Matt Clarke laughed, “Wanted: Lawyers must have pulse. Please show up by five o’clock.”
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Whit Andrews
VP Distinguished Analyst
10 years at Gartner
14 years IT industry
LegalTechNY: The wrong way to advertise for reviewers
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | Comments Off
LegalTech NY: Stephen Hawking’s question on search
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | Comments Off
Stephen Hawking: Can lawyers rely on keyword search any more?
Craig Ball [badly transcribed but the essence captured]: The way I look at Victor Stanley, the hyperbole of Judge Facciola found itself re-expressed as this: You need to be qualified to engage in search, and you need to have Quality Assurance and quality control, and you need to be testing. You’re going to have to test your keywords, have a methodology and some level of expertise. They need to be people who understand the collections, the hidden words, the inside words that are used. You’re going to have to involve them in what you do, because otherwise you’ll have clients paying for nightmarish collections, and you’re going to miss what’s important.
Victor: There’s keyword searching and theire’s keyword searching, and what we’re learning in TREC legal track and the legal track, is there isn’t any one search tool that’s going to get you everything. There’s concept searching. When you combine these tools together, and you look at it and you tweak, you do better. You can’t pick a few blunderbuiss words out of the air, plug them in. That’s not diligent representation.
Craig [laughing]: But Ken, it works so well for Google. The business model will put us [lawyers] out of business. Are you kidding? “Do no evil”?
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Legaltech NY: Multi-matter management environments?
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
Apropos of a briefing we took from Iron Mountain’s Stratify last week, and also this week when I talked to Inference, the question of the value of multi-matter management environments came up.
Ken Withers: Managing matters in a single place for all parties could result in serious savings — but there has to be a tremendous level of trust on both sides to make that happen.
Craig Ball: Where we don’t recognize the opportunity is in small cases, where you spend a lot of effort. Whereas if you can get on the same page, and see things the same way [things can improve.] The repository companies need to be viewed as utilities — we need and association and code of ethics.Why aren’t you getting together? This is the opportunity.
Patrick: That sounds like a den of thieves to me.
Craig: No, that’s the US financial industry.
But seriously, the idea of an association is interesting, because when we asked Iron Mountain what would happen to any matters proceeding if it were to go out of business, Iron Mountain said, basically, that they think it’s extremely, infintesimally unlikely that would happen. A better answer might have been, “we’re in an association, and they’ll cover our backs.”
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Legal Tech E-Discovery Town Hall
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | Comments Off
Question: How can we establish a set of practices for meet-and-confer prep and conduction?
Ken Withers, the Sedona Conference: There will never be a 3×5 checklist. There will be best practices. A few things will be fundamental. EVerybody going into meeting must know what clients’ data holdings are.
The most recent disaster scenario in Fannie Mae, where counsel blindly agreed to things they couldn’t deliver — and result turned out to be 6% of client’s annual budget.
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LegalTech 2009: Executing eDiscovery Inside the Corporation
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | Comments Off
Honeywell’s Ron Harry (Manager, Electronic Data Discovery) shows a model where Honeywell divides into three tiers — small, medium and large matters. Then they split that into Identification, collection, pre-process, pre-review, processing and production. There are in-house, out-sourced and hybrid models for each cell that this matrix produces, and Honeywell aims to save as much money as possible by slotting the right model into that cell.
Gartner has a slightly broader model, where we set a certain threshold for matters/year and then advise inhouse/out-source (for the left side of the EDRM) depending on which side of the threshold that company falls on.
Harry mentions that they’re looking at the EDRM, and asking what the company needs to accomplish in each cell, and then asking what level of sophistication they need. An interesting point from Christina Ayiotis, Group Counsel (E-Discovery and Data Privacy) at Computer Sciences Corporation — how to work out existing software and service assets’ impact on e-discovery, and what purchases (she mentioned enterprise search, and I didn’t even give her any baked goods) can be used across in multiple places.
Harry says that Honeywell is also seeking to decommision enterprise information systems that are simply too old to trust. That could mean eliminating the systems or migrating the data elsewhere. What he says they are trying to do at Honeywell is involve his group in the actuall process of equipment collection and requisitioning, which is intriguing — in other words, trying to get a DNR tattoo on servers that need it.
Harry said he attended a a meeting at Honeywell where an administrator gave a speech on protecting the company from Web 2.0 techs by barring it. “I just sat in my chair and I was going insane inside my head…you have to work with the technology as it comes along.” Much of his work has been on mitigating the concomitant risks.
KPMG’s Keith Andrzejewski (Principal) now discussing models for working with information BEFORE e-discovery enters litigation phase. Discussing what we think of as Data Loss Prevention.
Andrzejewski said enterprise search is a huge boon in identifying properly valuable information, but at the same time creates explosive perspectives that aren’t sufficiently narrowed. “The challenge has been I couldn’t find anything…now, I find everything. Now we get an automated, overwhelming response.”
Jim Lynch (partner, Latham & Watkins): “You’re saying garbage in, garbage out. The best ones preserve chain of custody, and that’s a critical issue. If the data collection is not done properly, then you can have a real problem from a spoliation perspective. The best enterprise search tools eliminate that risk by capturing it in a way that is documented and defensible.” (not sure that he said “defensible”)
Ayiotis mentions that one of the problems is things like public Internet sites and private Intranet sites, because they’re hard or nearly impossible to manage. (Something that came up in the discussion with Autonomy this morning apropos of the potential synergies between itself and Interwoven.)
Good job by Lynch, moderator, in guiding discussion.
Glad I went to this panel. Everything a pleasure.
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Now hear this
by Whit Andrews | February 2, 2009 | 3 Comments
Good conversation with Autonomy at Legal Tech today. They had good case studies of the use of audio in e-discovery, which is a Big Scary World of new complexity we expect to get fairly explosive fairly quickly thanks to unified messaging. Only video has the potential to be more emotionally devastating (think Hard Copy in your neighbor’s civil case about retention wall collapse) to the losing side’s chances.
Regardless of the vendor-specific claims, which we try to steer clear of on the blog, the demo (which was, natch, video) of search running against Enron data (anyone not seen a demo with Enron data in the last few weeks? — it’s to search what “Make Way For Ducklings” is to a Brookline elementary school) is good demo. There it is, in a recorded call, a Mighty Shady Thing Being Said, being pulled back on a keyword search and then a concept search (and no, I am not going to define the washbucket term “concept search” here).
One thing that’s interesting is that Autonomy is now indicating it’s doing phonemic search, which is apparently the result of a long, slow about-face from (they said) two years ago, when (I know) they used to argue almost entirely in favor of a transcriptive approach. In other words, they now index the data stream as a set of phonemes, in addition to (as they put it) a transcriptive strategy for textual analysis.
Phonemic strategy is a big deal for search. It shifts the perspective from looking at text – or treating everything as something that has either strayed from text or yearns to return to it – to seeing information as a non-textual, non-documentary environment. It was more than just a good demo that I saw (and I emphasize – a demo is not a living, breathing client) – it was a look at a futuristic perspective on information I found very interesting indeed.
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Accepting Excepting
by Whit Andrews | February 1, 2009 | Comments Off
Search has been a rough business for years, now, with Microsoft loading improving free software into its discharge chute and heaving it out as it goes, with IBM signing up with mighty Yahoo and doing the same, with Google standing on the brink of the enterprise sales slurry pit and throwing appliances in like it’s trying to build a steppingstone path. Growth’s limited, and most of the money has been coming in the horizontal applications like the spectacularly lucrative e-discovery niche where Autonomy, Recommind and Zylab have to clean their cash rakes regularly to keep the coin from clogging them. I’m at LegalTech this week and I’ll have to wipe algorithms off my trouser cuffs when I walk the show floor. The next person who says “concept searching” to me will quite possibly face legal intervention. (There will be ample lawyers around to facilitate, one presumes.)
There’s always a new vendor, though. Last week alone I caught briefings from Columba Global Systems, which is mostly aimed at the law enforcement/intelligence vertical, especially with an eye toward external data sources. Columba’s out of Ireland, and they tell a compelling story that I find eminently believable about the value of findable, shareable information in law enforcement. We don’t get fat loads of inquiry on that over here in the enterprise search stall where I swing my pickaxe all the livelong day, but it’s one of those obvious things that seems to generate the sort of contingency funds people like to spend.
You might not have heard of Columba before, but chances are much better than you know the people at Information Builders, a vendor known for its Business Intelligence more than search. Now enter them in enterprise search, though, as well, with WebFOCUS Magnify (did you shout “FOCUS” in your head on reading that? If not, try again, I’m still seeing kinda blurry). They’re certainly not the first to dream big for the convergence of structured and unstructured data – not a convergence so much as a widening position on a spectrum, as my redoubtable colleagues Mark Beyer and Rita Knox have pointed out assiduously and tirelessly. This brings Information Builders (and Columba!) to the list of vendors who are exceptions to the general rule that structured (or “columnar,” as Mark puts it) data and unstructured data (or “steaming piles of alphanumeric strings meant for meat to peer at,” as I put it) dwell apart.
I count these, so far: Columba, Information Builders, Business Objects (which bought Inxight to get there), Endeca, Progress Software (via EasyAsk) and Attivio. There are a few others or more, but they’re lost in the NDA mists (did I do inquiry with them as a client or did I take a briefing? How many PSTs ago was that, and was it before the laptop got stolen or after, before the crash last week or after?) They’re all welcome to enter their names in the comments and make fun of my memory.
We made predictions about this about two years ago, after marathon meetings in which analysts darted around between communities like characters in Law and Order and other NBC series. I suspect that for once, we may have been too conservative in our predicted timing, but perhaps not. I wonder how you feel about it all.
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See you Monday at Legal Tech
by Whit Andrews | January 31, 2009 | Comments Off
Send me homework. Here’s some for you all. A collection of Gartner research on e-discovery. (Vast majority behind the paywall.)
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“Hostile”? Hmm.
by Whit Andrews | January 29, 2009 | Comments Off
This is more the impact of performance art than hostility in the information ecosystem, but the potential for disruption is real (and also, funny) all the same.
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Outtake: Pokemon Lesson, Recall for E-Discovery
by Whit Andrews | January 28, 2009 | 3 Comments
I’m looking forward to LegalTech next week. They’re looking for video questions for the e-discovery town hall. Here’s the outtake from my question:
I’ll have the rest of the question at the YouTube site. Those of you who can’t wait can see my video on YouTube before it gets added…but why would you? There’s better in the group, I’m sure.
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