Tag Archives: eDiscovery

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.

1 Comment

Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Management

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Case Law, eDiscovery & Compliance, Social Media Investigations

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 29, 2012 · 9:57 AM

Plaintiff Claims Physical Injuries Made Worse by Cold Weather, Then Goes Snow Skiing

Earlier this month a New York Appellate court ordered the complete disclosure of a personal injury Plaintiff’s Facebook account.  In Richards v Hertz Corp., 2012 WL 5503841 —N.Y. Supp. 2d—, (NY AD 2d 2012, November 14, 2012) the Plaintiff claimed that her injuries from an automobile accident impaired her ability to participate in sporting activities and caused her to suffer pain that was exacerbated in cold weather. However, in the course of investigating the claim, the Defendant identified publically available images on the Plaintiff’s Facebook page “depicting [plaintiff] on skis in the snow,” (i.e. not only a sporting activity but in cold weather) and subsequently served a discovery demand requesting all her status reports, email, photos, and videos posted on her account since the date of the accident.

The Plaintiff objected to the request and ultimately a court motion was brought to resolve the discovery dispute. Initially, the trial court only directed that the injured plaintiff send defendants a copy of “every photo on Facebook” evidencing the injured plaintiff “participating in a sporting activity.” However, The Defendants appealed the order and the appellate court viewed the trial court’s order as too narrow, finding that defendants demonstrated that the injured Plaintiff’s profile contained an image that was “probative” of the issue as to the extent of her injuries, and finding in turn that “other portions of her Facebook profile may contain further evidence relevant to that issue.”

The appellate court ruled that defendant made “a showing that at least some of the discovery sought will result in the disclosure of relevant evidence or is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of information bearing on her claim.”

Regular readers of this blog will note that there is nothing new here as we have covered many similar recent cases with this type of fact pattern and outcome. But it is notable that such cases are becoming very routine. Also, it should be very clear by now that any law firm defending or prosecuting personal injury claims – as well as their hired eDiscovery consultants — should be investigating social media sites for sources evidence as a matter of course. As attorney John Browning pointed out earlier on this blog, any attorney who fails to do so may be violating their ethical duty of competence.

Leave a comment

Filed under Case Law, Social Media Investigations

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 22, 2012 · 5:48 PM

No Legal Duty or Business Reason to Boil the Ocean for eDiscovery Preservation

As an addendum to my previous blog post on the unique eDiscovery and search burdens associated with the de-centralized enterprise, one tactic I have seen attempted by some CIOs to address this daunting challenge is to try to constantly migrate disparate data from around the globe into a central location. Just this past week, I spoke to a CIO that was about to embark on a Quixotic endeavor to centralize hundreds of terabytes of data so that it could be available for search and eDiscovery collection when needed. The CIO strongly believed he had no other choice as traditional information management and electronic discovery tools are not architected and not suited to address large and disparate volumes of data located in hundreds of offices and work sites across the globe that all store information locally. But boiling the ocean through data migration and centralization is extremely expensive, disruptive and frankly unworkable.

Industry analyst Barry Murphy succinctly makes this point:

Centralization runs counter to the realities of the working world where information must be distributed globally across a variety of devices and applications.  The amount of information we create is overwhelming and the velocity with which that information moves increases daily.  To think that an organization can find one system in which to manage all its information is preposterous. At the same time, the FRCPs essentially put the burden on organizations to be accountable for all information, able to conduct eDiscovery on a moment’s notice.  As we’ve seen, the challenge is daunting.

As I wrote earlier this month, properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by effective software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources throughout the enterprise.  The value of targeted preservation was recognized in the Committee Notes to the FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the keywords used to identify responsive materials. (Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25 (2)).  And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, 2007 WL 1655757 (June 5, 2007 E.D.Mo.), the court noted that “[p]reservation efforts can become unduly burdensome and unreasonably costly unless those efforts are targeted to those documents reasonably likely to be relevant or lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.”

What is needed to address both eDiscovery and enterprise search challenges for the de-centralized enterprise is a field-deployable search and eDiscovery solution that operates in distributed and virtualized environments on-demand within these distributed global locations where the data resides. This ground breaking capability is what X1 Rapid Discovery provides. Its ability to uniquely deploy and operate in the IaaS cloud also means that the solution can install anywhere within the wide-area network, remotely and on-demand. This enables globally de-centralized enterprises to finally address their overseas data in an efficient, expedient, defensible and highly cost-effective manner.

But I am interested in hearing if anyone has had success with the centralization model. In my 12 years in this business and the 8 years before that as a corporate attorney, I have yet to see an effective or even workable situation where a global enterprise has successfully centralized all of their electronically stored information into a single system consisting of hundreds of terabytes. If you can prove me wrong and point to such a verifiable scenario, I’ll buy you a $100 Starbucks gift certificate or a round of drinks for you and your friends at ILTA next week.  If you want to take the challenge of just meet up at ILTA next week in Washington, feel free to email me.

Leave a comment

Filed under Cloud Data, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, IaaS, Preservation & Collection

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 7, 2012 · 4:23 PM

The Global De-Centralized Enterprise: An Un-Met eDiscovery Challenge

Enterprises with data situated within a multitude of segmented networks across North America and the rest of the world face unique challenges for eDiscovery and compliance-related investigation requirements. In particular, the wide area networks of large project engineering, oil & gas, and systems integration firms typically contain terabytes of geographically disparate information assets in often harsh operating environments with very limited network bandwidth. Information management and eDiscovery tools that require data centralization or run on expensive and inflexible hardware appliances cannot, by their very nature, address critical project information in places like Saudi Arabia, China, or the Alaskan North Slope.

Despite vendor marketing hype, network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate data to a single repository render traditional information management and eDiscovery tools ineffective to address de-centralized global enterprise data. As such, the global decentralized enterprise represents a major gap for in-house eDiscovery processes, resulting in significant expense and inefficiencies. The case of U.S. ex rel. McBride v. Halliburton Co. [1]  illustrates this pain point well. In McBride, Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s instructive opinion outlines Halliburton’s eDiscovery struggles to collect and process data from remote locations:

Since the defendants employ persons overseas, this data collection may have to be shipped to the United States, or sent by network connections with finite capacity, which may require several days just to copy and transmit the data from a single custodian . . . (Halliburton) estimates that each custodian averages 15–20 gigabytes of data, and collection can take two to ten days per custodian. The data must then be processed to be rendered searchable by the review tool being used, a process that can overwhelm the computer’s capacity and require that the data be processed by batch, as opposed to all at once. [2]

Halliburton represented to the court that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on eDiscovery for only a few dozen remotely located custodians. The need to force-collect the remote custodians’ entire set of data and then sort it out through the expensive eDiscovery processing phase instead of culling, filtering and searching the data at the point of collection drove up the costs.

Despite the burdens associated with the electronic discovery of distributed data across the four corners of the earth, such data is considered accessible under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and thus must be preserved and collected if relevant to a legal matter. However, the good news is that the preservation and collection efforts can and should be targeted to only potentially relevant information limited to only custodians and sources with a demonstrated potential connection to the litigation matter in question.

This is important as the biggest expense associated with eDiscovery is the cost of overly inclusive preservation and collection. Properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by adroit software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources throughout the enterprise. The value of targeted preservation is recognized in the Committee Notes to the FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the key words, date ranges and other metadata to identify responsive materials. [3]  And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, the court noted that “[p]reservation efforts can become unduly burdensome and unreasonably costly unless those efforts are targeted to those documents reasonably likely to be relevant or lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.” [4]

However, such targeted collection and ECA in place is not feasible in the decentralized global enterprise with current eDiscovery and information management tools. What is needed to address these challenges for the de-centralized enterprise is a field-deployable search and eDiscovery solution that operates in distributed and virtualized environments on-demand within these distributed global locations where the data resides. In order to meet such a challenge, the eDiscovery and search solution must immediately and rapidly install, execute and efficiently operate in a localized virtualized environment, including public or private cloud deployments, where the site data is located, without rigid hardware requirements or on-site physical access.

This is impossible if the solution is fused to hardware appliances or otherwise requires a complex on-site installation process. After installation, the solution must be able to index the documents and other data locally and serve up those documents for remote but secure access, search and review through a web browser. As the “heavy lifting” (indexing, search, and document filtering) is all performed locally, this solution can effectively operate in some of the harshest local environments with limited network bandwidth. The data is not only collected and culled within the local area network, but is also served up for full early case assessment and first pass review on site, so that only a much smaller data set of potentially relevant data is ultimately transmitted to a central location.

This ground breaking capability is what X1 Rapid Discovery provides. Its ability to uniquely deploy and operate in the IaaS cloud also means that the solution can install anywhere within the wide-area network, remotely and on-demand. This enables globally decentralized enterprises to finally address their overseas data in an efficient, expedient defensible and highly cost effective manner.

If you have any thoughts or experiences with the unique eDiscovery challenges of the de-centralized global enterprise, feel free to email me. I welcome the collaboration.

___________________________________________

[1] 272 F.R.D. 235 (2011)

[2] Id at 240.

[3] Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25 (2)):

[4] 2007 WL 1655757 (June 5, 2007 E.D.Mo.)

Leave a comment

Filed under eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,