Awful story out of Toronto . . .

Well, I hate to make my first "two-wheel" post of the year a report on this story, but events beyond my control have made it the first newsworthy biking news of the year. It involves both bikes and the law, but not (as yet) technology.

Apparently Ontario's former Attorney General, Michael Bryant, has been charged with a variety of vehicular homicide charges for his alleged involvement in the death of a Toronto bike courier, Darcy Sheppard near one of Toronto's busiest intersections - Bloor and Bay. Sheppard had a baby boy who is now without a father.

This is a dreadful example of who loses when there is an altercation between a motorist and a cyclist.

To all of you out there on two wheels: be safe.

Hitchiker's Guide to the (Blog) Universe article in ALSP's newsletter

Quick blog post this morning after something of a hiatus (I wish I could tell you I've been doing lots of biking as an excuse, but I haven't - long story).

I have an article at ALSP's website for their e-newsletter all about finding your way around the blog universe. I've invited comments here and on Twitter asking for which eDiscovery blogs you like to read as I'm sure there are many I don't know about.

You can find the article here, but be aware that you'll need to log into the site once this month's issue is archived by ALSP. To log in, you'll need to be a member of ALSP (which I highly recommend, by the way)

Comment away!

New column on Slaw

In case you haven't seen it yet, I have a new column out on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal/tech collaborative blog website.

In this column I highlight something that is concerning a number of people in the eDiscovery world: the need for basic research to determine just how effective our eDiscovery tools and methodologies are.

Why is this important?

Well, I think in all the excitement (for us geeks, anyway) over how cool the technology is, it's easy to forget that the end point of all this whiz-bang technology is to find the relevant evidence and get it admitted in court. For something to be admissible you need (to a greater or lesser extent) to be able to demonstrate that the evidence is what it purports to be.

Without some basic research, there is a danger that we will all just assume that Tool X or Process Y does what we think it does because no-one has ever really checked to see if it really does do that or not.

The TREC Legal Track project is a good example of the kind of much-needed research that should be performed. I hope to see much more like it.

Summation Tip of the Week #2

This originally went out by email in mid-April.

Using Summation for tracking undertakings

This week’s tip explains a simple way to use Summation to help you track undertakings – both yours and those of opposing counsel.

How does it work?

If you are fortunate enough to have electronic copies of transcripts in Summation-ready format, you can use Summation’s searching abilities to help you find undertakings quickly.

First you import the transcript into Summation, and then use Summation’s search features to help you find the undertakings.

By searching on the word “undertaking” or “undertake”, or even words like “give” and “copy”, you will be able to find most instances of where either you or opposing counsel have agreed to undertakings. Once you’ve found an undertaking, you can create a transcript note to mark the spot and help you track the status of the undertaking.

In the transcript note itself, you will be able to:

• Add any additional comments (such as the bates number of the document or the status of the undertaking)
• Add issue codes to the note (such as “undertaking”, “refused”, “our undertaking”)
• Add a link directly to the document in question if you have it in your Summation case or on your network in electronic format

Pros and Cons

Some advantages of tracking undertakings this way include:

• Being able to quickly locate undertakings in one or more transcripts
• Being able to run reports from issue codes to find undertakings and their status
• Tracking of additional information that you include in your transcript note (such as the date of the request, and who asked for it)
• Having quick access to the document in question directly from the transcript
• Being able to quickly run a report and provide it to opposing counsel

Some things to bear in mind with tracking undertakings this way:

• Not everyone will actually use easily identifiable words when referring to an undertaking. A lawyer might just say “we can get that to you” – and so you should be aware that simply searching the transcript with typical keywords might not be enough.
• You have to keep the transcript notes up-to-date for them to be the most useful to you – you might find this more trouble than it’s worth.

Hope you all find this useful! If you want to get these tips by email, drop me an email at dtwestwood (at) intechgration (dot) com.

Leg@lIT 3.0, upcoming articles, and other news . . .

I've been busy the past few weeks!

First was my second CompTIA A+ exam, which I passed with flying colours: I am now a certified A+ IT technician which basically means I now know not to change out the memory in my laptop unless I'm wearing leather soled shoes and cotton clothes, standing on a rubber mat in an environment that is not overly dry, and have an anti-static wrist strap on. Okay, I know a little more than that, but studying for it did help plug a few of the more annoying gaps in my learned-on-the-job IT skills.

Then it was preparing for the LegalIT 3.0 conference in Montreal where I was giving a presentation on the "Virtual Road to Trial" with Sharon Redding of Bell Canada and Kelly Inglese of McCarthy's (Nicholas Trottier stood in for Kelly at the last minute). (I also have a white paper that I did for the conference on the use of technology throughout litigation which has not yet been published - contact me for a copy). I tweeted live from the conference which was kind of fun, although I'm sure I missed some of the points made in the presentations as a result.

After I got back from Montreal, I jumped straight into doing some actual client work, and I've also been preparing some presentations and articles ("eDiscovery Mythbusters", "eDiscovery - what it means for you" (for a US paralegal association) and an upcoming Slaw post).

All of which is a long winded way of saying that's why I haven't posted anything to the blog in a while, and for those of you that get my Summation Tip of the Week, that's also why you haven't had one for a couple of weeks!

Summation tip of the week

I've started sending out weekly tips for using that ol' stalwart of litigation technology - Summation iBlaze. As not everyone likes having their email cluttered with yet more stuff, even if it is high quality, informative, educational material like I send out (ahem!!), I thought I'd put them up here as well.

For those of you that have had my weekly tip via email and would rather read it here (or not at all), just email me with "Unsubscribe - Summation Tip of the Week" and I'll be sure that you're taken off that email list. Be sure you let me know if you'd rather never hear from me again (in which case I'll head off into a quiet corner to sob) or just don't want to get the Summation Tips.

Summation Tip of the Week No. 1

Using Summation for electronic exchange of documents

This week’s tip explains a simple way to use Summation to exchange documents electronically with opposing counsel.

How does it work?

A Summation Briefcase will take the documents you want to send to opposing counsel (usually as an Affidavit of Documents) and package up the images, along with their document information from the columns that you choose into one file. You can then burn the file to CD or (if it’s small enough) send it via email to opposing counsel for them to import into their own Summation case database.

Pros and Cons

Some advantages of using a Summation Briefcase include:

• No need to print out all your documents, or make copies
• Reduces postage costs
• You can redact the images if necessary and Summation will permanently apply the redactions in the Briefcasing process
• You can select which columns (and therefore what information) to send to opposing counsel
• You can give your documents new, consecutive numbers that disguise any “gaps” in the Bates numbers
• Opposing counsel can integrate your Briefcase with their own documents in Summation, or view it in a separate Summation database

Some things to bear in mind with Summation Briefcases:

• You need to have Summation iBlaze to create and directly access Summation Briefcases
• Summation Briefcases are only good for up to 20,000 images or so – you might not be able to create or view ones that are larger than this
• If you’re going to use Summation Briefcases to exchange Affidavits of Documents, get opposing counsel’s agreement ahead of timeTry to match the way you enter information in the columns with opposing counsel. You can discuss this at your Meet and Confer or include it in your Discovery Plan
• Be careful about including OCR - it can reveal text in a redacted document

Great article from the ABA Journal Magazine this month on a research project being conducted by the Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track (http://trec-legal.umiacs.umd.edu/). In short, as the article's title suggests, they're "in search of the perfect search", which translates to "just how many documents are missed with the various search technologies".

The answer (so far) is sobering:

Legal Track showed Boolean keyword searches using commands such as and, or
and within so many words across a range of different hypothetical topics
found only between 22 and 57 percent of all relevant documents cumulatively
retrieved through a variety of alternative search methods. But the Boolean
search was no better or worse than other more sophisticated search methods
tested, and it still represents the current standard.

Wow. That's pretty bad.

Slightly better news is that different searches find different documents, so if you combine several different types of searches, you're able to find up to 78% of the documents. As it says in the article (and as I've said to clients): ". . . No one off-the-shelf method will solve all of your e-discovery efforts."

So, in practical terms, what does this mean?

Well, for smaller data sets where you can feasibly (if expensively) look at every single document you are not as reliant on search technology to find the documents - you can categorize them as you see fit (usually by issue coding) and that, along with the bibliographic information coded into the review database is usually going to be enough to find your documents.

The big issue with this approach, of course, is consistency. Many highly-trained lawyers and legal staff just don't code the same (or similar) documents the same way. Use of near-duplicate technology, for example, can help with this, but you will still find variance in coding between documents that are similar in theme, if not content.

For larger data sets where it would take years for even a large team of people to look at every document, you have to rely on searches of the electronic data (or even OCR, which is a whole other post in itself).

The key takeaway is that you shouldn't rely on just Boolean searches, or just Concept searches, or any other kind of searching to do it all. Expect to use several kinds of search technology. Expect to come up with a smart set of search terms in the first place. If you're looking for documents about cars, don't just search on "autos" and "cars", search on "Ford" and "GoodYear" and "Mechanic" and "battery" and "gas" as well. These terms will pull up documents that are all about cars, but may never actually mention the magic word "car".

Thanks to Ralph Losey's Tweet which led me to the article in the first place.