Category Archives: eDiscovery

February 23, 2021 · 11:04 AM

Moving Beyond Litigation Support

By Sonam Sharma, Senior Manager, X1
(Originally published on ILTAnet.org, February 19, 2021)

The age-old adage of change being the only constant has never been truer than in today’s times. With pandemic induced disruptions fast-tracking an already burgeoning impact of technology in day-to-day proceedings of your business and having a likewise impact in the lives of our clients, the ability to manage and react to this change must make all the difference between the longevity of your business and ensuring that you stay ahead of the market.

Over the last decade, a lot of energy has been spent towards understanding the pain points of the lawyers while constantly examining ways to reinvent to stay ahead of the competitors of varying scale, capabilities, and customer base. Change is inevitable but the transformation is a conscious choice. To navigate through a highly fluctuating market, we are witnessing law firms embracing change and revisiting their litigation support services and strategies to develop a unified and client-centric approach for their organizations. A focus on operational efficiency is becoming more about survival and excellence rather than a good-to-have organization priority.

So, what is this change that we are talking about?

The Legal industry is a fast pace world. Clients are rapidly outgrowing conventional models, largely as a result of how they are using technology in their everyday lives. As the expectations of the clients are ever-evolving, legal professionals need to find ways of delivering more seamless and client-centered experiences.

Client-facing services roles such as litigation support, legal assistants, and paralegals are the first points of contact for the commencement of legal work. These professionals play an important role in ensuring case proceedings go as smoothly as possible. However, due to the lack of synergies and functional silos between these groups the operational model can become obsolete/misaligned. “Over time, to maintain the efficiency of teams, it is important to focus on communications and the improvement of processes and procedures,” said Ardian Triantoro, Practice Support Manager, Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP.

To mitigate risks arising from process inefficiencies and to overcome organizational barriers, law firms need to bolster their capabilities by combining teams dealing with legal operations (such as clerks, paralegals, attorneys, and technical support).  and develop communication strategies between them. The goal is to streamline the legal operations workflow to provide a connected experience to the client.

There’s no better time to start the transformation than now!

The more progressive law firms are methodically building and systematically delivering work in-house. Leveraging a base of existing skills, experience, and vendor relationships, organizations have merged their Litigation Technology Support and operational support teams into the Practice Support department to deliver value to customers.

Leading law firms such as Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Baker & McKenzie, Schulte Roth & Zabel, LLP have implemented new ways to approach critical back-office operational functions. “For the law firms, it is not just about implementing the technology but to shift the focus from commoditized services to high-value expertise to recalibrate a more predictable pricing model that generates a cost-effective outcome of the case,” said Jared Michael Coseglia, Founder & CEO of award-winning legal staffing firm TRU Staffing, Inc.

So where can you start?

To prepare for the future, you should begin with a focus on the following areas:

  • Process: Strategize the ebbs and flows! Develop a communication map to help attorneys and staff members better understand the firm’s operating functions and how it fits together. Design effective processes that drive transparency and have a clear description of tasks and outcomes.
  • People: A starting point for assessing the firm’s capabilities is to determine skills, competencies, the talent available and create a capability map. Align skills with the evolving business needs and identify partnership opportunities with a focus on enabling attorneys to focus on long-term strategic decision-making; and
  • Technology: Understand the business needs and align the technology with the law firm organizational framework so that it is supporting the firm’s overall business objectives. It is about using technology to improve the old ways of working.

The more things change, law firms will see increased benefits from…

  • Seamless Client Service: Today, clients expect effortless experience from start to finish. It is critical to serving as a team member to the clients. By streamlining the processes internally, the practice support department acts as an all-in-one suite that law firms can leverage to build a repeatable and defensible process for optimal service delivery.
  • Efficiency Across Legal Ecosystem: Litigation professionals are masters in their field and have worked with a multitude of attorneys on countless cases over time. By utilizing in-house expertise, law firms can establish robust business practices to allow for quick and effective decision-making.
  • Reduced Costs: Staying on top of technology and constantly building expertise enables law firms to design custom-tailored solutions designed for cost efficiency and operational excellence.

Key Takeaway:  The problem is that this is easier said than done, but the actual mantra is not perfection; it is an iterative progression!

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery, Information Management, law firm, Uncategorized

February 3, 2021 · 10:12 AM

The Reddit Evidence Hotbed: Three Important Tips for Reddit Web Investigations

By John Patzakis and Ashley Aranega

Over the past two weeks, stock traders fueled by Reddit message boards have engaged in a classic short squeeze that could involve potentially illegal behavior. Financial crime investigators as well as corporate risk and eDiscovery teams are scouring Reddit to identify and preserve critical evidence. With the stakes high, such investigations must be performed consistent with best practices in order to properly preserve and analyze data within pressing time constraints. Here are three key tips to help investigators to be as complete and efficient as possible.

  1. Automated Web Capture with Native Format Collection is a Must

Financial investigations of this scope require the analysis of thousands if not tens of thousands of social media posts and web pages. Flat file screen grabs will not do the job because they cannot be collected at scale, readily searched, nor organized in a streamlined manner. An investigator must be able to capture a single thread expanded to include up to hundreds of comments per post or crawl an entire publicly available Reddit Account collecting up to thousands of posts by that user on an automated basis. Once captured, the data must be searched, analyzed, and tagged all in line. None of this is possible with a manual print screen effort.

  1. The Investigation Should Include Other Social Media Sources and Web Feeds

Here is a very notable Tweet from Elon Musk:

He is directing people to a Reddit board where speculative investors congregate and plan short squeeze activity. Musk’s ill-advised social media posts have gotten him into previous trouble with the SEC, and this Tweet could be pushing the envelope. It demonstrates why multiple web sources and social media accounts are essential to cross-reference and consolidate as evidence. Your social media investigation and analysis platform should enable you to search, sort, and analyze multiple social media accounts from different sources, all in the same interface. This again is impossible with screenshot based tools and workflows.

  1. Native and Granular Output is Critical

Securities fraud investigations often involve copious amounts of web-based evidence. It is extremely difficult to collect and analyze thousands of Reddit posts without the right technology. It is even more difficult to process and load those items into an attorney review platform if they are simple screenshots. Print screen as a social media evidence collection method only leads to higher costs for many reasons, namely because the resulting output is a truncated, unsearchable, flat image that fails to retain the all-important metadata. As a result, a substantial amount of secondary processing must be done to upload the social media images into a standard attorney review platform. The images must be run through OCR, the various requisite metadata fields must be manually entered, and the truncated screenshots reassembled into context, so they appear and read as they did in their original state. All this will typically cost thousands of dollars in additional processing fees.

Above is a screenshot of key Reddit evidence captured by and displayed in X1 Social Discovery. X1 Social can capture a single thread or crawl an entire Reddit account, collecting up to thousands of posts by individual users on an automated basis. Once captured by X1, the data can be effectively searched, tagged, and exported out to load file or in native format as well as PDF. X1 Social Discovery is the most comprehensive and efficient tool for Reddit collections. Tweets, Reddit posts, and other social media evidence can be exported in one fell swoop into the same deliverable. Simply put, for serious web-based securities investigations, there is no other option.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery, Preservation & Collection, Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

December 9, 2020 · 10:44 AM

Traditional eDiscovery Processing is Now Obsolete

By John Patzakis

eDiscovery can be a very expensive process and time consuming when traditional methods are employed. With legacy processes, from the time ESI collection starts, it often takes weeks for the data to finally end up in review. Time is money, and this dramatically increases costs as well as risk.

ESI processing is a dedicated and often expensive step in the EDRM workflow. The majority of ESI processing consists of data culling and filtering, deduplication, text extraction, metadata preservation, and then staging the data for upload into a review platform, often in the form of a load (DAT) file.  Using ESI processing methods that involve on-premise hardware appliances that are not integrated with the collection process and do not integrate with review platforms like Relativity significantly increase cost and time delays. This means practitioners have to spend the often several weeks that are required by other cumbersome solutions through manual collections and multiple hand-offs.

However, the latest in collection technologies will now combine targeted collection with these processing steps that are performed “on the fly” and in the background so that the data is automatically collected, processed and uploaded into a review platform such as Relativity in one fell swoop.

The graphic below is an illustration contrasting the challenges associated with traditional eDiscovery processes, with the far more efficient new paradigm. When you engage in manual collection, and then manual on-premise hardware-based processing, and finally manual upload to review, you are extending the process by often weeks, you are dramatically increasing cost and risk with many manual data handoffs.

Providing a contrast to traditional methods, a recent Relativity webinar featured the integration of the X1 Distributed Discovery platform with its RelativityOne Collect solution. A live demonstration performed by Relativity Product Manager Greg Evans highlighted in real time how the integration dramatically improves the enterprise eDiscovery process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with full and integrated ESI processing. Within minutes, data collected from endpoints with X1 is populated straight into a Relativity workspace, fully processed and ready for review, without any human interaction once the collection is started.

So in terms of the big picture, this X1/Relativity integration not only streamlines enterprise ESI collection, but it relegates ESI processing to a completely automated background function as an afterthought. That’s what disruption looks like.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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Filed under Best Practices, collection, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Uncategorized

December 1, 2020 · 9:53 AM

Relativity Highlights Its X1 Integration for ESI Collection

By John Patzakis

Recently, Relativity hosted a live webinar featuring the integration of the X1 Distributed Discovery platform with its RelativityOne Collect solution. This X1/Relativity integration enables game-changing efficiencies in the eDiscovery process by accelerating speed to review, and providing an end-to-end process from identification through production. As stated by Relativity Chief Product Officer Chris Brown: “Our exciting new partnership with X1 highlights our continued commitment to providing a streamlined user experience from collection to production…RelativityOne users will be able to combine X1’s innovative endpoint technology with the performance of our SaaS platform, eliminating the cumbersome process of manual data hand-offs and allowing them to get to the pertinent data in their case – faster.”

The webinar featured a live demonstration showing X1 quickly collecting data across multiple custodians and seamlessly importing that data into RelativityOne in minutes. Relativity Collect currently supports Office 365 and Slack sources, and Relativity Product Manager Greg Evans noted that “this X1 integration will now enable Relativity Collect to also reach emails and files on laptops, servers,” and other network sources. The webinar outlined how the Relativity/X1 integration streamlines eDiscovery processes by collapsing the many hand-offs built into current EDRM workflows to provide greater speed and defensibility. Evans also said that new normal of web-enabled collections of remote custodians and data sources was a major driver for the Relativity/X1 alliance, as “remote collections now represent 90 percent of all eDiscovery collections happening right now.”

Adam Rogers, of Complete Discovery Source, a customer of both X1 and RelativityOne, highlighted a recent major multi-national litigation where the X1 and Relativity integration was critical to the success of the project. Adam noted that the effort would have taken about 30 days utilizing traditional methods, “but with this X1 and Relativity integration, we cut it down to 3 days, because with X1, we were able to index everything in-place, search, analyze and categorize that data right away, and then release that data to Relativity for review.”

The live demonstration performed by Greg Evans highlighted in real time how the integration improves the enterprise eDiscovery collection and ECA process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with immediate pre-collection visibility into custodial data. X1 Distributed Discovery enhances the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome electronically stored information (ESI) processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection.

The X1 and Relativity integration addresses several pain points in the existing eDiscovery process. For one, there is currently an inability to quickly and remotely search across and access distributed unstructured data in-place, meaning eDiscovery teams have to spend weeks or even months to collect data as required by other cumbersome solutions. Additionally, using ESI processing methods that involve appliances that are not integrated with the collection will significantly increase cost and time delays.

So in terms of the big picture, with this integration providing a complete platform for efficient data search, eDiscovery and review across the enterprise, organizations will save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and be able to make faster and better decisions. When you accelerate the speed to review and eliminate over-collection, you are going to have much better early insight into your data and increase efficiencies on many levels.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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Filed under Best Practices, collection, ECA, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI

August 26, 2020 · 11:39 AM

Intelligent ESI Collection Integrated with Relativity Can Cut eDiscovery Costs by 90 Percent

By John Patzakis

One of the biggest drivers of excessive eDiscovery costs is ESI over-collection. This in turn leads to a larger amount of data entering the processing and initial review funnel. These traditional inefficient efforts are manual with numerous hand offs and a high degree of project management and consulting hours to oversee the disjointed workflow. A recent analysis by Compliance CEO Marc Zamsky, illustrated in the chart below, established that cost for collection, processing and first month hosting under a traditional preservation process can cost upwards of $12,000 per custodian:

Properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by next generation software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources in place and throughout the enterprise. The value of targeted preservation is recognized in the Committee Notes to the recent FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the key words, date ranges and other metadata to identify responsive materials. (Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25(2)). And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, the court noted that “[p]reservation efforts can become unduly burdensome and unreasonably costly unless those efforts are targeted to those documents reasonably likely to be relevant or lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.”

Recently we hosted a webinar with Compliance highlighting the very compelling integration of our X1 Distributed Discovery platform with Relativity. This X1/Relativity integration enables game-changing efficiencies in the eDiscovery process by accelerating speed to review, and providing an end-to-end process from identification through production. As recently stated by Relativity Chief Product Officer Chris Brown: “Our exciting new partnership with X1 highlights our continued commitment to providing a streamlined user experience from collection to production…RelativityOne users will be able to combine X1’s innovative endpoint technology with the performance of our SaaS platform, eliminating the cumbersome process of manual data hand-offs and allowing them to get to the pertinent data in their case – faster.”

The live demonstration highlighted in real time how the integration improves the enterprise eDiscovery collection and ECA process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with immediate pre-collection visibility into custodian data. X1 Distributed Discovery significantly streamlines the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome electronically stored information (ESI) processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection without multiple hand offs, extensive project management and inefficient data processing.

Zamsky commented that the “ability to collect directly from custodian laptops and desktops into a RelativityOne workspace without impacting custodians is a game-changer,” which will “reduce collection times from weeks to hours so that attorneys can quickly begin reviewing and analyzing ESI in RelativityOne.” In fact, Zamsky demonstrated just that by presenting a second chart showing how this streamlined approach, based upon a detailed ROI analysis, reduces eDiscovery costs by over 90 percent:

So in terms of the big picture, with this integration providing a complete platform for efficient data search, eDiscovery, and review across the enterprise, organizations will save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and be able to make faster and better decisions. When you accelerate the speed to review and eliminate over-collection and inefficient processing, you are going to have much better early insight into your data and increase efficiencies on many levels.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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Filed under Best Practices, collection, eDiscovery, ESI, Uncategorized