I have to admit, I haven’t seen much coverage from blogs or Twitter about LegalTech. Part of that is my schedule being off from a typical East Coast work day, thus missing a lot of morning twitter traffic. Part of that may also be the lack of usable wifi at the hotel, at least from what I’ve been told by those attending.

However, it appears that Lexblog has me covered in terms of gathering up a bunch of coverage and letting me flip through it in one place. Looking forward to doing just that!

V. Mary Abraham wrote about making KM a force multiplier in your law firm on 2012 today. While I wouldn’t say that you could take this exact framework and turn Litigation Support into a force multiplier, I think there’s quite a lot in this article that does apply to making better use of your Litigation Support tools and staff within a firm.

For that matter, this serves as a nice framework for anyone looking to make sure their team is focusing on the things that really matter in 2012. It’s a good reminder to not get bogged down in putting out fires every day, but to keep your eyes on the ultimate goals on your department. Check it out and see how it applies to you!

My wife has written an interesting perspective on the huge waste of time that is created when a job description is vague and doesn’t really identify the job you might be applying for.

It struck a chord with me not only from previous job searches, but also from things I’ve seen and heard in both the technology and legal industries. (Especially in the legal technology area!) It seems all too common for there to either be “formal” job descriptions, that describe the job as it was done the last time someone in HR got on the everyone needs a formal job description bus, no matter how many years ago that was, or something thrown together at the last minute by people who have never done the job they are now advertising for.

The latter situation comes about because of a pure lack of planning. Someone resigns and everyone is caught by surprise. There’s no succession plan, no cross-training has been done, and there’s no clear immediate steps identified for replacing that person. It usually takes longer than the two weeks notice to even make any sort of decision about hiring a replacement, therefore there’s no input on what to look for from the person who has actually been doing the job.

On the other hand, the former situation comes about because there was, at one time, an attempt to develop succession plans, and identify the steps necessary to assure work continues to get done in the interim, but those plans have not been updated in years. Things change, quickly, in any technology area. New tools are brought in, roles change, staff members assume new responsibilities, etc. Dusting off the years old descriptions is not going to give you a clear understanding of the skills you are currently looking for.

In both situations, you wind up reviewing resumes and maybe even interviewing a lot of people who aren’t good fits at all for the job you currently need to fill.Wasting your time, and theirs.

IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

From one of my blog posts during ILTA11 in August:

Back to the HP-Autonomy appliance rumor, if the market for legal technology is headed toward direct purchase by clients, and away from law firms, I can’t help but think that HP is not trying to build a better legal platform for lawyers, but a better legal platform for companies to use inside their own organizations. Imagine a company with litigation readiness needs. Now imagine that they could buy an appliance that would give them the ability to search across their organization for relevant material, archive it, and then make it available using Autonomy’s Introspect platform for attorney review, and all you have to do is plug it in. HP will build it and configure it for you.

From Legal IT Professionals today:
Autonomy and HP Deliver Archiving, eDiscovery and Search Appliances:

eDiscovery Appliance – provides end-to-end eDiscovery capabilities, including identification, preservation, collection, processing, analysis, review and production. The appliance also includes a dashboard that provides visibility into each phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, and analysis of critical data points, including case status, cost, data volume and litigation trends.

Firms might want to start getting used to the idea that they will simply be accessing their clients data remotely, and that the whole process will be controlled by those clients, not themselves.

According to Ralph Losey it’s:

The secret has now been told, once again. Most lawyers are not competent to handle electronic evidence. The lawyers who do know how to preserve and find electronic information have a distinct advantage over their technophobe colleagues. This advantage is growing every day.

Despite this unconverted fact, the primary coping mechanism of trial lawyers remains avoidance and denial. That is where gadflies like me, Craig Ball, and Judge Facciola come in, to point out the obvious and chide them on. So to do the next generation of young Turks, the twenty something baby trial lawyers who know how to do e-discovery. And I mean really know how to do e-discovery and take advantage of others who don’t. I hear the stories my students tell. The next generation of wiz kids are out there shamelessly running circles around their elders, much to the delight of their clients.

But here’s my question. As a non-lawyer working in the legal industry I have heard over and over again that the lawyers will only listen to other lawyers. That you need a practicing attorney to get their attention and educate the rest of the firm, it can’t be done by non-lawyers. Since these practicing trial attorneys who really “get” ediscovery are so few and far between, why not pay attention to the folks who might not be lawyers, but understand ediscovery much, much better than the vast majority of lawyers?

I’d love to hear what Ralph, or anyone else, has to say about this seemingly accepted reality of law firms. Is it really true, and if so, why?

This is where I work almost 40% of my work hours, in my new home office. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned anywhere on the blog that particular change in my position. Basically, I spend about 5 hours at the office each day, drive home on my “lunch” hour and spend the evening hours (the hours where I’m supporting our West Coast offices until 5PM their time) working from home. The schedule allows me to have a quick dinner with my wife when I get home, at a somewhat normal dinner time, then retreat to the office to get back to work, and then already be home when my work day ends.

As with everything else involved with this schedule, this does provide some interesting challenges. First and foremost was creating a good work environment within our house. I think we’ve accomplished that.  It’s comfortable, but also in it’s own space within the house, away from the temptations of home. So far, it’s working out well.

I’m sure, as I go forward, I’ll be blogging about some of the other challenges, especially about how working in a centralized location, for a firm with offices all over the country, and then on top of that, not being in the office a significant portion of the day, presents challenges with building an internal network. I’d be interested in hearing any ideas for handling that challenge. If you’ve been in a similar situation, please leave a comment. Or, if you have any advice for a part time, first time, telecommuter, feel free to leave a comment too. I’m always open to suggestions!

Not good. Not good at all.

When firms see more and more clients moving to hosting their own data, and only allowing outside counsel to access it on a limited basis, this will be one of the reasons. There will be a litany of others, don’t get me wrong, probably topped by their wish to control costs along with their own data, but the insecurity of data once it leaves an organization bound for the outside law firm, will be a huge concern.

The sad reality is, even once this firm puts into place a security plan, including encrypting all data that is going off site for any reason, there will still be huge security holes. Don’t get me wrong, a stricter security policy is a good thing, but it won’t prevent attorneys from printing private, personal information, and carrying it around with them, or emailing it insecurely, or leaving it laying around, etc. Once data leaves the client and goes to a firm, you’re trusting everyone at the firm to protect it, and some clients aren’t willing to go that far, especially if they have the resources to control exactly what data the attorneys have access to, what they can do with it, and when they will no longer have access to it, which is also a huge area of ongoing concern.

Simply put, a firm should have strong documentation and security procedures in place and enforced, but they can never compete with the idea of never sending it to them in the first place.

I’ve seen some news, and cheering, recently suggesting that per-gig pricing as part of the ediscovery process is dead.

If you read that post from AccessData, and follow the links, I think you’ll see a pretty good case for why a per-gig pricing model is problematic, but the one thing you won’t see is what we should be charging instead.

Speaking from my own viewpoint of an internal Lit Support provider to a law firm, I can see the real problems with both the billable hour practice, and the per-gig, or disbursement, practice.

For billable hour approaches, you really don’t recoup the proper cost of handling large amounts of data. Because much of the work is done by the machine, I can only charge the time it takes me to setup the project, QC the end results, etc. That time doesn’t vary much whether we’re handling a 1GB collection or a 25GB collection, but the time that machines are in use, and unavailable, sure does! (I won’t even get into the difficulty in getting clients to pay for billable hours for non-attorneys, or getting attorneys to leave that “time” on the bill, which is quite a significant issue, worthy of it’s own post really)

So, we switch to a model that accounts for the fact that large collections take more time, and work, to deal with. But, one that also comes with it’s own problems. Strict disbursement pricing does not provide an incentive to do things efficiently the way that billable hours does. Simply put, in a billable hour scenario, you, as the client, have an incentive to collect completely and efficiently. Doing it once limits the amount of time the Lit Support professional can bill. With a disbursement model, you get charged the per-gig price, sometimes regardless of whether that 10GB collection comes in all at once, or 25MB at a time. Obviously, having to deal with small amounts of data, over and over again, is much more work for the Lit Support folks, but there’s no price incentive that would encourage clients and case teams to not behave like this.

Neither one really provides value for the client, and neither one really provides an incentive to be complete, and yet efficient. So, what does? Who is going to come up with a truly innovative way to bill for handling of ediscovery data, that accounts for the increasing amounts of data, and also stays within the ideas of proportionality?

It’s easy to say that something is “dead”, it’s much harder to come up with what will replace it. The billable hour is a good example. It’s been “dead” for years, yet it still hanging around, only partially being replaced. How long will per-gig pricing be “dead” before we come up with a replacement?

Just want to add a couple of further thoughts about ILTA that didn’t occur during one of the sessions.

One of the more interesting things about ILTA is that, with all the legal technology vendors in one place, it’s a great place to compare them, and get a feel for where the market is going overall. Obviously the big question on everyone’s mind was where was HP going with the very high price they paid for Autonomy. I heard a few rumors, and had a few thoughts of my own, but maybe the one that made the most sense to me was someone who pointed out that Autonomy has always had this great IDOL search engine, but never really figured out how to build it in to a product, so maybe HP was going to build it in to a server appliance?

In order to explain why I think this is so, let me talk a bit about some other vendors. First off, the move among ediscovery vendors has been, and continues to be towards integrated systems, and online review. Even the old stand-bys of Concordance and Summation are moving in that direction. Lexis is continuing to develop the desktop version of Concordance, but is also offering Evolution now, a web-based quasi-native review tool. Meanwhile, AccessData is really scrapping the entire back end of Summation, iBlaze and Enterprise both, in order to build it back onto the same back-end that is used with their forensics tool, FTK. In fact, they have positioned themselves to be not just a product for law firms, but a product for law departments. The AD Ediscovery product can be used to collect, which rolls right into their ECA tool, which rolls right into their review/production platform, and since it shares the same database structure, you can jump back and forth between the products.

In their presentation, they talked about being able to de-dupe globally, or only load the last email of a thread into the review tool, and when it came time to produce, you could go back into the ECA tool and grab those other copies, or earlier individual messages as needed. So, with one tool, you can collect your own data, search and cull it, and either send what’s left off to a hostedreview, or a firm, or simply add on the Summation piece, and give your outside counsel access through the web.

Now, think about what we talked about earlier in the week with the corporate law departments. They want to control the process, not give control to law firms. They want to get predictability in costs, and what better way to get that than to make the investment in infrastructure yourself, and use it as much as you need to use it, for the fixed price of that investment? This is where corporations are going, and why vendors are seeing so much growth outside of law firms. AccessData sees that this is where the market is headed, and is responding by making their tools more usable for law departments.

Back to the HP-Autonomy appliance rumor, if the market for legal technology is headed toward direct purchase by clients, and away from law firms, I can’t help but think that HP is not trying to build a better legal platform for lawyers, but a better legal platform for companies to use inside their own organizations. Imagine a company with litigation readiness needs. Now imagine that they could buy an appliance that would give them the ability to search across their organization for relevant material, archive it, and then make it available using Autonomy’s Introspect platform for attorney review, and all you have to do is plug it in. HP will build it and configure it for you.

Large organizations, and those frequently involved in litigation, are moving in this direction. Demanding their outside lawyers use the processes they decide on, the tools they decide on, and that they learn how to best use these tools. It’s no longer the law firms who are driving this train.

But, you say, there are always the small businesses that will continue to let us do business as usual. Maybe for now, as the investment costs for some of these tools are higher than their litigation risk is, but this won’t be true once Google gets completely into the ediscovery game. (Yes, there was someone from Google at ILTA, someone with their edicsovery area in fact.). Right now, if your business uses Google Apps, it’s pretty close to ready for ediscovery. Google can easily search across Gmail, Google Docs and all the other tools that come with an Apps account. Heck, even if you’re not using Gmail, they have Postini setup in front of your email server and can be configured as an email archive. Once they pair that up with a collaboration tool that would let you grab a copy of all those search hits and make it available online to your attorney, you have yourself a complete ediscovery solution, all part of your $50 per user, per year, Google Apps account. I don’t believe they are that far away from this. Go back and read that paragraph again, and think about all of the various tools they already own, or have investments in. It’s really more a matter of putting it all together as a service than it is developing a whole new tool.

Where does that leave law firms, and in-house Lit Support at law firms? Good question. I don’t think the need for Lit Support will ever completely go away, but the work is changing. It’s going to involve a lot more working with clients, and supporting a variety of tools being used across various clients. Some firms will still offer some processing and review services, but it’s not going to be a big revenue generator for firms. We simply can’t compete with companies where this is their area of expertise. It’s not the core function of a law firm. The revenue is going to come from helping clients develop their own processes and tools, as more of an expert, as opposed to a document reviewer. That’s also going to require lawyers to learn a whole lot more about the process and the technology than they currently know. Those that do, will be successful in the new world of ediscovery process being driven by clients. Those that don’t, should think about working elsewhere.