Blogs

How Do You Measure ROI and Why You Should: Practical How-to Advice

By Ann Halkett posted 09-28-2022
1 person like s this.
Please enjoy this blog, posted on behalf of the author, Andrea Williams, Principal, Fides essociates Inc. When undertaking initiatives and new opportunities, it isn’t always possible or easy to deliver to the classic Return on Investment (ROI) formula. While showing the profitability, or savings, that has resulted is very important, there are frequently many more results and learnings identified that have significant benefits and impact to the organization beyond the baseline ROI calculation. It’s not a black and white world, so painting your ROI picture using more of your palette will reflect the additional dimensions. Why is it important and valuable? ...
0 comments

eDiscovery Project Management: Tools and Decision Tracking

By Tanya Pereira posted 04-26-2022
2 people like this.
Please enjoy this blog post authored by Tanya Pereira, Discovery Services and Litigation Support Coordinator, Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP. As a Discovery Services and Litigation Support Coordinator, I have a 360-degree view of how projects are managed, both on the internal legal operations side as well as the eDiscovery and client matters side. Legal project management is becoming increasingly prevalent in the industry as more firms build out dedicated project management offices and encourage teams to be trained in legal project management. In eDiscovery, it remains critical to adopt a standardized approach to projects due to the need to monitor ...
1 comment

Practical Tips/Strategies for Selling Innovation Upwards – The Constant Struggle of Litigation Support

By Charles Neal posted 02-25-2022
Be the first person to like this post.
Shawn McClurg moderated a pre-recorded roundtable discussion today with Peter Pepiton entitled Practical Tips/Strategies for Selling Innovation Upwards – The Constant Struggle of Litigation Support . The focus of this roundtable was determining ways that innovation could be achieved inside a law firm. How do you best identify an innovation ‘need’? There are a few ways in which you would identify an innovation need. First, a need might be glaringly obvious (i.e. a problem is out in the open and needs to be solved). If it is not easily identifiable, you might have to suss it out by talking to people and others in your firm about their pain points. And ...
0 comments

TAR Protocols: A Practical Guide - Second Blog

By Joel Sandler posted 01-27-2022
1 person like s this.
Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Joel Sandler, eData Practice Support Manager, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, Ethan Ackerman, Senior Attorney, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and Leonard Impagliazzo, Associate, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP. Introduction As we explored in the recent “ Crash Course in TAR ”, Technology Assisted Review (“TAR”) refers primarily to the use of machine learning to predict the relevancy of documents in a discovery project. The technology continues to evolve; we have progressed from the static models of TAR 1.0 to the active learning models of TAR 2.0 and are witnessing further innovation with workflows described ...
0 comments

A Crash Course in TAR: What Do You Really Need to Know?

By Rachel McAdams posted 01-24-2022
Be the first person to like this post.
Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Andrew Lyons, eDiscovery Technology Specialist A&L Goodbody Solicitors and Kayode Okubanjo, eDiscovery Analyst, A&L Goodbody Solicitors. Technology-assisted review (TAR) has gone from a new technology to a critical element in a relatively short period of time. The first judicial approval of TAR in e-discovery was in the United States, in the February 2012 Opinion and Order in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe. Ireland followed in 2015 and the UK in 2016, and the use of TAR is now an everyday occurrence across the globe. When embarking on a new project, the question of whether or not to use ...
1 comment

Demystifying eDiscovery Costs

By Gretel Best posted 09-13-2021
1 person like s this.
Please enjoy this blog post authored by Gretel Best, Manager, Litigation Support & eDiscovery Management Group, Gowling WLG (Canada) LLP. As the volume of electronic data continues to grow, managing the cost of processing, reviewing and producing data as part of the electronic discovery (“eDiscovery”) process is becoming increasingly challenging. Leveraging technology and litigation support tools and retaining the assistance of vendors or alternative legal service providers (“ALSP”) are effective ways to manage these costs. However, implementing cost saving measures can itself present a complex undertaking for those who fail to approach tasks strategically ...
0 comments

Three Considerations for Outsourced Review

By Natasha Doucas posted 08-17-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Written in collaboration by: - Marta Young LL.B - Review Manager, Ricoh Canada - Natasha Doucas - Business Development Executive, Ricoh Canada At the onset of a large litigation, one of the big decisions you’ll need to make is whether your legal team can handle the entire eDiscovery process, or whether parts of that process should be outsourced. One of the largest investments of time and resources is document review. Often, firms wait until all documents have been processed before deciding how review will be managed. Fortunately, we are starting to see more review planning at the data identification and collection stages. The earlier you begin planning, ...
0 comments

Litigation Support Tool Tip – Mastering Google Sleuthing

By Amy Bowser-Rollins posted 08-09-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Please enjoy this blog post tip from Amy Bowser-Rollins, Instructor, Litigation Support Guru. Have you ever had an attorney ask you to track down “something” or “someone” by running Google searches? I know I have! Google has some nifty search tools that can help you narrow down what you’re trying to find. Let’s start with Google Advanced Search . If you don’t know the exact syntax to use, this tool can help prompt you for the information and then format the search syntax for you. Here are some examples you can try: You can add a dash (or hyphen) in front of a word to tell Google you don’t want that word in your search results -- the equivalent ...
0 comments

Certifications for eDiscovery Professionals

By Lauren Doucette posted 08-06-2021
1 person like s this.
Please enjoy this blog post authored by Lauren Doucette, Senior Practice Technology & eDiscovery Project Manager, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP. EXAMS PASSED: Certified Paralegal, Relativity Certified Administrator, Relativity Analytics Specialist The world of certifications can seem incredible overwhelming and confusing. With so many to choose from and with such a range in schools of thought, I am often asked by my mentees, “Which certification should I choose and is it worth it?” To address the first part of this question, I think its important to ask the “why?” While some colleagues and even employers don’t find certifications worth ...
0 comments

Skills Roadmap: What to Learn First - Resource List

By Rachel McAdams posted 07-27-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Please enjoy this blog post co-authored by Rachel McAdam, eDiscovery Technical Specialist, A&L Goodbody Solicitors and Kathy Dallaire, eDiscovery and Litigation Support Coordinator, Stikeman Elliott LLP. This week, I sat down with Doug Austin, editor of eDiscovery Today, and Kathy Dallaire, eDiscovery and Litigation Support Coordinator at Stikeman Elliott LLP, to discuss the skills which are crucial for succeeding in a role in eDiscovery and how to learn them. Our conversation was recorded and released as a podcast, and you can listen in at this link: https://iltanet.org/viewdocument/skills-roadmap-what-to-learn-first During the course of ...
0 comments

Use a Text Editor to Quickly Extract and Cleanup a List of Cited Bates Numbers

By Gillian Glass posted 07-12-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Use a text editor to extract a list of Bates numbers from a pleading, expert report, etc. If you've ever been asked to pull all documents cited in interrogatory responses or listed in the footnote of an expert report, you can use a text editor (I use UltraEdit, but TextPad and Notepad++ have similar capabilities) to help you quickly generate a Bates number list. You will be able to clean up your Bates list and plug it into your review platform for searching. Make sure your document is fully text-searchable, if it's a PDF you may need to OCR it. Take a quick look through the document to make a note of Bates prefixes (if you're already at the expert ...
2 comments

Why Using a Case Chronology Tool is Essential to Building your Best-Case Strategy

By Natasha Doucas posted 06-29-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Please enjoy this blog post tip authored by Natasha Doucas, Business Development Executive, Ricoh Canada Inc. Good organization of case details is critical when building a strong case strategy. A case chronology and timeline tool will organize and prioritize your case information when preparing witnesses and in preparation for trial. It provides clarity and connects all the pieces of your case. There are many tools out there that will help you build a Chronology. For the purposes of this article I will focus on Relativity Case Dynamics . Case Chronology Using a chronological tool provides a “who said what, when, and why” timeline of a case ...
0 comments

Litigation Support - Tool Tips - Converting Date Field Format Using Excel

By Ann Halkett posted 06-15-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
In litigation support, we often receive data in formats that may not work for our software platforms. A key example is the date field. Dates can be formatted in many different ways, but the software platform may only recognize one format for sorting purposes. Therefore, extracting the date field information in the format that you require it in can be a bit of a pain. However, you can use Excel to assist with that process. The following is a formula that you can use to assist with the conversion process: Convert Date infor - DD/MM/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY Formula: =MID(TRIM(B2),4,2)&"/"&MID(TRIM(B2),1,2)&"/"&MID(TRIM(B2),7,4) #Firm ...
1 comment

Here’s What Else You Can Do With Machine Learning

By Peter Sanford posted 06-14-2021
1 person like s this.
Please enjoy this blog post tip co-authored by Matt Maslow, Senior Manager, Deloitte Canada, and Peter Sanford, Director, ‎Deloitte Canada. Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have the Jetsons' robot maid, Rosie, simplifying our lives. Yet so far, all we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner. — Juan Enriquez Well Mr. Enriquez, we are here to respectfully disagree. In the context of eDiscovery, the advent of Artificial Intelligence has changed the way that legal teams approach document review, by teaching the machine what we are looking for and what we can deprioritize. In the simplest terms, Machine Learning takes each ...
1 comment

Excel as a Tool for Litigation Support

By Tiana Van Dyk posted 05-17-2021
4 people like this.
It’s hard to argue the beauty and power of Excel as a tool for Litigation Support. The vast number of functions available make it a fantastic starting point for any changes you have to make to data. Whether you’re editing a load file, creating an index, preparing a report, or making your database more functional – there is a way to accomplish almost every task in Excel. CONCATENATE With so many great functions, there is one that gets used in almost all of my data manipulations: Concatenate. This function has so many functions (see what I did there?) that once you learn to use it, you’ll find yourself going back to it all the time. Concatenate joins ...
1 comment

Navigating the New Legaltech Landscape

By Catherine Casey posted 05-03-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Understanding what legaltech is out there and how it can help your practice. The velocity of innovation in the legal technology space is moving at a breakneck pace that is sometimes hard to keep up with. From AI-powered evidence retrieval to predictive outcome modeling and even smart billing, it seems like technology is bleeding into nearly every aspect of the practice of law — because it is! This new innovation that is reshaping the practice of law may at times seem like it is (as we say in Texas) all hat and no cattle — in other words, a tish overhyped — but the reality is that these new technologies are impacting key tasks legal practitioners face each day. ...
1 comment

Short Text Messaging - Know Before You Go: Part Two

By Mark Anderson posted 05-03-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
Please enjoy this short blog story from Mark Anderson, Director of UK Operations, CDS. Collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams grew exponentially as businesses sought to support their newly remote workforces during the global pandemic. The resulting proliferation of short message data presents compliance, data security, and eDiscovery challenges for legal and IT teams. Here are five key considerations for handling this data: Export Format: Collecting data correctly is critical. Typically, the export will be a structured data export such as an XML (Bloomberg) or JSON (Slack) format which will need to be converted into a reviewable ...
0 comments

Litigation Support - Tool Tips - Calculate Time Zone Offset Using Excel

By Ann Halkett posted 05-03-2021
Be the first person to like this post.
There may be times when you need to adjust the time zone for a data set. For example, where you process the data in Coordinated Universal Time UTC (aka Greenwich Mean Time or GMT), but the action itself is in Pacific Standard Time (PST). To do this, you can create a Time Zone Offset field (or several of these depending on the nature of your case) to display the date/time information for that particular time zone. Note that you cannot change this information on the document itself, ONLY in a field. Also note that this will not take daylight savings time into account. (However, you could do additional calculations if you determine when daylight savings time ...
1 comment

Demystifying the Alphabet Soup of Legal AI

By Catherine Casey posted 04-15-2021
3 people like this.
What is legal AI? There is quite a bit of confusion surrounding legal AI and frankly, AI in general. For the purposes of this article, let’s use the original definition proffered in 1956 by the man who coined the term AI, John McCarthy: "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." A more elaborate definition characterizes AI as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.” [1] Understanding the machine learning at play in legal AI In the context of the practice of law and ediscovery in particular, ...
1 comment

New Kids on the eDiscovery Block

By Catherine Casey posted 03-29-2021
1 person like s this.
Over the last decade, there has been a steady increase in the volume, variety, and velocity of data and formats that are in scope for ediscovery matters. When ediscovery first hit the legal stage, a big case might be 100 GB — stored at a cost of $2,500/GB — and data sources might include Word, Excel, email, and possibly network shares. Though data volumes have increased over the last 15 years, the main data sources remained fairly constant — even the initial focus on cell phone data was limited primarily to call logs, voicemail, and text messages. Today, however, a big case might contain terabytes of data, in dozens of different formats, all of which must be ...
1 comment