Category: eDiscovery and Litigation Support

Can lawyers rely on search to find documents in e-discovery? Recent decisions suggest perhaps not.  Craig Ball’s blog post, Grimm Prognosis for ESI Search (6 June 2008) recaps decisions by Magistrate Judge John Facciola in U.S v. O’Keefe and Equity Analytics v. Lundin and by...

If National Public Radio reporting is a sign, then e-discovery is breaking out of the legal press and into the public consciousness.  E-Mail, the Workplace and the Electronic Paper Trail, a Morning Edition segment on 18 June 2008 provides a short, lay person view of...

FTI Consulting announced on Tuesday that it is acquiring Attenex.  FTI is already a major player in e-discovery; it also owns popular litigation support software Ringtail. The press release, FTI Consulting, Inc. to Acquire Attenex Corporation, dated 10 June 2008, enumerates several expected strategic advantages,...

Should courts accept e-discovery productions generated by concept searching?  That’s the question addressed in When E-Discovery Is Put to the Test (Pennsylvania Law Weekly, 14 May 2008). This article takes a deep dive into a potential Daubert challenge to using concept searching. Some lawyers will...

Benchmarking is not the same as analyzing a process.  In Law departments rarely benchmark processes, law department consultant Rees Morrison explains that general counsel benchmark ratios but “very few law departments formally benchmark key processes, such as how to manage large numbers of contracts.” In...

I’ve long thought that litigators should more frequently use litigation risk analysis using formal decision trees. I am swimming against the tide. In Making the Case for Change (ABA Journal, April 2008), the sub-article Case Evaluation: Too much em­phasis on a quantitative ap­proach often misses...

Finding and filtering relevant documents in e-discovery is a big challenge. What steps must a lawyer take? Just how far does a lawyer’s ethical obligation go?  In Improving E-Discovery with Smart [Humans] [Technology] (16 March 2008) I suggested that lawyers must learn enough about e-discovery...

Does finding the best way to search through huge volumes of e-data sometimes feel like the quest for the Holy Grail?  I’ve previously written about applying smart search tools and using offshore lawyers to manage e-discovery reviews more effectively. In thinking about process improvement, we...