Author Archives: X1

May 7, 2013 · 9:58 AM

Next Generation Desktop Search for Law Firms and the Enterprise

We are taking a break from eDiscovery and investigations to discuss some big news in the world of X1 search. Today I am excited to announce that we launched a major upgrade to our popular desktop search software, X1 Search 8. In addition to a new, very sleek interface (see screen shot below), and a faster and more scalable index, X1 Search 8 (X1S8) features two distinct game-changers.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

First, X1S8 comes with a built-in SharePoint connector. SharePoint is proliferating throughout the enterprise, and X1S8 provides an outstanding search experience of SharePoint, which we believe is a vast improvement over native SharePoint Search. All search results are displayed in a single sortable view with a full-fidelity preview pane, in the same view as your local files an emails. The feedback from many enterprises is that X1 now has the best search of SharePoint in the business.

The second game-changer is that X1 Search 8 is fully compatible with desktop virtualization. Finding content is difficult enough on a traditional desktop, but the issue is compounded with the virtualized variety. There are many compelling benefits to desktop virtualization, but the architecture does not facilitate or even enable traditional desktop search solutions. X1 Search 8 provides search capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments with results returned in a single pane. X1 was specifically architected to uniquely and seamlessly operate in virtual desktop environments, including popular Citrix solutions XenApp and XenDesktop.

Here is a 2 minute video demo overview and another demo video specific to our integrated SharePoint search support.

At just $49.95 per seat, X1 Search 8 is a time-saving, intuitive tool that saves enterprises time and money. For more information, visit www.x1.com.

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April 3, 2013 · 7:18 AM

SharePoint eDiscovery: Ten Times the Cost

Sharepoint no colorOur recent webinar on SharePoint eDiscovery challenges with eDiscovery Journals’ Greg Buckles featured a substantive and detailed discussion on the nuances, pitfalls and opportunities associated with eDiscovery of data from SharePoint sites. This topic is very timely as the majority of enterprises are deploying the Microsoft platform at an accelerated rate, with the solution reaching $1 billion in sales faster than any other Microsoft product in history. As SharePoint enables enterprises to consolidate file shares, Intranet sites, internal message boards and wikis, project management, collaboration and more into a single platform, it provides significant operational efficiencies as well as eDiscovery challenges. The vast majority of current SharePoint deployments are versions 2007 or 2010, and neither have meaningful internal eDiscovery or even export features.

Greg Buckles is a well-known eDiscovery expert with a strong command of technical issues concerning data collection from SharePoint sites. In his presentation, he addressed the particular challenge of preserving data from SharePoint in a targeted matter and in context. According to Buckles, current eDiscovery practices involve mass raw data exports from the platform, instead of a preferable practice of review and early case assessment in place to enable a far more efficient and targeted collection of only potentially relevant information. Bulk exports from SharePoint contain a mass of unstructured data that is out of context with no easy way to associate files, document lists, metadata fields and the many other native data types and fields. As a result, the data must be sorted out on the back-end in time-consuming and highly manual eDiscovery processing and review efforts.  Buckles reports that he routinely sees tenfold increases eDiscovery processing and review costs because of these challenges.

A full video recording of the webinar can be accessed here.

Another key SharePoint eDiscovery challenge involves its deployment architecture. By their nature, typical SharePoint deployments are de-centralized as the solution is geared toward supporting individual departments and “teams” as opposed to forcing data centralization to a single and large data center. Appliance-based eDiscovery solutions or remote collections do not work as it may take weeks if not months to copy a multi-terabyte SharePoint site over a network connection and a large corporation may have several dozens of SharePoint silos to collect from.  Manual collection efforts, which are geared toward mass “data dumps,” are as mentioned very costly and inefficient.

Instead, what is needed is a solution such as X1 Rapid Discovery can quickly and remotely install and operate within the same local network domain to enable localized search, review and early case assessment in place. X1 Rapid Discovery’s full content indexing and preview of native SharePoint document libraries and lists, as well as it robust search, document filters, intuitive review interface, uniquely enables targeted and contextual search, preservation and export of SharePoint evidence in its native format. In fact we believe it is the only solution available that enables true in-place early case assessment and eDiscovery review of SharePoint sites, including iterative search, tagging and full fidelity preview in place, without the requirement to first export all of the data out of the Platform.

To learn more, sign on to the recorded webinar or please contact us at info@x1discovery.com for a further briefing to learn how to save your organization or your clients tens of thousands of dollars on litigation costs associated with SharePoint.

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February 21, 2013 · 1:35 PM

Live Social Media Evidence Capture from Today’s Vegas Strip Shooting

Unfortunately, a tragic event transpired this morning in Las Vegas leaving three people dead and at least three others injured after a shooting and fiery six-vehicle crash along the Strip. According to reports, at about 4:20 a.m. someone in an SUV opened fire into a Maserati that had stopped at a light. The Maserati moved into the intersection at Flamingo Road and collided with a taxi, starting a chain of crashes that involved four other vehicles. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

Given the criminal investigation and civil liability implications of this event, we wanted to demonstrate the new important capabilities of X1 Social Discovery to immediately identify, preserve and display geolocated Tweets (and often Instagram posts) at or near the scene immediately before, during and after the incident. X1 Social Discovery is now able to map a given location, such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geolocated tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. As illustrated below, this capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.

When we learned of the Vegas incident, we mapped the general area of the strip  and within seconds, all the recent Tweets from the past several hours were populated within the grid and collected within X1 Social Discovery.

Accident 4

From there, we were able to sort those tweets within the interface and identify some key Tweets made immediately after the incident, such as this post:

Accident 5

Accident 2

We are able to sort and identity the exact time (in GMT) of the posts in question as well as associated metadata.

Accident 3

Here is another post below. Both this example and the one above contain notable intel in the comments, suggesting the possible identity of one of the victims, as well as a reference to another posted picture on Instagram. This reflects the utility of X1 Social Discovery’s ability to collect not just the social media post, but the comments thereto in real-time.

Accident 1

This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geolocated tweets in real time. But of course in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence such as the evidence, posted above, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.

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February 5, 2013 · 9:24 AM

Social Media Discovery Hotter Than Predictive Coding?

fire isolated over black backgroundIt was a great show last week at LegalTech New York. Definitely an increase in the number and quality of attendees and it was nice to see many friends and colleagues both old and new.

Also very noticeable were the many, many vendors sporting predictive coding (aka technology assisted review) messaging in their respective booths and various forms of marketing material. In fact, one industry colleague pointed me to a recent bold prediction offered by Recommind lawyer Howard Sklar, essentially proclaiming that predictive coding will have really hit the big time when a state bar organization issues an ethics opinion stating “that failure to use predictive coding is ethically questionable, if not unethical.” Sklar goes on to predict that such an opinion will come within the next 18 months.

I don’t disagree that such a development would be a big deal. But my question is, why stop at an advisory ethics opinion? What about an actual published court opinion where a sitting appellate judge decrees, without mincing words, that legal ethics obligations require lawyers to employ predictive coding? Now that would be huge. Something, in fact, like Griffin v. State, 192 Md. App. 518, 535 (2010), which addresses another hot topic in eDiscovery:

“[I]t should now be a matter of professional competence for attorneys to take the time to investigate social networking sites.”

Now to be fair, I must point out that Griffin v. State was reversed and remanded on other grounds (419 Md. 343 (2011)), but I would argue the overall impact from an ethics and best practices standpoint is still there.

Sklar also points out three appellate level cases with written opinions that discuss the concept of predictive coding, without any definitive rulings compelling its use, but nonetheless discussing the concept. Two of the three are even retrievable on Westlaw. I think such appellate-level published decisions are important, which is why we highlight the several thousands of published court decisions in the past three years (see here and here) that have compelled the production of, admitted into evidence, or otherwise recognized the importance of social media evidence to the case at hand. New cases are being published every day, to the point where we candidly have stopped counting due to the deluge. So by the standard set by of my esteemed fellow eDiscovery lawyer Mr. Sklar, social media discovery is a very hot field indeed.

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January 24, 2013 · 1:36 PM

Social Media Geolocation Provides Critical Evidence – Including Admissible Hearsay

Nearly all new mobile devices not only feature geo-location but set its activation by default. Many of the most popular mobile apps are built around the premise of geo-location to help you navigate the streets, find new restaurants and other points of interest, and even find your friends, so more and more mobile users are enabling this function. As such, a significant number of social media posts made from a mobile device have geo-location coordinate metadata associated with them. The evidentiary value of such information cannot be understated.

For court purposes, the content of such Tweets may be admissible hearsay themselves even if the actual identity of the author of a Tweet is never ascertained.  Under Rule 803(3) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, “[a] statement of the declarant’s then existing state of mind, emotion, sensation, or physical condition . . . but not including a statement of memory or belief to prove the fact remembered or believed unless it relates to the execution, revocation, identification, or terms of declarant’s will” is not excluded by the hearsay rule. Rule 803(3) arguably describes the vast majority of Tweets, especially those from the likes of Paris Hilton or Charlie Sheen.

And then there is the “excited utterance” exception under Rule 803(2) which provides that, “[a] statement relating to a startling event or condition made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition” is not excluded by the hearsay rule. So, a Tweet stating “Oh my gosh, a big SUV just ran a light and nailed that Prius!!!!” would arguably fall under Rule 803(2).

To enable our user base to leverage this key evidence, this week we are announcing a major enhancement to X1 Social Discovery software that we believe significantly advances the ball for social media investigations. X1 Social Discovery will now be able to map a given location such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geo-located tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. This capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.

Below is an example of a geo-located area with X1 Social Discovery, with the highlighted, captured Tweet suggesting that the author could be a key witness to a traffic accident:

accident4

From there, an investigator can silently follow identified persons of interest in furtherance and highly efficient investigation. For law enforcement, this is obviously useful to gather facts and identify potential witnesses for various crime scenes. This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geo-located tweets in real time. But in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.

This upgrade is part of our continuing innovation for X1 Social Discovery. We strongly believe that we have the top social media investigation tool on the market and this new feature only solidifies this position.

> To learn more, contact us for a demo or come visit us next week at Legal Tech New York, where we will be in booth #2012.

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