Category: Review

A truly excellent article outlining the interplay between inside and outside counsel regarding e-discovery. Michael Gold (partner) and Ryan Mauck (associate) at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro author a superb overview of how an e-discovery project should flow and who has what responsibilities on both sides of a litigation matter.

I especialy appreciate the first paragraph which does a fine job of listing the responsibilities of today’s lawyers regarding e-discovery:

“Effective compliance with the new rules requires:

1. a fundamental understanding of how digital technology works,
2. sufficient skill to manage the identification, harvesting and production of electronic information,
3. an ability to communicate with:
   a) the court,
   b) opposing counsel,
   c) outside litigation counsel,
   d) and the client”

Other key quotes from the article include:

One of the most critical skills is the ability to understand every dimension of the e-discovery process, from the creation of discoverable information to the business use of such information and — this is where many lawyers will falter — to the effective addressing of e-discovery issues with the client and the coordination of e-discovery between in-house and outside litigation counsel.

One of the most important steps in e-discovery takes place when outside counsel develops an effective working relationship with the client’s IT staff. In “traditional” litigation, you have the usual roster of players. With e-discovery, there are several more — the client’s IT staff, your outside e-discovery expert (who may be retained by in-house counsel or outside counsel), and, of course, the opposing party’s IT staff and outside e-discovery expert.

I regularly enjoy reading Keith Ecker’s Technology columns for Inside Counsel magazine, but his latest column entitled “Tech Tags – Reviewers use tags to categorize electronic information and manage e-discovery” makes me ask - is this a new technology?

Just about every document database application can “tag” documents, or “code” them, or “label” them. Granted “tags” are sort of a Web 2.0 concept with the rise of Flikr and del.icio.us, but the idea can be applied in multiple ways. And perhaps that is the revelation experienced by the attorneys in Ecker’s column, that the attorneys finally grasped the idea of applying tags/labels/codes to e-docs so they can retrieve, organize, sort, and search the documents at a later time. I know I have personally struggled many times trying to get a legal professional to understand the concept. Ecker’s column is a good read if you’re fuzzy on the whole idea.

The Futurelawyer mentioned InBoxer back on June 8 and I was very intrigued. InBoxer is a rack-mounted virtual appliance that conncts to your e-mail server and can be used to archive and filter messages as needed.

According to the InfoWorld review the appliance will work with both Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino and scores each e-mail message on a scale of 1 to 100 for inappropriate content, privacy violations, and other metrics. Obviously, InBoxer was initially aimed at the risk management sector, but it can just as obviously be used for e-discovery issues.

The largest kudos for the company goes for their test site located at www.EnronEmail.com. You sign up for a free account and have the ability to use their software through your Web browser (which is how you would use it anyway). The site cautions you on the offensive language you’ll find inside the Enron e-mails, but this is a fantastic way for potential customers to test run the appliance.

Why don’t more vendors do this? I congratulate InBoxer for having enough confidence in their appliance to allow a test run like this. And the system is a joy to use.