Sean Dohery
Law.com
January 29, 2010
Lawyers provide legal information to clients and courts of law. The key word is information. With it, we can retain clients, render services, and manage the business of law. And with developments in information technology, we can continually improve our receipt, analysis, and delivery of legal information and account for its costs and remuneration.
With information technology, we can provide better legal services with research tools from the likes of LexisNexis and Westlaw Next and software from e-discovery vendors like Guidance Software, Kroll Ontrack, and StoredIQ that help manage and archive information, as well as cull, produce, and review data for evidence. Transactional lawyers can benefit from document assembly tools and litigators can improve their chances for success with trial technology and internet research. We can also better manage our business with time-and-billing programs, as well as case and matter management applications installed on premise or in the cloud from the likes of Clio and Rocket Matter.
What are the next big improvements in information technology that will benefit lawyers and law firms? Find out at LegalTech New York.
LegalTech brings lawyers, paralegals, law firm administrators, developers, manufacturers, and technologists, and more to the Hilton New York from Feb. 1-3 to share developments and improvements in legal technology, including e-discovery. In 2009, LegalTech New York attracted nearly 13,000 attendees and featured almost 300 exhibiting companies. This year’s attendance will be comparable to 2009, says Henry Payne Dicker, vice president of ALM Events, and is ahead in some categories, like paid registrations.
Each day of the show will feature a keynote. On Monday, Feb. 1, Russel Stalters, head of information technology and services for Information and Records Architecture at BP America, leads with “Don’t Build Your E-Discovery Program on a Landfill.” Mark Howitson, deputy general counsel at Facebook, follows Stalters on Tuesday, Feb. 2, with “Perspectives on Corporate E-Discovery and Social Media.” And don’t think about cutting out early.
On Wednesday, Feb. 3, Malcolm Gladwell, futurist and best-selling author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point,” and Dr. Lisa Sanders, New York Times medical columnist, headline a keynote panel on “The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information.” The panel will also include David Craig, Thomson Reuters chief strategy officer.
The 2010 conference will offer more than 60 educational sessions for attendees on topics ranging from electronic discovery and knowledge management to emerging technologies. Each day, the sessions are parsed into multiple tracks including Risk Management, General Counsel, Web 3.0 Intelligence, Knowledge Management, International E-Discovery, ILTA Advanced IT, Comprehensive Recordkeeping, and Emerging Technology. If you are like me, it will be difficult to pigeonhole one track and stick with it. But even if you stick to one track it will be impossible to walk away with nothing.
LEGALTECH IN SESSION
Legal holds and preservation issues (read: spoliation) are hot topics. The session “Preservation Roadtrip — Begin With the End in Mind” will discuss best practices and case law developments in document preservation on Monday, Feb. 1. Farrah Pepper, chair of the Electronic Data Discovery Initiative at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and author of “To Have and to Hold: A Romantic Guide to Document Preservation” and “Honey, I Forgot the Cell Phone: The 411 on ‘Outlier’ ESI” will be on hand with Chris Paskach, of KPMG, Kelly F. Farmer, of Latham & Watkins LLP, and Ken Koch, of KPMG LLP, to cover analyzing the preservation “trigger” and timing issues, scoping for key players and sources of data to be preserved, crafting appropriate format and distribution of hold notices, monitoring and tracking compliance, and lifting legal holds.
And to continue my interest in legal holds, I won’t miss the session on “7 Steps for Legal Holds of ESI and Other Documents” on Monday, Feb. 1, that will discuss ways to minimize the occurrence of spoliation and the importance of legal holds and the design of an effective hold process.
Some people may have forgotten all the excitement around knowledge management that was generated at LegalTech West Coast in 2008. I still have hope that KM products will someday meet their hype. So I will drop in on the sessions “Assessing and Accessing the Knowledge You Already Have” to see about the present benefits of KM, “Maximizing Your Knowledge Management Investment” to learn how KM systems and search providers work together today to provide the best results for an organization, and “External Knowledge Management: Using Internet Resources to your Advantage” to learn how to use search sites and social networks for legal research, competitive intelligence, and current awareness about clients and partners. And to get a real feel for the state of KM in the firm, there’s a super session on KM with John Alber, technology partner at Bryan Cave; Oz Benamram, director of knowledge management at White & Case; Douglas Brown, corporate knowledge manager at McDermott Will & Emery; Saul Rosenberg, director of knowledge operations at McKinsey & Co.; and Ali Shahidi, director of knowledge management at Bingham McCutchen.
And speaking of super sessions, which are free to all attendees, Microsoft is sponsoring events around Office 2010 and SharePoint. Donna Payne, of PayneGroup and author of “Seven Up,” will be on hand at “Building a New Office with Office 2010.” And whether or not you follow Mark Gerow on Microsoft SharePoint, don’t miss the super session on “SharePoint 2010″ conducted by Adam Juechter, Bob Daniels, and Norm Thomas, all from Microsoft.
IN THE EXHIBIT HALL
Lawyers and law firms are not unlike other business professionals and organizations. We need to look forward to hardware and software upgrades as our businesses grow and mature, as markets fluctuate, and as new associates form a class of potential partners who are even more familiar with technology than their predecessors. So follow me into the exhibit hall to investigate what’s new.
The groundbreaking for Westlaw Next will occur on Feb. 1. Get a taste of the unveiling from Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, Thoughtful Legal Management, and the ABA Journal. But make a note that Thomson Reuters is not going to steal the whole show. There are plenty of new developments in e-discovery from Kroll Ontrack’s archiving tool to StoreIQ’s early-case-assessment software, along with major platform releases like Guidance Software Encase version 4. And remember that e-discovery is only one facet of legal technology to see on the exhibit floor that includes dictation systems, matter management, and time-and-billing programs, as well as secure file transfer applications and document management systems.
Early case assessment is a topic that will echo through the Exhibit Hall this year. StoredIQ joins that conversation with its new Analyze Anywhere product that sits on top the Intelligent Information Management Platform to enable early case assessment prior to preservation and collection, without moving data from its native location. It is designed to analyze more than 20 different data sources while providing a dashboard interface for end users to estimate costs and analyze case data by date, custodian, content type, and more.
Kroll Ontrack (booth 216) has developed an archiving tool for files and e-mail that scales to more than100,000 mailboxes and supports both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. George May, vice president of product strategy, says that Ontrack Compass is designed from a records management perspective. Previous archiving tools are “blunt” in applying legal holds to archives, says May. Compass aims to provide complete information governance to archived data to reduce risks, comply with regulatory requirements, and prepare for litigation. May says the product can easily apply legal holds and implement retention policies without intervention from IT staff, as well as integrate downstream with Kroll’s full suite of e-discovery products.
Kroll is also announcing a self-contained mobile e-discovery device for organizations with privacy and security obligations that prevent the export of data beyond their firewall perimeters. Ontrack Onsight aims to bring the full capabilities of Ontrack e-discovery on premise, in an appliance, for organizations that cannot make use of a hosted service, says Regina Jytyla, managing staff attorney for Kroll Ontrack. The all-in-one device is designed to scale to the organization’s e-discovery needs and will be priced by the per-gigabyte volume of data processed.
Not only can organizations have security and privacy concerns in processing e-discovery, they may also have a need for speed. After all, e-discovery projects are limited by time. And e-discovery vendors are reducing the time necessary to process and review data responsive to litigation or investigation with new hard and software developments, as well as with tight integration with data storage vendors. For example, Index Engines announced the capability of indexing 1 terabyte per hour of data stored on EMC Celerra storage system using a single indexing node running version 3.0 of its software. According to Jim McGann, vice president of Information Discovery for Index Engines, the benchmark was attained using six simultaneous NDMP (network data management protocol) data streams to transfer file and Microsoft Exchange data from the Celerra system to the indexing node.
Index Engines is not the only vendor promoting speedy e-discovery. Lateral Data has also announced the results of performance tests for Viewpoint version 4.5. Using 30 of its “worker” computers, Viewpoint was able to process 50 gigabytes of un-extracted native files and e-mail in 1.08 hours. Endpoint: If someone brings up speed at the show, make sure you know what’s being processed, from where, and what the end product is.
Guidance Software is coming to LegalTech with a major new release. Encase version 4 aims to supply legal and IT departments with one integrated suite for e-discovery tasks. The new version includes features to implement legal holds, conduct pre-collection analytics to create data maps, engage early case assessment, and support a first-pass review. Near deduplication of data will come later. Guidance Software will provide demonstrations at LegalTech, but the product won’t ship until April 2010. Side note: Clearwell Systems now includes support to handle Guidance Software Logical Evidence Files and Forensic Image files (E01).
If you are a Bridgeway (booth 500) customer, you will be happy to learn that legal holds have been added to their broad array of software products for general counsel and corporate legal departments. Bridgeway’s products span e-discovery, case and matter management, contract management, entity management, as well as electronic billing and invoicing. With such a tight integration, it’s possible to kick off a legal hold within a matter management application, says Rich Hall, vice president of e-discovery at Bridgeway. Hall also pointed out that customers can view all the components of their e-discovery tools in a dashboard view to manage hold notices and track responses and collections.
Not everyone is coming to the show with new versions of software. Many vendors have news on integrations and partnerships with other vendors. So when you are investigating software options, check out the value added to a product from a partnership or a built-in connector to other products. For example, Mimosa Systems (booth 1404), a maker of e-mail, file, and SharePoint archiving software, is teaming with Navigant Consulting’s E-Discovery Portal. The combination hopes to provide customers greater insight into SharePoint and archived data to satisfy e-discovery obligations, including legal holds. Another example, CaseCentral, a cloud-based e-discovery provider, announced a connector that integrates with Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator. The connector aims to eliminate the need for Enterprise Vault customers to manually export and upload large amounts of data for legal review — but that’s not all. Customers using the new connector can bypass e-discovery processing fees for data moved from a Symantec Vault to CaseCentral’s hosted e-discovery platform. CaseCentral and Symantec will be demonstrating the connector at the show. See booth 311.
Don’t be surprised to find vendors who do not supply e-discovery tools. BigHand is coming to the show with version 3.3 of its .NET enterprise digital dictation workflow software and a new speech recognition module, which utilizes the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech server from Nuance Communications. New workflows include a speech-recognition-only option where the transcription server returns a transcript back to the author, as well as a speech-recognition-with-proofing option where the transcription server sends the resulting text to a secretary. The new voice-to-text module supports voice recordings from BlackBerry Smartphones or Windows Mobile, along with traditional dictation hardware.
Smart WebParts has released Smart Time 2.6 that adds classic time entry functionality to its on-demand, time-capture engine. Smart Time helps lawyers construct complete and accurate timesheets by polling across servers (e.g., Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, document management systems) and telephone switches (VoIP and digital) to provide a detailed journal of billable activities. The upgrade makes Smart Time a viable replacement for legacy time entry programs such as ADERANT Expert, DTE Axiom, Elite WebView, and Sage Carpe Diem. Also noteworthy in version 2.6 are Smart Timers, a desktop stopwatch utility that helps professionals track time and an ActiveX Control to capture time spent searching the web.
Sean Doherty is Law.com’s technology editor. He has more than10 years experience as a law and systems librarian. He also practices law and is licensed in California, New York, and Washington, D.C.
