery | Burgess Forensics
While many of the tools for searching and storing data are effective, and accurate, when it comes to audio, no such level of accuracy or ease yet exists for the purpose of searching for specific information. There are currently three means of searching audio: phonetic search, transcribing by hand, and automatic transcription.
Phonetic search technology matches wave patterns, or phonemes, to a library of known wave patterns. For example, the acronym “B2B” would be represented by the following phonemes: “_B _IY _T _UW _B _IY” (Wikipedia example from Nexidia, a company involved in speech recognition systems). Given the wide variation in modes of speaking, pronunciation, accents and dialects, the accuracy of this method is spotty. It produces many false hits. And while it may identify sections and phrases that are of interest, it doesn’t transcribe the audio into text – the audio must then be listened to.
Manual transcription of audio so that transcribed text can then be automatically searched, is time-consuming. As it depends upon a listener to type the words as they are heard, this labor-intensive task can also be very expensive. There may be security concerns, as the audio goes outside the company (or perhaps the country) to be transcribed.
Machine transcription is the one automated means of converting audio to text. But it suffers from accuracy issues. It compares “heard” audio with known libraries, again facing issues of differing pronunciations, terms not in existing libraries, and clarity of recording. While high-quality recordings can lend themselves to recognition rates of 85% or so (a positive-looking number until compared with the nearly 100% accuracy of pure text searches), when dealing with voice mail, accuracy dips down as low as 40%.
The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require companies to have a means of identifying key communications and data sources. That data must then be saved. For the sake of efficiency, both in the optimizing amount of storage required, and diminishing the volume of data that must be identified and produced for litigation, it is also important to be able to accurately identify data that is unnecessary.
While requirements for retention of data increase, and storage costs go down, identifying what audio should be kept and what should be deleted can be costly. As such information is digitized, it must nonetheless be stored and indexed (or searched after the fact). The technology is not mature, and is evolving. There may be an opening for an innovative company to prosper here, especially if able to produce some kind of breakthrough in voice-to-text technology. In the meanwhile, companies face a difficult issue in deciding what stays and what goes.
via Audio Files Present Challenges For Computer Forensics and E-Discovery.
Google Receives ‘Second Request’ From DOJ On ITA Acquisition – WSJ.com
Google Inc. (GOOG) said Friday it had received a “second request” for more information from U.S. regulators looking at its pending $700 million acquisition of flight information software company ITA Software Inc.
The Internet search giant, however, said in a blog post it remained “confident” the Department of Justice will conclude that the online travel market will remain competitive after the acquisition closes.
via Google Receives ‘Second Request’ From DOJ On ITA Acquisition – WSJ.com.
Google Realtime Search Challenges Bing, Twitter – Search Engines from eWeek
Google rolled out its Google Realtime Search page, which returns Twitter conversations and other real-time results in response to search queries. Google and Microsoft’s Bing have spent months exploring real-time search features.
Google’s latest move in real-time search, the launch of a dedicated page that aggregates of-the-moment information from Twitter and other sources, represents yet another escalation in the search-engine giant’s competition against Microsoft’s Bing.
With Google Realtime Search, typing in a term like “Halo: Reach” will result in a scroll of real-time Tweets about the game, alongside related “Top links” from YouTube and other Websites. A timeline at the top of the page allows you to follow those real-time updates into the past, in minute-by-minute increments. Tweets are organized from oldest to newest, helping users trace a Twitter conversation to its source.
Other real-time tools include the ability to narrow a search term by geography. “You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify,” Dylan Casey, a product manager for Google, wrote in an Aug. 26 posting on the Official Google Blog. “So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.”
via Google Realtime Search Challenges Bing, Twitter – Search Engines from eWeek.
Redacting Personally Identifiable Data From E-Filings | New York Law Journal
Electronic filing of court documents has become the norm rather than the exception both here, in New York federal and state courts, and around the country.[FOOTNOTE 1] The trend is driven by the pervasive availability of online technology to conveniently enable e-filing, as well as the generally held presumption in U.S. jurisprudence that court proceedings are public in nature and should be easily accessible to the public.
At the same time, privacy advocates, concerned about the amount of personally identifiable information easily available on the internet and the resultant increase of identity theft and other types of fraud, wish to restrict public access to certain types of data. These two somewhat contradictory philosophies intersect on the issue of whether the proliferation of electronic filing has unduly and unnecessarily exposed personally identifiable information to possible exploitation.
At issue is the requirement that attorneys redact personally identifiable information from their e-filings. The obligation of an attorney to preserve the privacy interests of those involved in litigation and administrative proceedings has arisen in a variety of circumstances, and has been touched on in academic circles.
via Law.com – Redacting Personally Identifiable Data From E-Filings.
Getting meta about metadata: Connecting content to business transactions, part 1 | Hyland Software’s Document Management Blog
When we think about keeping track of information, we usually start with when we save or capture it. We capture data all the time, such as when we upload photos of kids, a vacation view, a restaurant dish we tried, or some other reason for bragging on Facebook.
To find a particular photo, our mental database uses information about what we’re looking for. We can then skim thumbnails for the tiny green soccer jersey, white sandy beach, or monstrous bacon cheeseburger that we remember from the picture we’re trying to find.
At work, there are way too many documents, or too much content, to rely on manual scans supported by mental hints. We need more. To capture, preserve, and protect the content we care about, we can store it in an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Capturing and storing content is where ECM starts.
However, the real value provided by ECM isn’t from storing the content; the value is provided by the ability to quickly and easily retrieve exactly the content you need. Usually, the first sorting of content is into content types, such as invoices. This creates a bucket of content that looks even more alike, though.
Climbing Back – Consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann highlight key trends they identified in their annual e-discovery survey | Law Technology News
In the world of electronic data discovery, 2009 was a year to refocus, with providers and consumers shifting away from review and moving toward information management and analysis. And while money wasn’t pouring in like the apex years, revenue is climbing back, with a steady if modest growth.
More than anything else, those are the lessons learned from our seventh annual review of the industry, The 2010 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey.
We are definitely starting to see the maturation of the electronic data discovery market. The good news: prospects are bright for law firms and EDD providers that focus on helping clients address e-discovery challenges efficiently, with an eye to early understanding of electronically stored information and what it means to the matter at hand.
The future is dim, however, for those who seek only to treat the symptoms, pursuing short-term, reactionary, just-make-it-go-away approaches. It’s also murky for those who continue to insist that the way they addressed EDD three years ago still works fine today.
via Climbing Back.
Translation
by