Ralph Losey is putting his money where his mouth is. After years of trying to encourage law schools to do a better job teaching e-discovery, he’s decided to take on that challenge himself, with the help of some friends. Earlier this week, he announced the opening of E-Discovery Law Training, an online course equivalent to a three hour law school class, and is even making the first quarter of the class, 15 modules, free to anyone who’s interested.

Yes, it’s open not just to attorneys and paralegals, but also IT folks, Lit Support folks and others who find themselves in this world of e-discovery on a regular basis. It’s not often us lowly Lit Support folks have access to legal educational resources like this.

I will certainly be taking advantage of the free registration, and depending on how it goes, I am also giving serious thought to paying out for the rest of the course as well. I encourage any of you who are interested in learning more to do the same.

Saw this video over at Jim Canterucci’s blog originally. It certainly makes you wonder about the way we educate children, and how the education models hasn’t changed, despite the fact that the world has changed in most every other way. As I watched it though, I began to wonder how this applies to law schools. Are law schools also pursuing an education that isn’t necessarily relevant to the legal industry?

Having never attended law school, but working with the products of that system every day, I’m curious to see what others think about the law school dynamic. Lawyers, is legal education helping, or hurting, innovation within the legal industry?

As one of the Summation Certified Trainers who has kept current with the certification, I’ve had a bit of an inside look into where AccessData is taking the Summation product after purchasing the company. Clearly, their initial forays into redesigning the training and certification programs were not very well thought out, and they have even admitted that. Now that the dust has sort of settled on that, where do we find ourselves?

Well, for me, the changes mean that I will no longer be a Certified Trainer. As an in-house law firm user, I can’t possibly meet the requirements to be available to do training classes. I will, apparently, instead become some sort of Summation Certified Engineer, though I believe the exact details have not quite been ironed out. For others who were working as independent trainers, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Obviously, AccessData is seeking some control and consistency over how their product is being taught, but they’ve also put themselves in competition with many of those same trainers. I know many very good trainers who will be out on their own, without support from the “mothership” when it comes to training on Summation, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time. I’ve always been a believer in “the more training options, the better”, but AccessData needs to put together a very good training program to compete.

That being said, bringing in Michelle Kovitch to run that training program was a pretty genius move, especially given the obvious lack of law firm insight initially showed by AccessData’s training folks. Michelle will get things pointed in the right direction, and get some good training resources put together. I’m looking forward to seeing what she comes up with, as well as what the various certifications look like. I had, at the beginning of 2010, talked to some of our paralegals about getting a Power User certification, but with the company getting sold and that program being put on hold, it never really got anywhere. Now it appears those sorts of opportunities might be out there again for them, however with my no longer being a Certified Trainer, I may not be able to do the prep training for free. That will be the one real downside to losing that level of certification, if it turns out that way.

As far as the product, AccessData is going for the holy grail of end-to-end ediscovery, from using FTK for forensic collections, right through to using Summation as your case review, and building both iBlaze and Enterprise on a SQL backend. In theory, that sounds good. In practice most companies that have been trying to get this end-to-end solution have wound up with something that reminds me of every all-in-one printer I’ve ever worked with. Sure the printer does a whole bunch of things, but it doesn’t really do any of them all that well, and really just has more points of failure than usefulness. We’ll see if AccessData, or any other company comes up with one true end-to-end solution.

If you want to check out the recording of a recent webinar where they talked about all this, in more detail, I believe you can view it here.

What’s your view?

Note to self, and to anyone else who might be interested:

Check the list of recorded webinars on the ILTA site occasionally. There are some good resources there. Watched the OneNote webinar this afternoon. As someone who has used OneNote before, much of it was not new to me, but it did give me some ideas for maybe putting it to use in certain work situations, like media tracking, and project notes, in shared notebooks that wouldn’t be cloud-based like Evernote is.

Anyway, I’m going to check out some of the Lit Support peer group ones soon too.

A post at Lockergnome about IT burnout got me thinking today. The author listed some of the reasons we see a high rate of burnout in IT, and I couldn’t help but think of the seemingly large number of people I know who have left legal IT specifically, in recent months, citing burnout as a major cause.

I am pretty sure I’d agree with all of the reasons laid out in the post, and that they combine to create burnout, but in legal I’d add even one more, unrealistic expectations. Attorneys are not exactly known for their understanding of things like maintenance downtime, or getting that some technical processes take time. (“Why do I have to wait for you to make a copy of that drive the client pulled from their PC?”)

Anyway, since I don’t work in a truly “IT” job any longer, I also started to wonder about whether we should be worried about burnout in Litigation Support. It’s a relatively new job niche, so it may be that we simply haven’t seen many folks in it long enough to have a burnout epidemic the way IT seems to be having. On the other hand, do the same causes add up here too?

Long hours? – Check!

Little recognition? -Check! (Though I think Lit Support folks who do trial presentation do get some recognition, it’s not as behind the scenes as other functions.)

Lack of respect? – Check! (Think of the number of times attorneys write your work off a client’s bill, because it’s not “real” legal work.)

Unrealistic Expectations? – Double Check!

Of course, like IT, some firms are better than others at creating a good environment for their Litigation Support folks, but I think there’s certainly enough similarities to IT that if you’re seeing burnout there, eventually you will see it in Lit Support too.

What do you think? Have you seen signs of burnout in this industry?

Monday, I was up in Cleveland at the state-wide ILTA Litigation Support event. There were a number of sessions throughout the day and some excellent speakers. One of the themes that came through, from the morning session on litigation holds, through the e-discovery project management sessions and on through Craig Ball’s final session on the state of search, was the fact that this process is a process. It’s not a one-stop fix for all e-discovery issues.

In the legal hold session we heard all about how technology can certainly help keep things organized, but that it’s not a set it and forget it situation. You still need to follow up with custodians, verify that things are being done, and revisit what is being held as the case develops. In other words, you have to be a lawyer and do some work.

Obviously, when we started hearing about project management, these same themes stood out to me. Legal project management is all about testing, measuring the results, and reacting to those results. Again, nothing is a set it and forget it type of technology. You have to constantly assess the case, and make adjustments to your project tasks.

Craig then talked about search, and specifically he mentioned the TREC Legal track from 2008, which found that the best search results were accomplished by the teams that spent the most time talking to custodians, finding out how they would talk about the items in question, what time frames these documents or emails would have been written, etc. and also by teams that ran a search, started looking at some documents, and adjusted their searches based on what they were really seeing. Again, the teams with the best results, were the ones who spent more time being lawyers, and less looking for the perfect technology.

Given the importance of seeing these steps in the EDRM as processes, as opposed to one-time actions, I can’t help but wonder what implications that has for Early Case Assessment (ECA). Vendors seem very excited to tell us that their ECA tool will be the only thing attorneys need to do, just grab all that data, push it into our tool, and it’ll tell you what’s important. Hogwash! The technology can certainly help, but it won’t be anywhere near as successful as understanding that even ECA is a process. It still involves evaluating your case, evaluating what data the client has, who has it, and what’s relevant, and constant willingness to adjust as the case changes.

No matter what technology you have, you still have to go be a lawyer. As a litigation support professional, I’ve got a number of technology tools at my disposal, but they can’t replicate you, they can’t design strategy or try the case for you, it still takes a legal professional to do that. As I’ve mentioned previously, many times, at some point it’s not about the technology, you just have to go back to being a lawyer.

Jeff Brandt asked on Twitter at the end of the conference if the educational sessions or the networking opportunities were more valuable from the conference. I my 140 characters on Twitter I replied that I thought the networking was more valuable, but the firm wanted to see the quality sessions for the money spent. I wanted to take a minute and explain that in more detail.

Obviously, the organization paying to send you to ILTA, or any conference, is going to be looking for those quality educational sessions, and what information you bring back from those sessions that add value to them. That’s expected, and ILTA provides plenty of great sessions. I know I’m bringing back some ideas I will be implementing from the sessions I attended, and think they will provide great benefit to the firm.

At the same time, though. I am also bringing back lots of little tips and ideas that I picked up outside of the educational sessions, from conversations I had with folks, sometimes well into the morning hours. While those tips I picked up informally might not quite equal the value of the formal educational sessions, those conversations do something that the sessions could never do, they formed connections, or enhanced existing connections, that I will take with me going forward. These are folks who I will continue conversing with, even if it is just online, sharing information, ideas, tips, stories, etc. The educational sessions, good as they were, are done. The relationships are not.

I know that some of the folks I met for the very first time this past week, I will continue to be in touch with, and continue to gain knowledge from being connected with them. That’s a value that may be hard to put a dollar amount on, but it’s much higher than any one week’s worth of sessions could hope to be.

I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations.

Just wanted to toss out some links to some more stuff from ILTA this week. I will have another post with some thoughts about the benefits of the conference, but for right now, I have a couple of things I wanted to get out to folks.

First of all, if you attended our ILTAU session on Weds. morning, and were as disappointed as I was that there was some Outlook configuration issues that prevented us from really digging in to that PST by creating rules to filter things out of the inbox, I did go back to the documentation site that Sean Brady started for the session, and add some documentation on using Rules, and the Organize function in Outlook 2007. Check it out, or if you weren’t able to make it, check it out for some information on what we talked about.

Secondly, I had the pleasure of doing a quick interview with Josh Gilliland, of the Bow Tie Law Blog, about Social Networking benefits, and the e-discovery issues with social media. It was great to finally get to meet Josh after many years of “knowing” each other online, and the having some discussion was fun, and a good example of exactly the sort of benefits you get from the conversation at ILTA, above and beyond the educational sessions.

Lastly, for those I met at ILTA (and there were more people than I could possibly name!), or those who I didn’t get a chance to see in person but have connected with online, I wanted to share the places where you can connect with me, beyond the blog.

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemac29

Twitter – http://twitter.com/mikemac29

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/mikemac29

But, enough about me.

Well, technically Sunday was day one, but Monday was day one of the educational sessions, so I’m calling it day one.

Jason Jennings got things going, with a great keynote where he discussed the “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”. Among the many good points made by Jason, one of the things that really caught my attention was his description of the shared traits of the leaders of the best companies in the world, and how those traits affect the rest of an organization. For example, these leaders were happy to share their plans, their knowledge, and their strategy. They wanted everyone in their organization, and everyone they did business with, to understand the purpose of their work, and their place within the overall purpose. Given that, I couldn’t help but wonder if those of us who are practicing this whole idea of sharing and learning from one another in the online world, are in fact, practicing leadership?

We are, after all, on the forefront of sharing ideas and knowledge openly. We’re open to new ideas, and also open to letting go of old ideas as we acquire more knowledge. We’re accountable to the folks we share with, they’ll know if we start passing off bad information, or straying from the truth, and they will call us out on it. I also like to think that those of us living in this space, who really want it to benefit our careers, are also good stewards, both of the information we have and share, and also of the attention and time spent by those who follow us.

Social Networking as part of leadership training? Maybe, it’s worth thinking about anyway.

The rest of the day for me was spent in the Litigation Support track, and the one thing that really jumped out at me in those sessions, and also from a breakfast discussion at a Cowen Group event this morning, was the things that need to be in place before we can even think about implementing project management disciplines. Simply put, legal project management depends on measurements and workflow processes. You have to define the processes and document the work well before you can think about what to measure, and how it fits into a project management process. Same thing goes for making technology and strategy decisions, you have to understand how you work, what work you do, and what your end result looks like before you can make the correct decisions. It’s an idea I’ve been working on quite a bit, and one I’m determined really takes quite a bit of time. Others are further along this process, but it takes work, and it takes buy-in from management, which can only come from having good measurements to show the value. So we measure and document and try to spot the trends and the patterns that will inform us of the best way to plan for the future.

Good data can only help, right?

As always though, above and beyond all of the educational sessions, having the chance to catch up with old contacts, meet some online friends in person, and make new connections is the biggest benefit to being here. Again, it’s that network of folks who are willing to share what they know that is the best resource we walk away from at the end of the week. I look forward to building it even more!

In the span of two days this week, I’ve noticed that Seagate is coming out with a 3TB drive for $250, and then over at the Bowtie Law Blog, a challenge to make using hosted ediscovery review tools less expensive.

So let’s see, I can buy 3TB worth of storage for my machines, for a measly $250, but if I get sued and need to send my documents to an attorney to review, it’s going to cost me $760 per month for just a few GB? (Using Josh’s estimate, which doesn’t seem far off compared to what I’ve seen quoted)

Does anyone else see a problem here? Technology is making it easier, and cheaper, to store data. The legal industry, however, is making it more and more expensive to be involved in civil litigation, mostly due to the amount of data there is. Somehow, our industry needs to catch up and find efficient ways of dealing with data. The lawyers and vendors who do this, will survive, while those who don’t, simply won’t.

Still think you can continue to practice law the same way you have for 20-30 years? Not likely.