David and I discussed how he got started in eDiscovery, the expansion of eDiscovery in his firm, and the growing risks and demands that impelled Pillsbury to build out their eDiscovery operations. We talked about how to build a strong internal eDiscovery operation. David talked about that build-out, especially the importance of the people involved, and about the imperative for them to compete on value. We also examined the goals behind eDiscovery; principal among them, as David noted, speed to narrative. David talked about the technology stack that powers the work his team does, in particular the power of advanced AI and reusable AI models, and closed with his thoughts on an ideal eDiscovery platform.

Recorded live on January 15, 2021 | Transcription below

Note: This content has been edited and condensed for clarity.

George Socha:

Welcome to eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal. I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 am Eastern, I host an episode of eDiscovery Leaders Live where I get a chance to chat with luminaries in eDiscovery and related areas.

Past episodes are available on the Reveal website, go to revealdata.com, select “Resources” and then select “eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast”.

This week our guest is David Stanton, David is a partner at Pillsbury. He’s been at Pillsbury since 2004 and has put together an extensive list of accomplishments, which I will not try to detail. I’ll just point out a few things. First, David leads the firm’s Information Law & Electronic Discovery practice, where they take a multi-disciplinary approach to the operational and legal challenges of large data sets in litigation, internal investigations, and mergers and acquisitions. He’s also proficient in cybersecurity, privacy, incident response – those areas that border on eDiscovery or on which eDiscovery borders. He collaborates with in-house lawyers and IT professionals on implementing robust information governance programs and related policies and procedures. Among other things, he created PEARL, which is Pillsbury’s E-Discovery Alliance of Resource Leaders. He’s been recognized by Chambers Global, Chambers USA, The Legal 500 U.S., and Who’s Who Legal.

Before joining Pillsbury, he was an attorney at Chadbourne & Parke and before that at another firm, Troy & Gould. David has his B.A from St. John’s College and his J.D from University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. David, welcome.

David Stanton:

Hi George. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the introduction.

George Socha:

I’m glad to have you with us.

David Stanton:

I’m glad to be here.

Getting Started in eDiscovery

George Socha:

I’d like to start with your journey of the last five years and the transitions that you’ve gone through such as the transition to the cloud.

David Stanton:

As you mentioned, I’m a litigation partner. I’ve been working in this eDiscovery space, I guess it’s for a couple of decades now, and like many people kind of sided into it. At the time that I was coming up, there wasn’t a career path that really existed around eDiscovery. It just happened by happenstance and maybe I had an aptitude; I was brought up in a family that was exposed to a lot of computers early on and so fell into managing this thing called e-mail, back when discovery was early on. I just had that faculty, I was just that kind of an attorney, as I’m sure many in the audience are. We had an interest in technology, had an interest in dealing with these kinds of challenges and problems, and over time took on more and more responsibility in that area.

George Socha:

Out of curiosity, was this something that you actively pursued from the onset or were you like some of us, where you said “This is really eDiscovery, I don’t want anything to do with it. Please don’t pull me into this?”

David Stanton:

I wouldn’t say that I actively pursued it, because it didn’t really exist but I was up and coming so it wasn’t something to pursue. There did come an inflection point where I really did start to recognize that this was going to be a thing, that eDiscovery was going to become more and more important.

The discovery already is such a big part of litigation. I was at a pretty big firm, as you mentioned, by 2004 and most of what the cases were about, for better or for worse, was the discovery process. More and more of those matters were involving data and I enjoyed getting to know all of the vendors and all of the sponsors and going to conferences and educating myself about this entire space.

An Expanding Practice

You mentioned this last four or five years, and this was a bit of a windup for that, but at that time, in the 2010 to 2014/2015 time period, we were working at Pillsbury with a whole lot of different vendors. We had, like many partnerships, a federated approach where litigators could make their own decisions about which vendors they wanted to work with. The eDiscovery operations happened in a very transactional way. They were based upon a case. A matter came in, then you put out bids and you got some offers to do the project and you selected your vendor and you ran with them. It was all pretty informal at the time.

For a while we tried to embrace it, we tried to improve upon it and put some stability into those systems. We pursued that through that operation that you talked about when you made the introduction, that we called PEARL, where we identified a select handful of vendors, got to know them, put together master services agreements, standardized our contracts and terms with them, made it much easier to on-board those relationships and bring those folks into a matter, gave a panel approach if you will. That was fairly successful, it was somewhat helpful.

But what we found is that our efforts at stability were kind of fleeting, because every one of the organizations that we made a relationship with continued to evolve internally, they continued to combine with other organizations, the project managers that we got to know got reassigned or left or went somewhere else. We didn’t have any control over what was happening inside the organization around those kinds of decisions. It continued to be very difficult to manage and maintain this multiplicity of vendor relationships around eDiscovery projects. And at the same time, you started to get a lot of breach activity out there and data incidents became more and more notorious and we saw a risk for the firm.

Growing Risks

One of the perspectives that we at Pillsbury have on all of this is that we are fiduciaries around client data. When we are litigating a case or working an investigation and we arrange to take custody of a client’s information assets, we have an obligation. Our duty of confidentiality, our duty of supervision, our duty of competency attaches to those state assets. We need to operate mindful of those risks and responsibilities. We started to see that it made sense for us to consolidate all of this data that was out there. I think that’s a thing that a lot of organizations have begun to realize. There was a time when I would do these kinds of panels and presentations and I’d say, “It’s 4 o’clock, do you know where your data is?” Do you know as an organization where you have sent emails over the past 5 years? Do you know? Do you have a sense of who has hard drives with gigabytes of your employees’ files, emails from the C suite, unfiltered repositories of information that have been gathered up for this litigation and that litigation and just sort of sent out. We saw that as risks for our clients, and we saw that as a risk for Pillsbury.

Pillsbury’s Response: Building a Strong Internal Operation

We looked to consolidate that operation internally and effectively to in-source the eDiscovery vendor operation, to build our own alternative legal service provider inside the firm. That journey over the last five years has been about situating that operation internally, identifying an appropriate technology stack, championing the program, getting the approvals, putting a staff and a team together and then sort of building and maturing that operation over time.

George Socha:

There are a number of challenges there. I’d like to touch on one part first and then come back to in some ways the bigger issue of how you actually do all of this. One of the challenges historically has been that this is a law firm after all. Partners feel rightly or wrongly that if there is a set of preferred providers or set of preferred tools, those are just preferences; they use other things. And then you also have clients who say, “Yes, we understand you want to do this but here’s how you’re going to do it” or “Here’s how we’d like you to do that”. How do you address those parts?

Competing on Value

David Stanton:

It’s a good question, and we’ve been dealing with this for a while. I see them as very different types of clients. While my partners are in a big way my clients, the firm’s clients have a different relationship. When firm clients have made a decision and they’ve gone through the process of identifying and selecting appropriate vendors to handle their eDiscovery projects, it’s very rare that we will contradict those decisions. Sometimes we see that as having been a decision that was made and perhaps not thought through or the resources that the client vendor has might not be appropriate or we think that they’d be better off to work with Pillsbury directly, and we’ll lobby to get that work. But we tend to fall in line and work in those relationships and normally it works out great.

I’ve long said organisations should centralize their data, they should centralize their eDiscovery operations. They can do that through select vendors, they can do it by hiring things in house, they can do it by engaging a firm like Pillsbury who has those operations. But as they mature they naturally tend to head in that direction and so the more mature organizations seem to have that sorted out to some extent and we work in that.

With the partners inside the firm, the internal clients that we deal with, it’s a little bit of a different relationship. On the one hand, yes, you’re a sophisticated person, you’re a sophisticated partner at a big firm. Certainly, you should have some prerogative to guide your case in the direction you want to go in. Oftentimes though, those decisions historically have been made without a lot of forethought and perhaps based upon relationships and not necessarily thinking through the consequences of how that might affect the case or the relationship with the client over time. The bottom line when it comes to kind of dealing with the partners, I think anybody who is sort of in my position or a position like mine when they’re trying to build an internal operation, you have to compete on value. You have to prove to your internal facing clients that they are better off to work with the firm’s own team than to do that through third party vendors. And I think over time we’ve been winning most of the work that comes in our direction.

Putting Together the Platform and the Team

George Socha:

To compete on value you’ve got to put together that team, you’ve got to put together that platform, and you have accomplished this entirely or to a large degree. How have you gone about doing that?

David Stanton:

We’ve been lucky, we’ve had good sponsorship. We’ve tackled a few challenges that I think are going to be common for anybody who’s dealing with this kind of thing that we’re thinking about. One is, who is advocating for this opportunity, for building this out? Clearly, I was on board with it. In Marty Metz, Pillsbury’s former CEO, we had a tremendously supportive sponsor at the C level, who was communicating regularly with the firm’s board and was able to articulate the value and help people to understand how the firm was going to be addressing the risks. There’s no substitute for that kind of relationship.

I think anybody who is in eDiscovery learns to value the relationship between legal and IT. When you’re doing what I do inside the firm, that becomes a really instrumental relationship. It’s key for us to have strong connections between our groups of attorneys and the firm’s own IT department, so that was huge.

We won approval by the board and we had folks who gave us considerable autonomy to go about doing what we needed to do. And then we had to hire. We were transitioning folks in-house. We also had an opportunity to hire an outside director. Again, we got really lucky, we ended up with somebody who is just fantastic in Gordon Moffitt, who is at the firm here.

We run a technology shop and we also run a review shop. On the review shop, we started small and then worked with a lot of flex staff and managing that sort of thing and over time we’ve brought on more and more full time people. Obviously, having good people, having their morale be good, having them see a vision for an operation internally that we can build together, to have that entrepreneurial spirit be alive and well inside of a law firm – it’s a gratifying thing and it’s a really important thing about putting a team together that’s going to collaborate and be successful.

And then finding good technology. We’ve looked to distinguish the firm and to make ourselves competitive around the technology stack that we have put together and I think we’ve done a good job with that. We have leaned far into analytics, we’ve leaned far into predictive coding and the use of TAR. We made those, early on, a commonplace feature of how we approached the eDiscovery process. We leaned into statistics, we leaned into random sampling and validation, so that we could achieve a good quality result and learn to measure that in a lot of different ways.

And keeping an eye on the metrics by which we measure organization across a lot of different criteria. There’s “How fast are you doing things?”, “How cheaply are you doing things?”, “How much revenue are you generating?”, some sort of soft metric of how the morale is across the team, how many people are you bringing on.

Speed to Narrative

The thing that’s the cohesive identity that we have inside of the organization here is getting to the story. We call it speed narrative. How quickly are we turning a big set of documents into a story that our attorneys can tell, that supports their strategic aims, their settlement aims, their litigation aims across the board? That becomes the driving motif that everybody is about. Everybody on the team is looking to improve our speed to narrative.

George Socha:

It seems to me that if you’re not trying to figure out what story to tell and how to best tell that story, why are you doing any of what you’re doing?

David Stanton:

Right. It’s such an interesting thing though, because what we do in eDiscovery is oftentimes make a lot of binary decisions. You look at a document, you say is it this or is it that? Is it that or is it that? You might have a heuristic and that might be multiple tags in the way that they get set up, but you’re making a yes or no decision. And there can be tens of thousands of yes or no decisions that get made over the course of the day. Getting those decisions right is very important. It’s very important to learn how to measure the quality of those decisions and how people are doing and, “Are they getting them right?, “Are they getting them right quickly enough?”, and all that sort of thing. And that’s the day to day sort of blocking and tackling.

A Core Key Attorney Review Team Inside the Firm

Being able to step back, to pull the lens back and look at what everybody has done over the course of a day or what everybody has done over the course of a week and to be able to find a mechanism to filter the intelligence up to the partners – it becomes an interesting thing. And it’s a thing that’s particularly advantageous to be working with these groups that are inside the firm, that are already and always part of that conversation – to already have embedded in the way we do business a model where all the document review attorneys are valued as attorneys. We take them very seriously as key members of the team and welcome and appreciate their input and collaboration and conversation around what they’re seeing, what they’re learning, how they’re coming up with things. So there’s time in the course of a day or it’s certainly in the course of the week to step away from their documents and convey that information in one form or another And different conversations along the way that allow that to percolate up. And then get recycled back into the analysis as we go. That’s a big part of how the firm operates.

The Technology Stack You Chose and Its Implications

George Socha:

What you’re highlighting there is some of the value that comes from bringing capabilities in house and not relying solely on external capabilities. It seems to me that at some point you hit a juncture where you don’t have the capacity or the capability that you need immediately. How do you handle that?

David Stanton:

We’ve had two places where that happens. The technology that we took on, we took on in the cloud from day one. We had the private cloud environment at the onset. Since then that has been migrated, as many things have, into an appropriately profiled pod or space in AWS.

Being in the cloud gives you the advantage of being able to add more workers and add more machines and if you have properly constructed technology, add more processing, add more memory and take advantage of all the multithreading value and wonder that is the cloud today. That ability to have turnkey resources is really important.

When working in a technology stack, then you have a different relationship. You still have eDiscovery vendors, but we have a different relationship, more stable relationships. When you’re working with a provider like Reveal who has really great technology and their personnel – who also work in an on demand environment, who do still do transactional work on this case or that case – become flexible resources that you can bring on board as needed. If your internal staff is handling day to day administration of your cases and processing and loading and running productions and off-boarding data – which also you need to build into your administrative time, if something comes and it’s just too much to handle, you can arrange it so that you have hourly resources available through the provider to come on board and help with that. Similarly on the Reveal side, we’ve always had a flex combination of full-time and flex staff.

One of the things we’ve looked to do in building that is to make a pathway where we really are trying to value these attorneys and create career opportunities. And eDiscovery does represent a maturation of the general legal sector and specialization happens in businesses that are mature. Think of a time when there were doctors and nurses, and now there are all sorts of different tiers of doctors and nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants, and it’s all sort of broken up. eDiscovery is a place where that is happening in the legal practice and you have different careers that are now being created out of people who start doing document review. We’ve been mindful of trying to create those pathways and bring flex staff into full-time positions and give them opportunities to continue to grow and develop professionally. That flex staff pool creates a body of individuals that we can call upon to handle the cases that we don’t have the resources to do ourselves.

Coming Next: Advanced AI Capabilities, Reusable Models

George Socha:

You have managed to build both a platform in terms of the people you’ve got internally to call upon and undertake all these various tasks, and then a platform in terms of the technology that you’ve settled on to enable all of this. You’ve moved from ad hoc and transactional to something more unified, coherent and the like, where do you go next?

David Stanton:

Well, it’s getting fun. We’ve enjoyed a bit of success. I think we’ve proven the model to the firm. We’ve demonstrated to plenty of partners that we are good at this and we know what we’re doing. We see them as repeat business, if you will, and are very much supporting their practices. There is continuing to grow in our own ability. Where do you take a bunch of eDiscovery lawyers who are really good at what they do? My sense is, you get them better and better at telling that story. There’s professional development around, being better at searching, being better at analyzing, being better at converting what you’ve learned in a document set into consumable products that you can deliver over to the case teams that you’re supporting.

We’re having a lot of fun looking at different artificial intelligence capabilities. We have incubated a setup with a data scientist, Alexis Mitchell, who is working with Pillsbury through her organization, Implicature, and building out customized AI capabilities that are assets of the firm that will allow us to automate and script things that we do all the time. In particular, we can use AI to look back and do quality control measures and metrics and identify outlier reviewers early on so that we can take corrective action to bring them back in line. We can use some combination of AI and regular expression filtering to create very interesting chronologies of cases where we can select certain sets of documents and pull up material and start to display it in a reported format earlier in the case than otherwise you could.

We can use it to detect things – and I know you guys are at the fore of this – around detecting incidents of privilege or material likely to be confidential or things that look like different types of contract clauses that you might be particularly interested in.

And there’s a whole world of classifiers and ways to take what we’re doing day in and day out and coding documents and turn that, not just into a model, a TAR model that we’re using on one case, but turn that into models that then we can apply to every case. With a lot of client data running through the firm, being exposed to these kinds of analytics, it gives us a really unique opportunity to build models that are useful to our clients. So that stuff has been really fun. And then continue to try to just keep growing and do this better and better.

The Ideal eDiscovery Platform

George Socha:

In the time that’s remaining, I’ll pose one final question, which is that if you could have no limitations whatsoever, no restrictions whatsoever, what would you want out of your ideal eDiscovery platform?

David Stanton:

It’s a great question and a fun one. I would want to have a group of people who are gratified in what they’re doing and are continuing to be challenged by interesting and important legal challenges, legal problems. That’s what we’re doing. We are a group of people and we are looking to grow and get better and better at what we’re doing. It’s no good if you have a really great platform but it doesn’t enthuse your people to want to be working on it and make them develop a kind of expertise.

On the flip side, you get into the technology and that’s where it’s getting really in my view, very interesting, because I think what’s happening around eDiscovery, we’ve gone from a variety of different platforms out there that can do the basic functions of processing, homogenizing data, presenting it, and providing sort of a templatized environment for people to go about classifying those documents and put them into different buckets. And then that’s kind of where it stops.

What’s happening now, is we’re finding more and more capability to go in and mine that data early on. So my ideal systems have different levers that allow me to go in and apply different filters to mine out certain components of data; to display with a lot of data visualization, different identities and different components and characteristics of the data that’s in front of me; to be able to automate a lot of that initial assessment, the initial shaking out and sorting of the data set.

Being able to bring in every kind of data imaginable – I need a system where I don’t have to worry if somebody is in Slack or Teams, whether I’m going to be able to display it or not. I need a system that’s going to be able to handle all sorts of different languages. It’s going to be able to handle all sorts of different data types.

And on the AI front, I need a system that’s going to learn from my work, that’s going to learn from what I’ve done in one case and allow me to apply that understanding in the next case just as I would if I were training up an associate, where the technology really becomes an integral part of how you practice law.

George Socha:

David, thank you very much. David Stanton is an eDiscovery partner at Pillsbury. Thanks for joining us this week.

Our guest next week will be Kevin Clark, who is Litigation Support Manager at Thompson Knight. Thank you all very much. Again, David. Thank you.

David Stanton:

Thanks George. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

The post eDiscovery Leaders Live: David Stanton of Pillsbury Law appeared first on Reveal.

LDM Global now has expanded access to Reveal’s complete next-generation platform, including industry-leading processing, early case assessment, artificial intelligence, review, and production functionality.  Additionally, the new relationship expands platform deployment to include hybrid usage with both on-premises and cloud instances in multiple locations including the United States, the Caribbean, the UK, and Ireland, among others.

“Having worked with the Reveal team and their industry-leading technology for over 2 years we have seen significant benefits for our corporate, law firm, and government clients. We are rapidly accelerating the time to insight, reducing document count, and reducing costs”, stated Conor Looney, Chief Executive Officer at LDM.

Mr. Looney continued “We are very excited about our expanded relationship with Reveal as a best-in-class technology partner. This allows LDM Global to further innovate with our AI-led approach to litigation, investigation, and insolvency support, creating customized client solutions that help find facts faster than ever before, leveraging previous matters, understanding the context, ambiguity, and variability of language, and even identifying risks within active data.” 

“Fueled by the world’s most powerful AI technology and backed by the largest team of data scientists in the industry, Reveal is uniquely positioned to fulfill LDM Global’s eDiscovery needs,” said Wendell Jisa, Reveal’s Chief Executive Officer. “We’re looking forward to working with the LDM Global team and helping the entire organization gain a massive competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving space.”

 About LDM Global

LDM Global is a professional service company providing law firms, corporations, and state agencies with eDiscovery, AI Solutions, Document Review & Forensics services. The company was founded in 1996, has worked in 47 countries and its clients include Am Law 200 law firms and Fortune 500 corporations. Clients are supported 24 hours a day, seven days a week from operations hubs in North America and Europe, and an ISO:27001-certified Operations Center in India while data is secured at four locations in the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Caribbean.

About Reveal

Reveal is the industry’s only eDiscovery platform powered by artificial intelligence. As a cloud-based software provider, Reveal offers the full range of processing, early case assessment, review, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence capabilities. Reveal clients include law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, legal service providers, government agencies and financial institutions in more than 40 countries across five continents. Featuring deployment options in the cloud or on-premise, an intuitive user design, multilingual user interfaces and the automatic detection of more than 160 languages, Reveal accelerates legal review, saving users time and money.

The post LDM Global Expands Relationship with eDiscovery Provider, Reveal appeared first on Reveal.

Kristin and I had a wide-ranging discussion. We started with the impact of COVID on eDiscovery, a topic we have not addressed on this program before. Kristin talked about the growth of remote collection and remove review, once viewed skeptically but now being embraced. She also discussed the growing understanding, driven in part by the changes wrought by COVID, of the value the cloud and AI bring to eDiscovery. Switching directions, Kristen gave us the benefit of her experiences returning to the in-house side – how she gets to see a better picture and form stronger partnerships with vendors. Finally, Kirstin told us what she would like out of her ideal eDiscovery platform. It should do everything we want out of any eDiscovery platform, ride on the data no matter where it resides, never increase the overall data footprint, and most definitely give her a foot massage. Don’t we all want that?

Recorded live on January 8, 2021 | Transcription below

Note: This content has been edited and condensed for clarity.

George Socha:

Welcome to eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal. I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 am Eastern, I host an episode of eDiscovery Leaders Live where I get a chance to chat with eDiscovery luminaries.

Past episodes are available on the Reveal website, go to revealdata.com, select “Resources” and then select “eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast”.

Today, I am pleased to welcome as our guest, Kristin Sunderman. Kristin is the Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac, and comes with years of experience on the corporate, on the provider, and on the law firm side. Kristin started out five years in law firms, in secretarial and paralegal roles, moved on to the corporate side working first at Merck and then at Teva Pharmaceuticals, and then spent 10 years on the provider side, working primarily at eTERA, moving up through the ranks from project manager to Managing Director, Operations, briefly at Haystack through the acquisition of eTERA, and then at WES Litigation Group. Just this last year, Kristin joined Freddie Mac and we are pleased to have her with us here today.

Kristin Sunderman:

Hi George, good morning. How are you?

George Socha:

Good morning. Glad you could join us.

Kristin Sunderman:

Thank you for having me.

The Impact of COVID on eDiscovery

George Socha:

We’ve got several things we want to cover. One topic I would like to turn to – we chatted about this a little before – is one that we have not touched in any of the previous episodes, I think we’ve done 13 episodes now. That is COVID and how COVID has been impacting eDiscovery and what machine learning adds for that, where it all fits for you, that whole big world? Now that I’ve given you that wide range of questions, where would you like to go with it?

Kristin Sunderman:

Well, how have you not talked about COVID? I’m impressed that I get to be the first one to talk about it and we’re about to enter into the second year of it, almost. There’s a lot, I think, to unpack with COVID. COVID has impacted our lives in many, many ways. I think that’s part of the issue with a pandemic, is it’s much more far reaching than just work or personal. It’s pretty much impacted everything that we’re doing.

If you think about when it started off, everything came to a screeching halt, courts were closed, and everything stopped. When I first went into the office that Friday, just to get the lay of the land, it was a ghost town. There were empty cups, because people literally just up and left in the middle of COVID.

Trying to pick up the pieces after that, I think there’s going to be some challenges. We all came in-house; I’m sitting in my home now. And once you did that transition, everything was chaotic because we were not only remote workers, we are IT specialists, we are homeschoolers, and we’re everything under the sun at once.

I think that we’re going to see moving forward that as a result of that chaos, people maybe weren’t as disciplined or maybe didn’t even know how to handle data or communications or preservation. There’s that big meeting you had, a status conference where your computer wasn’t working so you went to your kid’s computer or you went to the iPad or something to try to get your materials available. And who can blame you, with all of the chaos, we just have all been trying to survive. But I think the implications of collections are going to be impactful, data preservation and data governance even, because there’s going to be this period of time that’s somewhat of a black hole in a lot of ways with things being all over the place.

And we don’t have an end in sight. We’re now in the phase of adapting to what will that look like? How is eDiscovery going to be impacted? How do we keep going? Because as much as things halted, we still have to move forward. We still have a job to do; the legal field is considered an essential industry. So how do we continue on?

Remote Collection: At First Necessary, Now Desirable

I think there’s going to be a big reliance and continued reliance on remote collections. Collecting has always been a combination. You do remote when you can, but for the most part, you’ll have a team depending on the size in-house for three or four days doing collections on site. And with all of the restrictions and social distancing, that’s less and less ideal.

I think there’s a big window for this remote collection to be expanded and for more robust tools, more expansive tools. That’s going to be a really sweet spot for vendors to try to get into because there’s a big need. And I don’t see that changing because once you can find a way to collect remotely, is anyone really going to want to go back to being in-house and sending these teams all over the country and that grind of on the road five days a week. For forensic specialists, it’s challenging and it’s difficult, so why not continue down this path? Right? I mean, look at all the corporations that are even going towards keeping their workers remote because of the cost savings and the flexibility.

I’m anxious to get back to the office, but I’m somewhat an anomaly, I think, in that regard. So, I think that collection’s a big piece that’s going to impact it.

Working Remotely Has Tapped the Brakes

I also think the industry as a whole has slowed down a little bit. We haven’t had the ability to get data to the vendors, or we haven’t been able to collect as quickly, or we haven’t been able to even process as quickly. Everyone’s in this new world where you’re either trying to process from home for the first time, or you’re trying to coordinate couriers and collecting data and somebody to plug in the drive. There’re so many different variables that now take a lot more time or thought or creative solutions to get done that weren’t an issue when we were all in the office.

And as that’s happening, I think we’re also going to look at, if we can slow down a little bit for this, then what does that mean for the overall picture? Do we really need to be pushing things out in the same way that we were, or, especially for people like me who are in-house, can we keep some of that in-house now? Is there really even the need to do that?

Face-to-Face Not As Important As Before

The approach across the board will start to shift because we’re now looking at the world very differently than we did before. The world is much bigger and there’s just not that face-to-face need, it isn’t as essential anymore. We’re seeing that even here. Normally I’d be in the office with you, talking to you and drinking coffee or whatever the case may be. But here we are, I’m on my couch and don’t make me stand up, I don’t want to show you my sweats.

Remote Review – Now A No-Brainer

It’s a different life right now and I expect that post COVID, a lot of that’s going to carry over because there are some real benefits to it. We’ve had it going on long enough to where we’re now finding solutions to the challenges. We’re finding solutions to being at home and the connection issues, and the IT issues, and people are determining how to remote into computers and into the office so that they don’t have to be in there. They’re doing these remote collections, doing remote reviews. Across the board, remote review is started to take off before the pandemic. And now, it’s a no brainer. I mean, that’s where you want to be. Right? And the people are starting to dip their toe into it now are at a disadvantage to those vendors that were already doing it before, because they were already ahead of the game with the security and they were already looking at those things.

I’ll be the first to admit, when I heard about remote review… no way, there’s so many security issues, you don’t know who’s going to see it, the clean desk policies, all of these things that are much easier to control when you have everyone in one room. But we’re finding ways around it. We’re finding ways to make it defensible. We’re finding ways to work with it. And I think that that will continue on because we’re also driving the price down. Everything is now going to be so much more competitive and you can make much more money as a managed review service doing remote review because your pool’s much bigger and you have your accessibility. As that shift is happening, I think it’s going to really turn the vendors on their side and looking at new ways to service in-house and law firms, because our approach is just very different with the world in the way that it is right now.

The Cloud and AI: New Power to In-House Personnel and New Partnerships with Providers

George Socha:

So, two big areas of change of course, are the collection side. None of us are hopping on airplanes anymore and trying to carry hard drives through customs, if that’s even a viable option. Similarly, the review centers are for the time being closed down and we’re learning to handle things remotely. What sort of impact are you seeing when it comes to where systems are deployed on premise, in the cloud, via mobile solutions, things like that?

Kristin Sunderman:

Certainly for me personally, I spent much of my career doing on-prem – hardware, the brick and mortar type business. Although we had remote workers, data centers were steel and massive. There’s been a big push to go over to more of the web-based applications for many reasons. Now with the pandemic, it just makes so much more sense, because you are giving over some control of the back end but you’re getting so much more. You have all the securities in place. It’s a no brainer, it’s secure. There’s no question I think about that. That’s been proved and it’s defensible that it’s a secure practice. You have much more control over whether you can scale up or scale down. You’re no longer dependent on a company that has this massive infrastructure to be able to provide more space or to provide bigger workspaces. Especially being in-house, we can start to bring all of that stuff in. We can go to the web-based tools. We don’t have to worry about jump servers or remote access or VPN. We can go directly to where we need to go, expand up if we need to, bring it down.

I think that the cloud-based piece alone has been a huge game changer for in-house people like myself because we now have access to those same tools that we maybe wouldn’t have had before. That allows us to do more of the work inside of the corporations. In turn, people like me, who’ve been in the industry for a very long time, are starting to go in-house and we’re getting a lot more skilled and experienced with real-life experience eDiscovery. I won’t say this is a new field, it continues to evolve, when the “e” got in front of the “Discovery” everything’s changed a little bit. I think that as that continues to happen, we have this new age of people going in-house that are highly skilled and have done this work.

So managing cases doesn’t seem like an alarming task or something that is beyond our possibilities. And with these cloud-based solutions that can scale up and down, and now all the machine learning and the artificial intelligence, it now allows us to use our smaller in-house groups to do a lot more work. It’s amazing the stuff that we can do with almost a skeleton crew of eDiscovery specialists who are skilled and knowledgeable in these tools. But then we have so much coming to help us, assist us, to get us to where we need, it automatically changes it.

Over the past few years, there’s been this push to bring more in-house, but there were always limitations. I heard everything from, you know, five gigabytes, even up to like 500, just depending on the tools you have in-house as to what you can handle and then at that point, you cap it and it has to go to a vendor. I think cloud-based solutions and all of the AI and machine learning that’s becoming available to us, is going to change that because we can now really analyze, cull, go through massive amounts of data with the help of technology. This technology is now being made available to us in a very tangible way. For a corporation like Freddie to bring in an on-prem software solution that can handle up to 10 terabytes of data, is an overhaul. It’s a huge undertaking. But now we can go over and we can sign up with one of the cloud-based vendors and we’ll have that much and more at any given time if we need to, all while keeping all of our cybersecurity issues at bay. It’s a win-win in a lot of ways, and we’ll certainly start to shift, the industry as a whole, because vendors have been seen as the ones who… you know, in-house really handles the small matters and aren’t too impactful and we send anything of significance out.

I think that that’s really going to start to shift and you’ll see much more of a partnership between vendors and in-house eDiscovery centers, both at firms and corporations, where they’ll have to work together on not only approach, but strategy and manpower and much less of the just deferring to vendors as the experts in the field, because of the diversity and because of the fact that COVID has not only caused us all to reevaluate how and where we spend our time. It’s also having corporations look at the same thing. Across the board, everything’s getting re-evaluated as what makes more sense.

The technology is blowing everything out of the water. As you are aware, I saw recently there’s analytics right now in the coding panels. When you go through on a review, you can literally see right there, comparables and it’ll start to rate it and scale it. It’s changing the face of review into a much more tangible way, making things exciting for me. As somebody who’s gone in-house, I think that the possibilities are open and it’s really cool to see how it’s shifting. But that’s this industry, this industry doesn’t really stay the same.

George Socha:

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that you’re talking about the Reveal coding panel.

Kristin Sunderman:

I am talking about the Reveal coding.

Returning from Provider to In-House

George Socha:

You are one of those people who has made that move from the provider side to in-house. And you were in-house provider and in-house again. What’s it been like to return from the vendor’s side to the in-house role?

Kristin Sunderman:

It’s very different. It’s very different. It’s exciting, I think just because of all of these changes that are happening and because I do feel like there’s more of us that are going in-house, so this is becoming a different type of arena. It’s exciting for me because I think that in-house is becoming much more reputable and much more of a decision maker. I think we were a small subset of the industry historically, but I think that’s shifting now and that there’s going to be a lot more of thought leadership and helping to shape the way the industry goes from people like me that have come in-house, because we’re seeing the needs up close and personal.

A Bigger Picture and A Better Partnership

On the vendor side, you see everything on a matter-by-matter basis, and that’s how you handle it. Being in-house, I’m looking at, not matter by matter, I’m looking at department by department. I’m looking at data preservation, I’m looking at data classification, things that all go into my ability to collect and do eDiscovery, but on a much bigger scale. If you can start to tie all of that in together, I think that the approach is a little bit more expansive and you’ll start to see a lot of this emerging technology to help support it. We already are, as we have discussed with the automated processes and artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s changing the way we even look at data, it’s changing how we deal with data.

Long gone are the days of where you just have one approach, where you’re just sitting and looking through boxes and boxes of documents. You now have options. You can do a straight review, you can do analytics, and you can do anything you want under the sun: grouping, coding, conceptual, whatever it is. It seems to be the time that you can make a wish and your data can somehow… one of these tools will find a way to bring the information out. You just have to find the right tool.

I think that’s where you’ll continue to see the partnership between the vendors and in-house counsel, because there’s an argument to be said for bringing work in-house but there’s also an argument for sending it out because you do have a limited number of resources in-house. You will have your tools that you use that will be phenomenal, that will get you to where you want to go. But there’s always going to be those cases that need some diversity of technology or diversity of thought or need to have a little bit of a different approach. That’s when that thought process will come and that partnership between in-house and vendors will really start to grow and flourish as you come up with these more complex approaches. That’s exciting because this industry changes so rapidly. To have the diversity of thought usually brings about some pretty fantastic results.

Where Venders Fit

George Socha:

As you were talking earlier in this discussion, I was thinking you might be making some of the service providers out there a little bit nervous…

Kristin Sunderman:

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

George Socha:

A little bit nervous with the concern that their work is…. the need for them is going to be evaporating. It sounds like that’s not going to be the case. It’s going to be evolving and shifting.

Kristin Sunderman:

Exactly.

George Socha:

There’s going to be a role for all three groups here.

Kristin Sunderman:

Absolutely. And this is not new to vendors. There are vendors who have been doing this since paper days. They are very good at evolving and finding the needs. I think that this is just going to be another extension of that. Remote collections, remote review: those are going to be some very big areas for vendors that maybe were less so before. I think it’s fair to say that it’s changing, but I wouldn’t say it’s evaporating. My heart is with vendors. I was in the vendor world for a very long time, so I certainly see a lot of value there. But I think there’s going to be some adopting and that’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

The Ideal eDiscovery Platform: Do Everything, Never Increase the Data Footprint, and Ride on Top of the Data No Matter Where the Data Resides

George Socha:

You mentioned earlier, “make a wish”, so I’m going to ask you to make a wish. If you could have – you know what’s coming – if you could your ideal eDiscovery platform, no limitations whatsoever, everything is possible no matter how ridiculous, price is not at all a factor, anything you could want, think as narrowly or as expansively as you want: what would this ideal eDiscovery platform look like for you?

Kristin Sunderman:

George, I told you I tried very hard to come up with some exciting platform and I am so boring. I was not able to.

George Socha:

Sometimes the apparently boring is actually the most exciting.

Kristin Sunderman:

I still stick with, if you could have something that could also give me a foot massage while I was collecting my data, that would be great. No, you know, honestly, I think the first thing when I was thinking about, “What would that look like?” So much of what I would wish for is already coming out and is in fruition. The machine learning and that piece is like a dream come true from somebody who’s old school like me, who did sit in warehouses, reviewing documents back in the day. You know, all of these platforms that are coming out are mind blowing.

George Socha:

We don’t have to brush and blow the dust off the top of the boxes and worry about what we’re going to find when we open up the boxes.

Kristin Sunderman:

My figures don’t hurt. And those spiders jumping out, dead rats….

George Socha:

They’re turning brown and the oily feeling you get on it. We don’t have any of that anymore.

Kristin Sunderman:

No. And it’s pretty glorious. The first time I saw some of the analytic capabilities of machine learning, I got a little misty-eyed at how amazing it is, almost to where I wish I still did document review. It’d be great to be able to experience this.

I think for me, especially now moving in-house, if I were to say what would be the ideal platform, it would be a platform that could do everything I needed to do, obviously collect full, process, review, host, but not increase the data footprint. Right now that’s such a big deal because of collecting and pulling into another place. Data is growing exponentially as it is. Data management is such a huge part of what I’m now doing every day. It would be great if there were a tool that could do everything and give us the same results that we need without increasing the data footprint.

George Socha:

Let’s dive into that a little bit. By not including the data footprint, do you mean by that, that we wouldn’t have to, or you wouldn’t have to go into your system, make a copy of the data, take that copy somewhere else, send it there and then who knows? They make a copy of a portion of it and that goes somewhere else, and then they make a copy of a portion. And so that’s part of what you’re trying to avoid, right?

Kristin Sunderman:

Right.

George Socha:

Which I think then means that the technology would have to be able to ride on top of the data where it exists.

Kristin Sunderman:

It would. It’d be a behind the firewall solution. It would have to be.

George Socha:

Or at least be able to hook into what’s behind the firewall with a semipermeable membrane with the firewall there.

Kristin Sunderman:

All while being secure.

George Socha:

Absolutely.

Kristin Sunderman:

Easy, peasy.

George Socha:

I told you no limitations, right?

Kristin Sunderman:

That’s right. That’s right, I agree.

George Socha:

So, it will ride on top of data, wherever that data might be, even if it’s in multiple locations…

Kristin Sunderman:

Sure, no problems.

George Socha:

Everything’s possible.

Kristin Sunderman:

Anything.

George Socha:

It will create almost no additional footprint. Its additional footprint will be only that data which it needs to create and store itself and not any of the underlying data. Would it be able to inject new data into the existing data stores?

Kristin Sunderman:

Sure, sure. Why not?

George Socha:

Why not?

Kristin Sunderman:

Why not? We’re wishing here, right?

George Socha:

That’s right. What sort of data would you want injected into the existing data storage?

Kristin Sunderman:

Well, you know, I guess it depends on the case. And the input from the team. Yeah. I think data is such a big issue right now and it just keeps increasing and increasing and increasing. That’s probably the biggest pain point. As long as it can keep learning how to code documents and categorize them and doing all the cool things that it’s doing now with these advanced machine learning and analytics and artificial intelligence, I don’t know what else I could possibly want besides the foot massage.

George Socha:

It sounds like you’re also trying to make your records management counterparts happy. Information governance counterparts happy. Right?

Kristin Sunderman:

Right, right. I definitely am because she’s amazing. And I definitely want her on my team and on my side. Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me on here. This has been fun.

George Socha:

Thank you. This has been great. Thank you, Kristin.

We have had with us as our guest today, Kristin Sunderman, who is Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac. I am George Socha, this has been eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal.

Next week, joining us on January 15th will be David Stanton who is an eDiscovery partner at the Pillsbury law firm.

Kristin, thank you very much.

Kristin Sunderman:

Thanks George, bye-bye.

The post eDiscovery Leaders: Kristin Sunderman of Freddie Mac appeared first on Reveal.

Year’s end is just around the corner, and it’s been a year like none other (and we don’t mean COVID-19).

NexLP joined Reveal, bringing its cutting-edge AI and premier data science team lead by Jay Leib. EDRM co-founder George Socha joined as well, and promptly kicked off the popular eDiscovery Leaders Live series with thirteen interviews to date. Reveal upped its game with Version 10, a modernized and redesigned version of our platform.

Service provider, law firm, and corporate clients launched new relationships with Reveal or built on existing ones. Those launching new relationships included the service provider Orbital, the KRCL law firm, and the contracting, management, and design-build firm Balfour Beatty, all of whom engaged Reveal as their preferred eDiscovery platform. Prominent examples of clients building on existing relationships included Epiq, which announced a global artificial intelligence enterprise licensing agreement; DLA Piper, which partnered with Reveal to develop a suite of groundbreaking AI solutions; and Pillsbury, which expanded the firm’s access to Reveal’s complete next-generation platform.

We upped our posting game as well, covering a wide range of issues. We hit on trends, wrote about budgets, remote work, and the future of legal review. We looked at what eDiscovery companies get wrong and offered advice on ways to get eDiscovery right. We examined artificial intelligence – what it is; where it does, could, and should fit in the world of eDiscovery; and ways to use it such as with translation and image detection and classification.

I had great conversations with eDiscovery leaders. Wendell Jisa and Jay Leib talked about Reveal’s acquisition of NexLP. Aaron Crews (Littler) talked AI, Jon Lavinder (Epiq) discussed TAR, and Manfred Gabriel (Holland & Knight) looked at the future of eDiscovery. Rich Robinson (Toyota) gave us our first in-house view. Udi Hershkovich (AWS) took as back to AI while Ron Best (Munger, Tolles & Olson) laid out his vision for the eDiscovery platform of the future and Ron Tienzo from Construction Discovery Experts upped the game with his retro visual aids. Aaron Bath (Balfour Beatty) brought another in-house perspective, Rachel McAdams (A&L Goodbody) discussed differences between eDiscovery in the US and Ireland, and Martha Louks (McDermott Will & Emery) talked about building a fuller picture of the case. Luke Smith (LTI) compared and contrasted discovery under civil and common law systems and Joy Murao (PAR) closed the season emphasizing the importance of training and education.

Acquisitions and Key Milestones

Reveal has been active this year, most notably with a key acquisition, new people, and a new interface.

Topping the list is Reveal’s acquisition, in August, of NexLP. With the acquisition, Reveal became the market-leader in AI-powered, end-to-end eDiscovery. Reveal brought the most comprehensive, solutions-oriented technology on the market with best-in-class processing and review software, a global footprint, and the ability to deploy this solution in the cloud and on-premise. NexLP added cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology that turns disparate, unstructured data into meaningful insights, and brought along with its premier data science team and its co-founder and CEO, Jay Leib, who joined Reveal’s leadership team as its EVP of Innovation and Strategy.

In September, George Socha, co-founder of EDRM, joined Reveal as SVP of Brand Awareness. Socha bolsters Reveal’s leadership team with more than three decades of experience as a lawyer, advisor, and expert witness. He has guided clients through virtually every facet of eDiscovery from the earliest efforts at effectively governing information through the persuasive presentation of ESI in court. At Reveal, he helps guide development of the product roadmap and consults with Reveal customers on effective deployment in legal technology.

Also in September, Reveal launched the already-popular eDiscovery Leaders Live series. Friday mornings at 11 am ET, George Socha dons a headset and settles down to chat with a leader in eDiscovery or related areas. Sponsored by Reveal, eDiscovery Leaders Live is hosted by ACEDS. More about the series below.

Reveal continued the push in October, announcing the release of Version 10 of its platform and a new user interface. Reveal modernized and redesigned its eDiscovery platform to enable customers to spend less time navigating the tool and more time achieving positive results. Available in all deployment models – cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and mobile – the new version boasts a bevy of new features and upgrades. These include an industry-first “dark mode” interface, a completely restructured search functionality, predictive search, and AI-driving transcription and image detection and classification capabilities.

Reveal’s clients have been active as well, with current clients expanding their relationships with Reveal and new ones joining the fold. Here are some of the highlights.

In January, Balfour Beatty US engaged Reveal as its preferred eDiscovery provider in the United States. An industry-leading provider of general contracting, at-risk construction management and design-build services, Balfour Beatty spent much of 2019 identifying and implementing new tools and functionality for electronic data processing, discovery and review. Balfour Beatty selected Reveal’s eDiscovery solution because it allows for the self-performance of eDiscovery processing, data analytics, utilization of sophisticated artificial intelligence models for technology-assisted review and a consolidated document review platform that can be used across their U.S. business.

In April, the law firm of Kane Russell Coleman Logan, PC engaged Reveal as its preferred eDiscovery
provider. By selecting Reveal, KRCL is able to take advantage of a powerful suite of tools and with the flexibility of Reveal’s cloud environment can very easily scale to match their needs. KRCL’s attorneys have been able to leverage Reveal’s advanced analytics and robust review solution to significantly improve their efficiency. With Reveal’s AI and other tools, they have been able to get faster and better results while dealing with large and complex data sets – all while enjoying predictable pricing that has been a great benefit to their clients.

In mid-October, Orbital Data Consulting engaged Reveal as its preferred eDiscovery and investigations software provider. Founded in 2020, Orbital is a global provider of eDiscovery consulting, digital forensics and incident response services in Europe and the United States, primarily focused on white collar regulatory investigations and complex cross-border litigation. Orbital chose Reveal after an extensive feasibility project where it rigorously tested and evaluated many of the major eDiscovery platforms. Key for Orbital were Reveal’s robust data processing capabilities; advanced workflow functionality; industry-leading, game-changing artificial intelligence capabilities; and straightforward, easy-to-use interface that enables a novice reviewer to be trained and working proficiently within 20 minutes.

In late October, Epiq and Reveal announced a global enterprise license agreement for the use of Reveal’s AI technology. With the agreement, Epiq, a global leader in the legal services industry, now provides all its clients with expanded access to Reveal’s best-in-class legal technology solutions. Already an early adopter of Reveal AI, Epiq has extended the scope of Reveal tools its clients can use to encompass all Reveal AI features including NexLP capabilities such as its industry-exclusive AI Model Library. Epiq has long provided the Reveal AI software to legal services clients; with this agreement Epiq has expanded that capability across all business workflows whether deployed in an Epiq managed data center or in the Cloud, providing agility and flexibility for any client requirement.

In November, DLA Piper and Reveal entered into a collaboration agreement to develop innovative solutions for law using Reveal’s artificial intelligence platform and DLA Piper’s global legal expertise. Rolling out from early 2021, the first set of products will focus on a range of different risk scenarios and investigations and will form part of DLA Piper’s Law& brand which delivers solutions beyond traditional legal services to help businesses succeed.

In December, leading international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP announced it had expanded its relationship with Reveal. Pillsbury, which shares Reveal’s vision of AI-powered eDiscovery, extended access to Reveal’s complete next-generation platform, providing the firm with the tools and opportunities for continued advancement to develop the efficiencies and insights their clients expect.

Posts

With our posts, at eDiscovery Blog, we seek to educate and, at times, entertain. This year we brought you thoughts from Reveal’s George Socha, Jay Leib, Jeff Fehrmann, Dan Fischler, Randal Girouard, Matthew, Miller, and David Shedd.

We started the year talking money with a post about Global eDiscovery on a Budget. In eDiscovery Trends from LegalWeek 2020, Matthew Miller shared thoughts inspired by the three conferences that comprised LegalWeek, the largest and longest-running trade show for legal technology.

Matthew kicked off April with The Document Review Process: 5 Critical Elements to Better Outcomes, where he broke down the five practices you should adopt for successful document reviews. Randy Girouard followed with a post tackling one of the issues of the moment, Will Working Remote Be the New Norm for eDiscovery? Jeff Fehrman then closed the month with an article about ECA, The Key to Effective Early Case Assessment – The 60 Day Sweet Spot.

From there, Jeff moved to The Future of Legal Review: Smaller, More Relevant Data Sets, where he discussed rules-based data classification, its use, and its advantages. He followed that with musings on a smarter document review process in The New Document Review Process: Less is More Relevant.

With summer, Dan Fischler brought us a quick primer with How to Nail the Legal Hold Process 100% of the Time. David Shedd warned us about the 7 Things Most eDiscovery Companies Get Wrong while offering advice on how to avoid becoming part of that club. Matthew Miller came back to close out the summer with Getting Predictable: 5 Little Known Hidden eDiscovery Costs and how to deal with them.

As the fall arrived, in George Socha: Why I joined the Reveal eDiscovery Team I wrote about what impelled me to join Reveal. On the heels of that post, we published a piece examining Reveal’s biggest news of the year, Why We Acquired NexLP: Insight into Reveal’s Master Plan.

We discussed some of the underlying eDiscovery challenges in eDiscovery Market Trends That Can No Longer Be Ignored and 7 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your eDiscovery Solution. From there, David Shedd offered hope with The Ultimate Early Case Assessment Checklist.

We then turned to artificial intelligence, starting with Jay Leib’s piece, Like Netflix for Legal AI Models: Reveal’s AI Model Marketplace Goes Deep. I followed by laying out an AI framework and potential benefits that can accrue from the effective use of AI, first in Legal AI Software: Taking Document Review to the Next Level, next, in AI in the Legal Sector – the Obvious Choice, and then in After 15 Years, Has the eDiscovery EDRM Model Been Realized?

We took a pause from AI to address the question, What is eDiscovery Leaders Live?, then turned to turned to specific challenges and how applied AI can address them, starting, in How Many Hurdles are in Your Foreign Language Document Review Process?, with how AI can be used for translation.

We published a two-part series on eDiscovery software deployment. The first part, eDiscovery In The Cloud or On-Premises? You Have Options with Reveal, explored the four primary options. The second part, Which eDiscovery Platform Deployment Options Are Right for You?, focused on how to chose from among the options.

With Image Recognition and Classification During Legal Review, we returned to practical applications of AI in discovery. To close the year, we asked you to give us your eDiscovery Wish List and, with apologies to Clement Clark Moore, we offered a bit of poesy to entertain you this holiday season, ‘Twas the Night Before Doc Review.

eDiscovery Leaders Live

As noted above, in September we launched eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS and sponsored by Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 ET, Reveal’s George Socha dons a headset and for about ½ hour settles down to chat with a leader in eDiscovery. The sessions are live, and we post the recordings and transcripts at eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast.

We started with a discussion with Reveal’s CEO, Wendell Jisa, and Jay Leib, formerly of NexLP, about the company’s acquisition of NexLP. Since then, we’ve talked with leaders from corporations, law firms, and service providers – all so we can share with you the benefit of their insights and forecasts. Here’s this year’s roster.

Aaron Crews, Chief Data Analytics Officer – Littler: We discussed what is and what is not artificial intelligence; looked at how to crawl, walk, and then run with AI in litigation; and tried gazing into our murky crystal ball to figure out where AI will take litigators in the future.

Jon Lavinder, Director, Technology-Assisted Review – Epiq: Our discussion ranged from lessons learned the hard way during the early days of technology assisted review, to how he has been able to make effective use of and then operationalize TAR, to a new service offering Epiq will be rolling out.

Manfred Gabriel, Senior Counsel – Holland & Knight: We talked about eDiscovery past and present; about the new eDiscovery capabilities Manfred has been rolling out at Holland & Knight; and about the future of eDiscovery, particularly how through effective use of AI it can reconnect attorneys to their cases, how it can help counsel find what matters most, and how lawyers can use it to build their cases.

Ron Tienzo, Senior Consultant – Construction Discovery Experts: Our discussion focused on AI, challenges with using generalized AI for discovery, and the benefits Ron has experienced using pre-built AI models as well as creating his own custom ones.

Rich Robinson, Director of Legal Operations & Litigation Support – Toyota Motor North America Inc.: We sat down to talk about what it’s like to be in-house in eDiscovery. Rich shared his thoughts on the biggest issue facing eDiscovery today, ephemeral data and collaborative platforms. He suggested that to be effective, in-house personnel needed to become techno-linguists, that law firms really need to leverage their support personnel and that providers should become extensions of and partners with legal departments. Finally, Rich reminded us of the importance of becoming part of the legal community.

Udi Hershkovich, Principal Business Development Manager – Amazon Web Services (AWS): We talked about Udi’s area of expertise, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its role in litigation. We discussed how to make AI/ML accessible to everyone and examined what is meant by “artificial intelligence”. Udi covered AI/ML in eDiscovery, not just for pre-processing and review but also for case assessment. We took a look at graph databases and how to have a discussion with your documents, areas with phenomenal potential. Finally, Udi left us with some thoughts on how to get started with all of this.

Ron Best, eDiscovery attorney and director of litigation systems, – Munger, Tolles & Olson: We discussed Ron’s current role at Munger Tolles and then moved into a rich discussion about where Ron would like to see eDiscovery capabilities go moving forward. Ron talked about the need for full analytics functionality in eDiscovery platforms. He then laid out his vision for what an “assume everything is possible” eDiscovery system would look like, offering us a play in seven acts.

Aaron Bath, National Director of Litigation Management – Balfour Beatty US: We talked about how teaching scuba divers has made Aaron a better legal professional, the value of understanding task loading and situational awareness, and his involvement with the Dallas Area Paralegal Association and ACEDS North Texas. We went into insights he has to offer about learning and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning and the value of getting one’s hands dirty, as well as advice for those wanting to move into legal operations, eDiscovery, and litigation management positions.

Rachel McAdams, eDiscovery specialist- A&L Goodbody: We discussed how Rachel made the move from plasma physics to eDiscovery, the Data Projects team at A&L Goodbody, and her thoughts and experiences bringing eDiscovery technology in house and new capabilities on board at a law firm. We also talked about the differences between building out eDiscovery capabilities at law firms and at service providers, the differences between eDiscovery in Ireland and the United States, and what a great legal community she has joined with her move to Dublin.

Martha Louks, Director of Technology Services – McDermott Will & Emery: We talked about tying together structured and unstructured data, building scalable timelines from the information, and using that content to build a fuller picture of a case. We discussed Martha’s eDiscovery technology wish list, including applying advanced active learning to short messages, having early and ongoing discussions with the data, and analyzing sentiments in yet more ways. We also touched on deployment models, working with audio and video data, and the need for new standards to deal with the data coming from the different ways COVID has forced us to work.

Luke Smith, Founder, CEO, and Head of Customer Delivery – LTI: We discussed differences between civil law systems, such as they have in Belgium, and common law systems such as we use in the US; the imperative for greater efficiency driven by the constraints of civil law systems; how eDiscovery in Europe is driven more by investigations than by litigation, with Luke pointing to merger clearances as an example. We turned to the slow but growing adoption in Europe of predictive coding, advanced analytics, and AI. I had Luke gaze into his crystal ball and tell me what that adoption might look like in the future. Finally, I asked Luke what his dream eDiscovery platform would look like and he came back with the most expansive vision yet.

Joy Murao, Founder and CEO – PAR (Practice Aligned Resources): We chatted about what Joy does today and how she got there. She discussed her big missions: bridging the gap between IT and legal, connecting the dots with training and education, and bringing the value of paralegals to the forefront. I asked her advice on how paralegals can be successful in today’s environments as well as how attorneys can most effectively use paralegals. Finally, we talked about Joy’s ideal eDiscovery platform, which would have a strong emphasis on helping all team members work together to build cases, supported by AI that both responded and guided attorneys and paralegals alike.

As 2020 draws to a close and 2021 looms around the corner, we wish you the very best for the coming year!

The post 2020 – A Year in Digital Review appeared first on Reveal.

When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But an eDiscovery platform, as I watched with revere;
With AI capabilities so precise and robust,
I knew in a moment, this was software I could trust.
More rapid than eagles this technology came,
And I whistled and shouted, the features by name:
“Transcription! Translation! Analytics, and Reporting!
Automation, Production, Support and onboarding!
From the start of the case! To the end of the matter!
Now process! Analyze! Discover new patterns!”

The AI Library was ready, each model a-shelf,
And I laughed in relief, in spite of myself;
A click of my mouse and a key email read,
I soon realized I had nothing to dread;
We spoke not a word, but went straight to our work,
But when a partner’s door opened, our heads turned with a jerk,

He sprang from his office, to his team gave a whistle,
And our backs all straightened as if we’d sat on a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, as he came into sight–
“All-in on AI! With Reveal, we’ll get it right!”

The post ‘Twas the Night Before Doc Review appeared first on Reveal.

This holiday season, we want to know what YOU want (what you really, really want) from an eDiscovery software platform. If it’s something we’ve already developed – we’ll let you know. And if it’s something that doesn’t exist yet, we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Because magic shouldn’t be reserved just for the holidays, or for kids. You deserve a little magic in your workday, too!

What’s on your eDiscovery Wishlist?

The post eDiscovery Wish List appeared first on Reveal.

Joy and I chatted about what she does today and how she got there. She discussed her big missions: bridging the gap between IT and legal, connecting the dots with training and education, and bringing the value of paralegals to the forefront. I asked her advice on how paralegals can be successful in today’s environments as well as how attorneys can most effectively use paralegals. Finally, we talked about Joy’s ideal eDiscovery platform, which would have a strong emphasis on helping all team members work together to build cases, supported by AI that both responded and guided attorneys and paralegals alike.

Recorded live on December 18, 2020 | Transcription below

Note: This content has been edited and condensed for clarity.

George Socha:

Welcome to eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal. I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 am Eastern, I host an episode of eDiscovery Leaders Live where I get a chance to chat with luminaries in eDiscovery and related areas.

Past episodes are available on the Reveal website, go to revealdata.com, select “Resources” and then select “eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast”.

This week we have with us Joy Murao – Murao as in “meow” as in cat. Joy is the Founder and CEO of PAR, or Practice Aligned Resources, a legal tech support and education company. She has over 20 years’ experience building and managing specialized global legal support teams for AMLAW 25 law firms, Latham & Watkins, Paul Hastings. These days she shares her practice, experience, and skill set with a larger legal community, not just that elite tier of law firms. Through PAR’s support and education programs, Joy aligns Big Law practice support level service and technology to corporate and government law departments, sharing all that with corporate and government law departments as well as law firms of all sizes. Joy, welcome. We are glad to have you here.

Joy Murao:

And thank you for having me. Sorry for ruining the set, looks like the power light just went out….

Bridging the Gap and Connecting the Dots

George Socha:

These things happen. I read my script from the wrong line, your lights come on – whatever, we’re good. I’d like to jump right in here, because unlike most weeks I do have a hard stop at the half hour. So, I’d like to get going right away and ask you – let’s get to the big questions: What are your big missions when it comes to all of this?

Joy Murao:

Okay, big missions. Well, first of all, everyone knows my name is Joy. I always joke about this, because I do really think that what we do every day in regards to legal support – and it’s a lot of hard work in litigation – how do you bring all that joy to what you do every day? I think a lot of that is removing frustration, feeling confident, deploying the right technology, and aligning resources to your practice – I think that’s a big thing. When I was working in Big Law – and I know that for me, I’ve always loved what I do…not every day – I remember there was one day where it’s like, oh my goodness this is just crazy and there should be a company that could do XYZ. What that meant to me was training, education and specific education for attorneys, because every day you’re trying to consult but you realize you have to take a step back and bring everyone on the same page.

My mission is to bring that baseline, what you’ve done with EDRM and providing that structure in regards to that visual, bring that to a practical aspect. That’s why I love being a part of ACEDS, trying to push that mission overall globally.Then from a practice standpoint, the practical application of technology, that’s always been a little bit of a gap or a wild card because it really does matter what litigation support program or what firm you’re at. Everything’s a little different, because everyone’s strategy, everyone’s understanding of the value of the support team, it differs. That consistency in the operational side has always been lacking. That would be my mission, to bridge the gap between IT and legal and also connect all the dots of that wonderful training and education and structure that already exists and tie it together and really help the lawyers and the paralegals and actually the clients understand the value of bringing this all together. So that’s PAR.

Bring the Value of Paralegals to the Forefront

George Socha:

Yesterday, you and I were on a call with the San Diego Paralegal Association. I’d like to focus on the “paralegal” part of this in particular because so often, I think, paralegals can be the unsung heroes in this process. Remind us just how valuable paralegals are and what they bring to the world of eDiscovery.

Joy Murao:

A lot of people don’t know this, but I went to paralegal school and I was one of those early people coming out thinking that I would go to law school. Let me go become a paralegal, understand the legal environment, see if I really like it before I invest in that. I was really fortunate to get the same education that a lot of paralegals have today, which is a certified ABA program.

To that, when I got my job, my first job in the legal industry at O’Melveny, it was in litigation support. I didn’t mean to, but I was applying for a paralegal job and someone saw my resume and said, she belongs over here in this other group. Being in this new group and understanding, “I really want to be a paralegal,” was that draw to me. I really tried to connect the dots again, on how can I leverage my paralegal side or still learn about what paralegals do and leverage that. Because to be honest, as I was moving forward in litigation support, there really weren’t a lot of us, there still is no school to generate the hundreds and if not thousands of legal technologists we need in this industry. We’ve all had to learn on a job, a lot of us are paralegals or attorneys from background, who just had an inclination for technology.

Today I still teach at paralegal schools and I do see this opportunity for para-technicals. I think that because paralegals are on the case teams, they’re sitting with the attorneys side by side, they’re talking to clients, they’re the ones who are the immediate right hand of that lawyer. I personally believe that we need to train them, to arm them, and tool them to be the best for that client or for the attorney.

I think paralegals play a valuable role, not just in the technology part – because that’s another area in regards to learning about SQL and all the back end stuff – but the practice side, the practical application of all the tools we’re giving them. That’s what the paralegal’s doing with the attorneys. They’re just so well positioned to be there and offer that service. I think that paralegals are high value employees.

The problem again is the inconsistency of the management of that. You go to every different firm and they deploy the utilization of these paralegals differently. You have some that have a great structure. I came from Latham where we had a wonderful structure of a paralegal system, a paralegal one, two, a senior paralegal, and then these specialists who after 15 years technically probably could go to law school and be a lawyer in that department because they’ve really specialized.

That’s great, but then you have other places where paralegals are wearing the jack of all trades; today they’re the receptionist and tomorrow they’re sitting in with a client meeting, and we’re helping the attorneys file the briefs, and doing all those different things. It’s interesting that no matter what, I think the paralegals could be better served if they had more tools at their disposal, understood the value of them, and actually could articulate and justify the procurement of these tools or at least the utilization of these tools.

Now, with the market the way it is, when we talk about a per-gig society, you don’t have to buy a big $100,000-$200,000 application anymore. You actually can bring and get a case on a per-gig charge. Now you do have access to tools. For me again, tying to the mission to help make paralegals more valuable – at least perceived value because we know their value, I know they’re valuable, they know they’re valuable, but sometimes the perceived value is not there – I want to make sure that we’re helping bring that bar and set that par for paralegals and lawyers to specifically address legal technology and legal, in general. It’s still not taught consistently across the country in law schools or in paralegal schools. Hopefully, we’ll help bring the value of paralegals to the forefront.

To Paralegals: Actively Take Control of Your Own Careers

George Socha:

For those paralegals who are not so fortunate as to have the type of structure you had in place at Latham but who are working as the jack of all trades and are expected to be doing this and this and this and this and this and eDiscovery, give them a few pointers for how they can be successful at that.

Joy Murao:

Project management is a big thing for us in litigation support. We change our titles pretty quickly but everything is a project so I would say for paralegals, be mindful that you are a project manager. You may not have that title, but you are operationally and functionally doing that where you’re managing expectations, weighing risk, meeting deadlines, and trying to do all that. I would suggest to paralegals, even if you can’t afford to get a full certified PMP… I think certifications are great, I aspire to them myself, but sometimes you don’t have the time or the money or the other resources to actually get that final test done. But that doesn’t stop you from learning the principles and getting familiar with some of the overarching themes. Start to slowly incorporate that. So I’d say project management.

Two, look at all the free resources that have been available through COVID but also before that. EDRM.net has been an amazing area for resources. You can look at Sedona, ACEDS, there are just so many organizations. Especially if you’re a member of your local paralegal association, there are resources and connections that you can go to.

What we’re trying to design for 2021 is really focused on paralegals, individual paralegals, taking control of their careers. That’s my big suggestion for paralegals: don’t wait for someone to give it to you, you’re going to have to be curious and seek it. And now with the Interwebs, you can go on Google. I remember looking up “hard copy scanning” or something like that, because paper is a little bit of the past but I was finding more and more of the larger corporations, paper has been stored in warehouses, they’re still there, and all of the sudden people are like, “How do we do this?” And I’m like, “What do you mean, how do you do this?” “We’re having 50 boxes just drop”. I’m like, “Stop, here’s the process. Let’s go back”. It was funny having Google and going back and getting material to explain scanning and coding and all the like that we did 25 years ago – that it is still relevant today.

The thing for paralegals is no, it’s not too late. I try to encourage everyone that the ship has not sailed, there is still a big divide between people who are either paralegals or attorneys who understand how to deploy or employ technology. Just be curious and use your resources, use your connections. LinkedIn has been amazing as you watch these different webinars, everyone that I’ve been on panels with has always said Link me in and write me, email me. A lot of us have had to learn the hard way, on the job, hard knocks, and we just are happy to pay it forward and help the next generation bring and be at a higher level than we started with. Like every parent, you want the next generation to have it a little bit easier than you did. So utilize this, I think it’s an amazing opportunity and 2021, I’m hoping, is going to be great things for everybody.

To Lawyers: Seek Out the People and Tools You Need to Succeed

George Socha:

For the lawyers out there, how can they more effectively utilize paralegals, in particular given our topic here, paralegals with eDiscovery expertise?

Joy Murao:

I first think, seek them out, because they’re not all built the same. There are going to be paralegals who are great at managing eDiscovery projects. There are going to be paralegals who understand some of the true nitty gritty stuff, like document coding and searching databases. And then there are going to be some that are great at working with clients and explaining things or being more of a consultant level. Seek them out and understand what role or what value they can bring to you.

As an attorney, I would say, really there are great tools. I don’t know if people are using eDiscovery Assistant or other different kinds of case law that are available to them. Understand how technology has helped cases move forward or minimize motion practice or minimize claims despoliation. There are so many things that from a legal perspective of competency we have to worry about. I think, one, understand how eDiscovery plays in your litigation and then, two, understand what your workflow is at your firm. Some people bill differently. When you have fixed billing, it’s not going to be more profitable when you make mistakes. Rework is very expensive, so understand how your projects are built. I think that some of those mistakes or the common hiccups in eDiscovery – both sides have them, let’s be very clear, both sides at them in regards to plaintiff and defense – it’s making sure you’re prepared for them.

I would say seek out your paralegals and see what you have. What’s that saying: If you got to know it, learn it, or hire it. Your paralegals are your first stop. Legal secretaries also have been doing a great job of getting and learning more technology, so I would not discount your legal secretary. Also, when you start looking at records departments, ARMA has started to integrate eDiscovery practices in there. Make sure you understand what resources you have available to you and then, if not, seek outside resources. There are a lot of different service providers there that are built for this.

I remember when I was growing up in the field, my vendors, my suppliers were the ones who I turned to and said, “How do we do this? What is this?” I want to thank all the different service providers that have worked with me through the years. That’s how I got there in regards to knowing and having the knowledge. I mentioned my first time I met you, you were talking about a survey at a Legal Tech. I think that again, it takes a village; know your resources and your paralegals are your first stop as an attorney. Then bring that circle out.

The Ideal eDiscovery Platform

Tools Attorneys Can Use to Get the Story Across

George Socha:

I’d like to change focus now and put to you the next big question, which I’ve asked others before. You know what’s coming. You know what I’m going to ask, but I’m going to frame it anyway.

Joy Murao:

Okay, let me have some caffeine, please.

George Socha:

While I’m talking, you have caffeine.

Joy Murao:

Okay.

George Socha:

What would be your ideal eDiscovery platform? Now, we’ve got some ground rules. The ground rules basically come down to this, assume everything is possible, assume no financial limitations, assume no technological limitations, your wildest imaginings are easily achievable. What would this look like?

Joy Murao:

So am I giving away my billion dollar ideas, is that what I’m doing?

George Socha:

Absolutely!

Joy Murao:

No, I think it’s not a secret that I personally would love to have tools focus on the attorney’s practice. My practice at Latham, the name of our group was “Technology in Practice”. I’d like to go to that, where we focus on the practice and we make sure the technology meets the practice where they’re at. I would say the perfect tool to me would truly be surrounded around the beginning of a case, the complaint and the answer. I know in a previous job I had created a pleading clip library, where we stored it, basically our own docket, for any case in the firm and worked with Records. That was great, because that was the complaint and the answer to look it up. But I mean, take that complaint and pull in the causes of action, pull in early-ish our response, so we can really hone in on the true issues and not get lost and don’t lose a story that we’re trying to really work towards.

I think that with eDiscovery and litigation going, what, one year, three years, five years, if it becomes very drawn out and how many different requests for productions come in and try to distract you from what your true story is. And then you’re trying to read into different, “Did they request this because they’re going down this other path?”, “Are they going to submit an amended complaint?”, you’re trying to preempt other things too. So, as a lawyer, I would wish for you tools that worked the way you worked. Not to put me out of business, like we don’t need Joy or a team like Joy. No, there’s plenty of operational work in our industry, whether it’s within a law firm or even moving towards corporate legal, where our client actually is storing documents, where their information is what we really care about.

I see the evolution of our own profession. I would hope that the tools are becoming more, as a friend would say “cold face”, to bring it closer to where the practice really is and have more integration so that you don’t have those risks of data transfer or any kind of miscalculation of data moving from one system to another. Having tighter integrations and really understanding the workflow, like the EDRM, from the beginning all the way to the end.

Have that all truly be integral and customizable, because again different practice areas, complex litigation versus criminal. There are nuances that are different in the practice, but overall getting your story to come across and how we get the facts to support that. So that’s what would be my wish.

Keeping Us Focused on the End Game

George Socha:

When I first started practicing, there were a few things that the senior lawyers at the firm I was at wanted to make sure we, the fresh crop of associates, understood about the practice of law. And two things come to mind right now as you’re talking about this. One was the notion that, when you’ve… we did mostly defense work. When you’ve initially received the complaint, the very first thing or one of the very first things to do, is to write the jury instructions. Because that tells you what your end game and end objectives are. Then as you work through the case, of course you’re going to be revising and rewriting them, but you keep looking to them and asking at each step of the way, “Is what I am planning on doing, helping get me there?” And if it’s not, “Why am I doing it?”

Joy Murao:

Exactly.

George Socha:

Sounds like you would like that concept baked right into this ideal platform.

Joy Murao:

Yes, because again, that’s truly, one, to be focused and keep everyone on the same page. How many different associates do we have working normally on these large, large, litigations. And paralegals have these different levels. How do we have something to go to and all know what we’re all trying to achieve. That’s first of all. The communication and then you mention the visual before the EDRM, I do like that the tool Hopefully would be visual so that people know where their place is.

I know CaseMap early on was doing really well for us. I had not known about the tool until someone, until I think it was Bob Wiss, called me and said, “Do you know you have eight partners using this tool?” I’m like, “what? They bought it on their own? Oh this must be a really good tool. I have to see you tomorrow.”

George Socha:

When does that happen, right?

Joy Murao:

Yeah, really. I mean, not saying that they don’t want to spend their own money, but it does take a lot of extra effort to find a tool, try it, and then actually buy it and say, “This is what I want all of my associates to use, because this is how I’m going to work and I’m the partner”. I think a lot of that was that, George, with them thinking and writing out their strategy, having their issues listed, thinking about the different facts that they want to get to or maybe looking at certain hot documents and saying, is it for us or against us. It had a rating. You could put your notes and have teams go off and research those projects. That was amazing in that it was a hub for the lawyer and their associates, and that was really… I haven’t seen much around that since then.

George Socha:

It’s no surprise, really, that they built it that way because, as I’m sure you know, their background was as jury research consultants.

Joy Murao:

DecisionQuest! Yes. Exactly, and they knew that that was what they were all trying to get towards. People say, “Well we don’t always go to trial”, but you do prepare to go to trial. The facts that you’re building for your case are things that you are going to use in your settlement hearings, are things that you’re going to use for your client to justify do we move forward or not. I think that the use of that information is not just for trial, it’s going to be used earlier to hopefully have that win for you. The win doesn’t have to be the verdict itself, it could be, “We settle for ten cents on the dollar, we’re happy.” That’s a win. I think the technology should get us there.

Building the Case Story Together

George Socha:

So a second thing that those attorneys I was talking about earlier tried to stress to us, the new crop of associates back in 1987, was that right after you write those jury instructions, you start to figure out what your theory of the case is going to be, what is the story you are going to tell, what are the unifying teams that you’re going to push forward? Here’s my very leading question, do you think this ideal platform should enable you to do that more effectively?

Joy Murao:

Yes. I have a central spot for the documents, but to actually tease out the content that I really care about, that’s not there yet. I would think that, yes it would be very centralized on how the attorney works and we focus on that and give them an opportunity to work it through. I use Mind Meister, a brainstorming thing. These tools exist, disparate technology, so bring it all in so I can use it. You know, “I’m thinking of something and it’s building, it’s building, I want that research”. Click a button: associate go research here, here’s my little Mind Meister, my brainstorm circle. Go research that and then add it in and add some facts and then it’s going to build on that bubble.

I think it’s amazing also for the associate, showing value to the partner. Most people want to be on a partner track and this is a great way to give insights into how the associates are working and to show their value. The same thing with paralegals. When an associate or an attorney gives that to a paralegal, the paralegal will be able to demonstrate the work and effort they put into and a client could feel value, “Okay that 30 hours, that was worth it because here is what that is”. Then from a knowledge management standpoint, that could all be reused: the research itself, the thought itself, obviously sanitized for the specific client matter that you’re working on. But wouldn’t those… Oh look, the lights came back on!

George Socha:

There you go.

Joy Murao:

And then there was light. That must’ve been a good idea, I should have done this. Anyway, wouldn’t that be amazing if these tools could bring that case team together and everyone knows their value. There are minimized mistakes, the rework, because sometimes you go down a research path and you realize that’s a no go, let’s go backwards. But I say, sometimes you learn not only on the good stuff, but you also learn by the bad stuff.

George Socha:

Absolutely. One last question before we run out of time. How much should the users be directing the system in your ideal system? How much should the system be directing the users? What should that interplay look like?

Joy Murao:

Initially during design, I think it should all be user-focused because that’s who we are designing for. The technology should be built for the user.Those are subject matter experts, those are people who are designing the system. As it goes forward into production, I would think that this system does guide users, because it’s a training tool. Not everyone is going to be the subject matter expert. I mentioned, attorneys are coming out every year, we’re training them on how to go from law school to practicing lawyers; they don’t even know how to file a document with the court, the operational aspects of uploading a document and everything. I would say that the tool at that point would be guiding them: if you ask a question like import the complaint, here’s the issues, here’s the answer that the partners have put and submitted, here are their ideas, here’s what you should go research. I think it will guide that next team, the next level, and then through time they will iterate and give feedback on, “You know what, can I just go ahead and have artificial intelligence go research Lexis and Westlaw?” Through time, when people actually use the tools, they can then give more feedback. If it’s iterative, it’s going to be amazing.

George Socha:

And that’s what we all want, “amazing”, right?

Joy Murao:

Amazing, exactly.

George Socha:

Joy, thank you very much for taking the time to sit with us today. We’ve been talking with Joy Murao, Founder and CEO of Practice Aligned Resources. I’m George Socha, this has been eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS and sponsored by Reveal.

Thank you all for joining us today, we will be taking a break until the New Year, we’ll be back on January 8th, Friday January 8th, when we talk with Kristin Sunderman, who is Litigation Support Director, Legal Division at Freddie Mac. Thanks.

Joy Murao:

Happy holidays!

The post eDiscovery Leaders: Joy Murao of PAR appeared first on Reveal.

I started by discussing some of the underlying challenges in eDiscovery Market Trends That Can No Longer Be Ignored and 7 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your eDiscovery Solution.

From there, I laid out an AI framework and potential benefits that can accrue from the effective use of AI, first in Legal AI Software: Taking Document Review to the Next Level, AI in the Legal Sector – the Obvious Choice and then in After 15 Years, Has the eDiscovery EDRM Model Been Realized?

Next, I turned to specific challenges and how applied AI can address them. In How Many Hurdles are in Your Foreign Language Document Review Process?, I looked at how AI can be used for translation.

Which takes us back to the pictures, and AI. With Reveal Version 9.2, released in June, new image detection technology uses machine learning algorithms to identify and apply labels to images to facilitate search and filter without looking at every image. With this approach, you can automate a process that when done manually is deemed by many to be impossibly expensive.

The Problem: Too Many Pictures and No Viable Way to Work with Them

When it comes to pictures and eDiscovery, there long has been a problem.

Pictures such as photographs, drawings, and logos have been part of the data available to be gathered up and used for discovery purposes since the early days of eDiscovery.

When analyzing and reviewing discovery materials, however, there has been no viable options. There has not been a cost-effective way to work with pictures; to get a sense of what content your pictures contains; or to find pictures you are looking for, especially when you did not know they were part of your ESI corpus.

As a result, many attorneys and allied professionals long have opted to take a pass on pictures unless they knew exactly what they were going after, had only a few pictures they needed to work with, or had an urgent need combined with a substantial budget.

The Possibilities

We know the problem. What if you had tools that solved that problem? Imagine you had technology at your fingertips that:

• Let you easily identify pictures, whether you are dealing with 10,000 discovery documents or 10 million;
• Automatically tagged objects, events, and concepts in those pictures; and
• Enabled to you search for those tags just as you search for anything else?

Assume you had those tools. What would that mean?

Burden goes down: Because the cost to search for relevant pictures would drop precipitously, no longer would you need to pretend pictures did not exist. Instead, you could add them to the ESI available to you as you conducted your investigation or built your case. On the flip side, because the burden of working with the pictures would be so much less, no longer would you have that shield to hide behind.

Access goes up: You finally would have access to pictures in a meaningful way. As you built a figurative picture of what happened, you could easily be able to draw on actual pictures.

If you were working on a matter where the plaintiff alleged lower-back soft-tissue injuries that prevented him from lifting heavy weights, you could search electronically stored information (ESI) for photos of him carting large boxes, throwing children in the air, or working out at the gym.

If you were handling a failure-to-warn products liability lawsuit, you could search for warnings in advertising materials, using image tags like “advertisement”, “poster”, “flyer”, and “brochure”.

If a regulatory agency were investigating your client in response to a whistleblower complaint implicating the company’s product in sudden infant deaths, you could search for pictures with image tags such as “baby”, “newborn”, “cradle”, and “blanket”.

The Solution: Image Recognition, and Classification

There is a viable way, available today, to tackle the picture problem. Take it on with artificial intelligence. Use algorithms, not keystrokes; look with computer vision, not just with eyeballs.

Reveal delivers these capabilities by integrating Amazon Rekognition into its platform and building on what Rekognition offers. Rekognition is a deep learning tool that uses a combination of feature abstraction and neural networks to analyze billions of images daily.

Rekognition as deployed by Reveal differs significantly from machine learning as commonly used for lawsuits and investigations. It differs from supervised machine learning – what the legal industry refers to as “predictive coding”, “technology-assisted review”, “TAR”, “active review”, and the like. It also differs from unsupervised learning such as concept clustering. While the two approaches (“traditional” machine learning versus image recognition) share common roots, they look at different content and take fundamentally different approaches to attacking that content.

Let’s explore that, starting with the first stage in the evolution of these capabilities, TAR; continuing with the second stage, reusable AI models; and concluding with the third and most recent stage, image recognition.

Stage One: Traditional Machine Learning Delivered as TAR

Let’s look at a typical TAR exercise. A lawsuit has been initiated. The team has preserved, collected, and processed discovery data. This data, this ESI, likely is a mix of communications, mostly email but increasingly including social media content and chat and other short messages; office files such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets; databases and other structured content; and pictures such as photographs, drawings, logos, and video footage. The team has done some culling to identify and set aside ESI that obviously will not be of interest. Then the team takes on the remaining data.

The team loads its data into a TAR system, or points TAR tools at the ESI wherever it currently resides. At this point, the team probably has no history to draw on, neither earlier analyses of the ESI nor earlier analyses of other data. The team tries to define what it is looking for. Perhaps it already has some exemplars – maybe some email messages already identified as important, possibly a made-up document that contains the key elements the team hopes to find. The team tells the TAR platform, “These are things I think are important, find more like them for me.”

Applying its algorithms to the exemplars and the ESI, the systems returns to the team documents from the corpus which it thinks share key characteristics with the exemplars. The system prioritizes the results, putting the most similar up front. Team members start going through the results. They give each document a thumbs up (“That’s the type of thing I am looking for”) or a thumbs down (“Not so interesting, let’s move on”).

The system learns from each of these thumbs up / thumbs down decisions, and with what it learns re-evaluates and re-prioritizes the remaining content.

This TAR exercise is largely self-contained. The team and the platform start with a blank slate, a clean page. As the team and platform move through the ESI, they develop a better understanding of what it contains and what that content means.

This approach makes good sense and is a powerful tool for many things we do as we conduct investigations and handle lawsuits. That is why Reveal and others offer TAR capabilities, as discussed in earlier posts such as AI in the Legal Sector – the Obvious Choice and Legal AI Software: Taking Document Review to the Next Level.

While this approach works with many types of content, it does not help much with pictures. With TAR there is no object detection, no image classification, no recognition system that locates pictures, identifies objects, events, and concepts in the images, and returns text describing those items.

Stage Two: Reusable AI Models

The next step toward a successful image recognition solution (but still not the solution itself) is to build on prior experience. Reveal accomplishes this with out-of-the-box, pre-trained NexLP AI models built by our team of data scientists and available at Reveal’s AI Model Marketplace.

Each NexLP AI model acts as a container of features. Features represent the collection of past knowledge the model has learned and are continually built upon, as described in How NexLP’s AI Models are Built. The models are designed to be reused across multiple matters, building upon knowledge from one matter to the next.

The image detection and recognition capabilities used by Reveal take that approach to another level, benefiting from on-going daily analyses of billions of images.

Stage Three: Image Recognition

How does this work, in practice?

Reveal’s platform identifies files that appear to contain pictures. You can direct the platform to go through all documents in your population, searching for images. If you prefer, you can manually designate specific documents to process.

The system deploys deep learning technology and training already done on billions of images to analyze the pictures it found. It attempts to identify objects, events, and concepts in the images. For each object, event, or concept the platform identifies, it returns one or more labels. For each label, the system also provides a confidence level. In the example below, the platform returned 10 labels with corresponding confidence levels: Housing, 90%; Building, 90%; Brick, 85%; Urban, 85%; Construction, 72%; Construction Crane, 67%; Soil, 66%; Demolition, 65%; Neighborhood, 58%; and House, 57%:

As part of Version 9.2 of Reveal’s platform, image recognition is available across all of Reveal’s deployment models: cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and mobile.

Image Recognition in Action

For this post, I deployed Reveal’s image recognition capabilities against a sample dataset of 15,757 documents.

I opted to have the platform find and label all images. The platform located 277 picture files with seven different extensions, .bmp, .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .tif, and .tiff.

The platform analyzed those files, identifying a total of 1,917 objects, events, and concepts. It entered each object, event, or concept in the database as a label.

The 277 picture files contain a total of 1,917 labels. The number of labels per document range from one to 28, with an average of 12.

There are 331 unique labels. Of those, the most common label, “Text”, appears 141 times, followed by “Paper” at 60 times and “Advertisement” at 53. Forty-one labels appear 10 times or more; 290 appear fewer than 10 times; and 141 labels appear only one time, labels such as “Banister”, “Forest Fire”, and “Senior Citizen”.

Step One: Labeling Your Images

As suggested above, you can choose whether you would like the platform to find and label all images automatically, or whether you would prefer to select specific images that you then will direct the platform to label.

Labeling All Images

If you want to label all the images in your set of data, you can start at the main Review space. Go to the menu bar along the top and select “Label”:

This will open a pop-up window:

In the pop-up window, “All documents in result list” will be pre-selected and will show the number of documents in your set. You will be given the option of overwriting existing image labels as well as the opportunity to assign a name to the labeling job. To start the job, click on the “LABEL” button.

To check on the status of the job, click on the abacus menu icon (1) and then select “Jobs” (2):

From the list of job types, select “Image Label” and image labeling jobs will be displayed. You will see the status of your job; the number assigned to it; a name, if you entered one in the pop-up window; the user who ran the job; the number of documents processed as of the time you checked the status; total documents processed; whether you had the job overwrite previous labels; the start and end times of the job; and the number of processing errors, if any:

Labeling Selected Images

You can opt to label only specific images. To do that, start by selecting only those images that you want to label by clicking in the checkbox for each document:

As above, select “Label” from the menu bar. The pop-up window that appears will give you the choice of labeling only those images you selected or labeling all images in your document population:

Step Two: Working with Labeling Information

The “Image Labels” Field

Once the image labeling job is done, you will find the image labels in your database in a field called “Image Labels”. You can get to that content several ways. I will cover just a few of those here.

The Review Space

One way to get to and work with labels in via Reveal’s main Review space. In the example below, I rearranged the order in which fields are displayed so that the “Image Labels” field is the first one shown. Then I sorted documents by the “Image Labels” column so that entries for documents with content in the “Image Labels” field are displayed at the top of the list:

You can work with the labels just as you would with other fielded data. Here are two examples, using a filter and refining a search.

Using a Filter

From the main Review space, you can filter by image label.

1. Select “Filter” from the top of the screen, which displays a filter icon to the right of each field;
2. Click on the filter icon for the “Image Labels” column;
3. Select the filtering mechanism you would like to use: Is like; Is not like, Starts with, Does not start with, Contains, Does not contain, Has any, Has none, or Has all;
4. Enter the value to filter on; and
5. Click on the “FILTER” button:

For this exercise, I selected “Contains” and entered “Trademark” as the value. Here is the first document from the results list, with the label “Trademark” having a 93% confidence level:

Refining a Search

For greater control, you can refine a search. To do this, start by clicking on the abacus menu icon on the right side of the search box. This will open a window with additional search options:

Click on the “Field” button (1) and scroll to the field you want searched (2). For this example, I selected “Image Labels Over 95”:

In the popup window, I selected “Contains” (1) and then from the list chose “Bulldozer” (2) as the value to search for. Instead of using the list, I could have started typed in a value (3). I also could have selected more than one value to search for (4). After making my selections, I clicked “SAVE” (5) and “SEARCH ALL DOCUMENTS” (6):

I got two results back, both with “Bulldozer” at a 97% confidence level:

You also can search using more than one value, either with an “AND” or an “OR” connector. Here, I searched for documents whose image labels contained “Baby AND Indoors”:

If your organization is interested in leveraging the power of legal AI software to work with images, contact Reveal to learn more. We’ll be happy to show you how our authentic artificial intelligence takes review to the next level, with our AI-powered, end-to-end document review platform.

The post Image Recognition and Classification During Legal Review appeared first on Reveal.

Luke and I discussed differences between civil law systems, such as they have in Belgium, and common law systems such as we use in the US; the imperative for greater efficiency driven by the constraints of civil law systems; how eDiscovery in Europe is driven more by investigations than by litigation, with Luke pointing to merger clearances as an example. We turned to the slow but growing adoption in Europe of predictive coding, advanced analytics, and AI. I had Luke gaze into his crystal ball and tell me what that adoption might look like in the future. Finally, I asked Luke what his dream eDiscovery platform would look like and he came back with the most expansive vision yet.

Recorded live on December 11, 2020 | Transcription below

Note: This content has been edited and condensed for clarity.

George Socha:

Welcome to eDiscovery Leaders Live, hosted by ACEDS, and sponsored by Reveal. I am George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal. Each Friday morning at 11 am Eastern, I host an episode of eDiscovery Leaders Live where I get a chance to chat with eDiscovery luminaries.

Past episodes are available on the Reveal website, go to revealdata.com, select “Resources” and then select “eDiscovery Leaders Live Cast”.

This week, I am pleased to have joining us, Luke Smith. Luke is the founder, CEO and Head of Customer Delivery at LTI – Legal Tech Innovations – in Belgium. In terms of his experience, Luke’s been in the industry for a while. Prior to founding LTI, he was at Freshfields as Head of Antitrust Investigations in Belgium; before that, at Latham & Watkins; and before that, at Epiq. Prior to that, he was with Hogan Lovells in London and Linklaters before that. Luke has had a long and extensive tenure in the industry with experience both on the provider side and the law firm side. Luke, welcome.

Luke Smith:

Hi George, thank you for having me.

Civil Law and Common Law Differences

George Socha:

Pleased to have you here. So, let’s get going. One of the things I’d like to focus on, you are the first of our guests who works in a civil law system, as opposed to a common law system, which we have in the United States or they have in the UK or Ireland. There are all sorts of implications when it comes to eDiscovery. Why don’t we dive right in and start talking about some of the differences and what those mean.

Luke Smith:

Where it came from originally was Linklaters and Hogan Lovells in the United Kingdom, and I started working in the eDiscovery document management world for cases in 2000 – about 20 years ago, almost 21. I moved to Belgium around 11 years ago and one of the things that surprised me when I moved to Continent, continental Europe, is the lack of discovery and disclosure that you would typically find in the UK and US systems. It took me back a little bit because in the United Kingdom we saw large volumes when there was a litigation or a dispute that needed to collect such, review and then more importantly produce these vast volumes of documents from your system into the other party’s system and visa versa.

In continental Europe, things play out a little bit different for lawyers. Here in continental Europe, you do have some large discovery and disclosure of evidence exercises but they’re very rare, they don’t happen so often. One thing that took me back a little bit was the need still to have care and attention when presenting your evidence, because here it be more of a trial by surprise. The lawyers would be liaising with their clients to talk about what the dispute is, ask them for evidence, and then they would be able to build their file and their bundle of documents that they would use in a hearing. There wouldn’t necessarily be a need to actually hand over everything in the universe that relates to that, it would just be the core documents that you’re focusing on.

There’s a need still, there is a practice to handle this document and the evidence with care. There’s more of a forensic background experience in continental Europe versus an eDiscovery background. You would engage with a digital forensic expert and say: okay we have this person, we have this case, we now need you to help us find the evidence, collect it in a way so it can be authenticated in case the judge or the other law firm’s lawyers ask to prove its authenticity. The knowledge of eDiscovery is less profound in continental Europe. A lot of the time when I first came across to Europe, I’d be referred to as “eDiscovery” or “eDisclosure” and the lawyers would be, “I don’t do U.S cases so thank you but I don’t need your help.”

A lot of the time the terminology is called a forensics search or an eSearch, but in principle it is the same thing as eDiscovery, because you have to find your evidence and your facts. On cases where you have lawyers working with their clients who aren’t able to pinpoint the evidence to you, you have to go through an exercise of collecting a wider set of documents and trying to build your case: go through the documents, find the facts and build your core bundle. Again, I think the key differences in all the disclosure rules, discovery rules, is the way you exchange these vast volumes of information is a bit different in the litigation and disputes worlds.

Similar Needs, Different Latitudes, and an Efficiency Imperative

George Socha:

Whether you’re in a civil law system or are a common law system, ultimately you do need to present a story, you need to support that story with evidence, which means you need to figure out what story you’re going to tell and what evidence you can use to support it. We have a very wide reaching process here in the US, where attorneys can range far and wide, looking for data, pulling a lot of the data – they have a lot of latitude in terms of what they go after – and also spent a lot of money on all of this. It sounds as if in Belgium, for example, the need is the same – you still need to tell a story, it needs to be a persuasive story, it needs to be supported by evidence – but the latitude is very different. You have to be much more disciplined and focused in how you find, get and go through data and then you only hand over a very small portion to the other side. Am I understanding correctly?

Luke Smith:

That’s exactly right. Every now and again, you do get such a large dispute or litigation where you do have the need to cast a net very wide to find your evidence, the same as you would in the US or the UK, but these cases are much less frequent. The size of the industry and then the actual knowledge of conducting these exercises in the legal world is much, much smaller. But the need is the same.

George Socha:

With the need being the same but the latitude being much different, how do folks efficiently and effectively accomplish all of this? We know how we do it in the United States; clearly you have to do it a different way. How are you approaching it?

Luke Smith:

I’ve had over the years the opportunity to work with many, many, great lawyers and one of them was a DC competition lawyer who came across to Europe and he coined the phrase, “the Wild West”. He said, “You just have no rules, you just do what you believe is right”. And he said it’s like the Wild West.

It takes a lot of care and attention because as you appreciate the knowledge of conducting these exercises is much smaller, and this also hurts, perhaps, the financial aspects of what a client may pay. If you are forced into conducting such a large eDiscovery exercise and you have dozens or tens, hundreds of custodians to investigate and collect data from and process hundreds of terabytes of data, you could be looking at a tens or hundreds of thousands of euros or dollars eDiscovery bill before the first search term or before the first page is even turned in the review. This can sometimes make it hard from an efficiency standpoint, because before a budget can even be set you may have backed into a lot of cost here. You have proportionality cards, I think that also exists in the US and in the UK too.

I would always recommend to make things efficient. Start with your key actors, the key custodians. You pivot. You process some of the data. You start your investigation, your research into the internal documents, the evidence, at a very small scale. You don’t throw hundreds of paralegals, hundreds of thousands of documents. You start into bite sized chunks and then pivot based on what you’ve learned. If you’ve got lots of irrelevant documents, why are these coming back? You change your approach, pivot again, and run a new set of searches or try at some analytics and see what that yields. If the responsive numbers are greater, then that’s a good process; we keep doing that until perhaps the responsiveness trails off a little bit. From an efficiency standpoint, it’s definitely start small and then from your learnings, bring more custodians in, more actors into the investigation or the review as you progress.

The Driver in Europe: Investigations, Not Litigation

George Socha:

eDiscovery is a portion of the activity that goes on for litigation, what we would call civil litigation, a portion of the activity that goes on in Europe, but it’s by no means all of it, right? There are investigations of all matter?

Luke Smith:

Yeah.

George Socha:

Talk about that a little.

Luke Smith:

Since I’ve moved to Europe, my number of litigations I can count on both hands, but the number of investigations now is, over the last 10 years, probably over a 100 investigations. The regulatory investigation work and corporate investigation work has really driven the adoption of eDiscovery in Europe.

Again, these are not as frequent as a dispute may be, but they are definitely rolling along now. All of the Bundeskartellamt in Germany, the ACM, the Dutch, French, the Belgium competition authorities and the European Commission have become a lot more wiser and knowledgeable on these larger exercises of uncovering evidence. These regulatory investigations are definitely driving the eDiscovery industry in continental Europe.

Merger Clearance

One area that stands out to me is the merger clearance. When you have two dominant companies merging in Europe, a bit like the DOJ process, the Phase 2s, of course the European Commission will act on this merger and they need to approve it, they need to do a market assessment: How is this going to affect the power of this company after the merger, our suppliers, consumers, people like us? Will prices go up? They have now used their powers to request large numbers of internal documents from the merging parties and the law firms are responsible for taking care of this – collecting all of the evidence, the internal documents and providing it to the regulator.

In Europe, they issue something called a “Request for Information” or an “RFI” for shorts. These RFIs are 12 or so paged documents. They ask for the documents to be handed over that relate to the planned investments that the companies have had: actual planned investments, the innovation, products that they’re looking at implementing, how this is going to affect pricing from suppliers, customers, how it will affect certain areas within the European Union. Very often these transactions are very big, so they can also be very political. If you’ve got a large US company buying out a European company, maybe the President of France is not so happy about this and wants the Commission to be very thorough.

They issue these RFIs with say 20, 10, 30, 20 different topics of interest that they want the law firms to look for, to search for, and then hand over anything that’s responsive. These RFIs normally contain a list of the employees or custodians they may want you to search. This will be the VIPs, the CEO, the head of sales, head of marketing, lots of different products and business areas. They also target now people lower down the chain to see how they may be discussing it differently to the people at the very top. Part of these RFIs now, they’ve changed a lot in the last few years, this is where it gets our attention, so the eDiscovery professionals’ attention is: they ask for the collection logs. When you’ve imaged the phones, the laptops, collected data from the e-mail systems, servers, you have to provide the logs of the collection over.

When you are crafting your search terms to answer the 20 questions, the topics that they’re after, you have to present your search terms that you are using to find these documents. Then you have to provide the load file – which for a lawyer who has not done any eDiscovery work, it takes you back a little bit – with the classic metadata I think most people would be used to providing on this call; they ask for the path of where the document originated from in the environment. Gone are the days where the lawyers could just say to the custodians, email me everything and I’ll copy it onto a USB stick and hand it over. We actually have to do this exercise in an eDiscovery-style fashion.

The regulators are definitely responsible for enhancing the knowledge and the need and the adoption process of eDiscovery workflows, best practices and using the technology efficiently.

Predictive Coding and Advanced Analytics: Slow But Growing Acceptance and Use

George Socha:

Are the regulators looking for certain types of approaches when it comes to not just gathering the data but evaluating it in order to determine what to hand over? Are they looking for certain types of technology to be used, or do they want certain types of technology not to be used?

Luke Smith:

Many of the regulators now have lawyers who have worked at law firms, who have moved into the regulatory body. They are perhaps familiar with the technology that can be used to search and present the results of search terms so they can analyze them and see if the terms are producing too many hits or not.

Very recently, over the last year or two, there has been some debate about whether you could use predictive coding or analytics to help uncover the documents and this will be used in tandem with search terms. It’s something I’m in favor of as a technology lover, but it’s somewhat quite challenging in Europe to implement because normally these exercises need to be completed in three to four weeks, you can get a little bit of an extension. They’re quite hard because you’ve got 20 very different topics and then you may have Spanish, Italian, French, German and English languages in the data. It’s quite hard to recommend to lawyers, “We can run this predictive coding model for topic number 2”, because we would have to think, “Okay now, we’ve got to run in different languages, do we have enough time, do we have enough resource while we’re looking at these other 19 topics in tandem?” and you’ve got your privilege reviews going on. It makes it a little bit hard to implement the more sophisticated approaches to find any evidence, just purely from the timeline base.

George Socha:

Is it lack of familiarity on the part of the lawyers that’s the key barrier here?

Luke Smith:

I would say it’s more in the regulators hands, the lawyers on the regulator side. They hold the cards to some extent because now they dictate a little bit about what search terms you will apply to which topic and then you can have a discussion about amending them if they’ve happened to use the company name as a search term, which sometimes happens – returns every document.

I guess it is an appreciation of the technology, what it can do and how it can be achieved within the time that you have. Also, the regulator has the clock running; they only have a certain number of days to actually approve the transaction. If you get bogged down in a four-week discussion about the scores – the results of the predictive coding model – and then spending time to actually qualify the results, they lose too much time themselves. Because you’ve got to then hand over these 500,000 documents and then they’re going to have to run their searches and conduct their reviews as well within that 30-odd day time period. It’s not a lack of appreciation, it’s that the time is of the essence, so it’s quite hard to agree on that when it’s already difficult to agree on search terms, which you would think is a little bit more easy.

Gazing Into a Crystal Ball: Advanced Technologies and AI Moving Forward

George Socha:

Sometimes, sometimes not so much. I have got one more question in this area and then I want to move on to a different topic. The question is, go ahead and take a look at your crystal ball. If today there is reticence on the part of regulators to use those more advanced sorts of technologies, protective coding and other forms of artificial intelligence, what do you think it will look like one, two, three, five years in the future?

Luke Smith:

I would hope, I would imagine, that the regulators will be conducting their internal reviews of the data that they’ve been receiving from the parties who are merging or they’re investigating, even if it’s a cartel. I would predict they should now be banking the knowledge and creating these models, their own internal models, about, “This is what innovation looks like, the topics of how we’re going to enhance products or services into the market”, or “This is what a price war or cartel or customer-sharing, bid-rigging information looks like, these are examples that we have”. Crystal ball, maybe in five years, we may actually see the law firm say, “Okay we have a database with 3,000,000 documents”. And perhaps the regulator would say, “Okay we want you to run this model, which is bundled up of text of previous examples of words”. And then ask them to assign it into their dataset. Then they would need to provide the top 1000 documents.

I think the market is somewhat there now. We have certain tools. They may not be compatible with the different products on the market, but if we could have a standard way of implementing these models, then that could be done. I think the regulator will start having this historical bank of information that will be turned into AI models that they will then implement on the datasets.

The Dream Platform: Augmented Reality Analysis

George Socha:

So now, a different crystal ball. I’ve asked this of a couple of other guests before. If you could have your dream package or dream platform, your dream technology capabilities for use with eDiscovery, for litigation and investigations, what would that look like?

Luke Smith:

A great question. If it’s a dream and anything’s possible,I would love to have the datasets presented in an augmented reality way. You could have these shapes and circles representing the data. It would be voice enabled, augmented reality.

You could say, “Show me in a dataset where the competition is mentioned, the names of competitors in the market”. They would come up and you would be able to drag them over into a bucket, and then you would say, “In that bucket, show me who the key actors are”. It would come up with pictures, faces. Then you could pick which ones you want, you could drag them into another bucket and then within that bucket, you would then say, “Show me the people who have been active in an aggressive nature”. You’ve got these filters going on with the buckets, and then the documents will come up and then you would say, “Right, we’re going to put them into a review batch”. Then it goes into a typical style document review exercise. That would be the dream, to have a platform you could talk to, you could interact with, and really cut up and carve the data.

George Socha:

I’ve got this picture of you standing there in front of a screen that doesn’t even exist, because you’ve got the Google glasses or what glass or whatever it is. You are moving your hands around. To an outside observer, they can’t figure out what you’re doing but for you, you’ve got this three-dimensional universe of data in a structured fashion in front of you, where you are able to grab pieces, expand them out, compress them down, move them around, combine and recombine. That sounds like what you’re talking about.

Luke Smith:

Yeah, like the movie with Tom Cruise, which was probably almost 20 years ago, I guess now. Something crazy like that would be….

George Socha:

Well, it might be crazy, but it would be really cool, wouldn’t it?

Luke Smith:

Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Some of the technology is there, we do have some now that’s able to detect stress and passive and aggressive tones in text. So it’s just trying to package that up in a sort of augmented reality way. That would be my dream if… Hopefully we may even see that one day.

George Socha:

Well, I will conclude that part with the same thing I’ve said to others, “Let’s see if we can make that happen”, because that would be a lot of fun. Thanks Luke. Luke Smith is with – do you go by LTI or Legal Tech Innovations? Which do you prefer?

Luke Smith:

Yeah, Legal Tech Innovations is a bit long, so I just cut it down to LTI.

George Socha:

Okay. Luke is Founder, CEO and Head of Customer Delivery at LTI. Luke, thank you very much for joining us this week.

Next week we will have with us Joy Murao, who is Founder and CEO of Practice Aligned Resources.

Luke, once again, thank you very much.

Luke Smith:

Thank you George. Thank you very much.

The post eDiscovery Leaders: Luke Smith of LTI appeared first on Reveal.

In this post, I will address how you can determine which deployment model – or combination of models – is likely to best meet your needs, accommodate your workflow, and fit in your budget.

Of course, no single deployment model is best for all situations, and a single organization might decide its interests are best met by deploying two or more models simultaneously. To make an informed decision about which model or models to use, you will have to look at your particular requirements, wants, and circumstances. You also will need to factor in the specific eDiscovery software and legal technologies you are considering deploying, as not all tools work in all settings.

Deployment Options Recap

As discussed in greater detail in the earlier post, there are four main deployment options for eDiscovery platforms: Cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and mobile.

Cloud computing comes in several models, most prominently public, private, and hybrid, and in several categories, in particular SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. With a public cloud, a third-party provider manages on-demand computing services and infrastructure. A private cloud differs from a public cloud in that with the former an organization hosts cloud computing and infrastructure resources privately, either on its own intranet or at a data center of its choosing. A hybrid cloud is a mixed environment, using some combination of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise infrastructures.

With an on-premise approach, software, hardware, and additional infrastructure for applications or platforms reside within an organization’s literal or figurative four corners. For a small organization, on-premise might mean a computer or two in a closet, likely with attached storage and backup systems. A larger institution may have a dedicated computer room containing servers, storage, and backup systems screwed into racks, physical security measures such as entry keypads, and power backup systems, or it may use one or more external data centers.

Hybrid models are a combination of cloud and on-premise. A hybrid option allows clients to decide which functions they want to take on themselves and which ones they prefer to operate in the cloud.

For mobile options, the same software that might be deployed in the cloud or on-premise is installed on a computer, allowing you to take the computer to the ESI instead of the other way around.

Who Am I?

To determine which model or models make the most sense for you, the first step is to define yourself. Who you are and what you do can be a critical factor in determining which deployment options best meet your needs.

Corporations and Government

Corporate and governmental in-house legal teams generally need to work within a larger organizational framework. Your company’s information governance or IT policies, for example, might prohibit you from processing data in the cloud – driving you toward on-premise and mobile options.

Laws, rules, and regulations might limit your options. If your organization is a HIPAA-covered entity, the organization will have to negotiate and enter into a business associate agreement (BAA) with a cloud provider before it will be permitted to store records containing personal health information (PHI) in the provider’s cloud computing facilities, as noted in Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s Cloud Computing 2020.

Volume can matter, as well. Corporations can have large volumes of ESI they need to work with on a limited basis and only smaller volumes that require more robust treatment. A company might have 100 TB of data under legal hold. It might be able to park 80 TBs locally and leave that untouched: no processing, no indexing, no document review. It might be able to lean on local functionality, such as deduplication deployed on-premises, to narrow the volume further. That way, the company could send only a small portion of the data to eDiscovery software deployed in the cloud where machine learning and advanced analytics would be used.

Law Firms

Different factors drive law firm decisions about which deployment options to adopt. Maintaining adequate physical and cybersecurity to protect on-premise data can be challenging for law firms, especially midsize and smaller ones, a factor tipping the scales in favor of cloud offerings.

Scalability takes on a more immediate importance. The next new lawsuit might require rapid ramping up of capabilities. A law firm using a cloud-based approach, whether a private cloud or a public one, may be able to add hosting and processing capacity quickly. One hosted eDiscovery software on-premises or at a data center may have fewer options immediately available.

Geography is key. For law firms operating on an international scale, flexible deployment options become appealing. A cloud-based deployment will not work for a US-based firm handling a matter in a state court in Florida, with a client whose headquarters are in Canada, and whose Swiss manufacturing facility is at the core of the dispute. The Swiss data almost certainly will need to be reviewed in Switzerland first, via an on-premise or mobile implementation, before any data will be allowed out of the country.

Service Providers

Yet other factors come into play for electronic discovery service providers. Generally, their systems need to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Any unscheduled downtime is problematic. If their systems are inaccessible for hours, to say nothing of days, they can suffer serious negative consequences.

Capacity can be an important consideration as well. Service providers often need to process and host many TBs of data, give hundreds or thousands of users reliable access to eDiscovery platforms, and simultaneously execute on many resource-heavy requests such as the all-too-common Friday afternoon rush to collect or produce data.

What Factors Should I Consider?

Next, you want to decide which factors matter to you. Here is a list of factors to consider. Although far from comprehensive, it should help you better understand which path might work best for you.

Accessibility: For end users, eDiscovery in the cloud often can mean more ready access from anywhere, at any time, and via a wide range of devices and interfaces. For those who want to get under the system’s hood, for example, to gain access to metadata not available via the user interface, on-premise may be the more desirable approach. For those needing to severely restrict access, mobile might be the best option.

Cloud accessibility has a flip side. Putting data in a cloud means you may possibly give your cloud provider access to more ESI and other content than you want them to have.

At Reveal, we give cloud users the ability to access the database backend. That means there is little a client cannot access within our cloud environment.

Advanced artificial intelligence: Advanced AI functions often work more effectively on cloud systems than on on-premise ones, and sometimes are available only via a cloud deployment. If you want to make use of functions such as AI-driven image recognition, transcription, and translation you want to look at this closely.

Capacity: Because of cloud systems’ scalability (see below), you should be able to quickly scale a cloud system’s capacity to meet your needs. With an on-premise system, to expand capacity you need to go through a whole series of often expensive and time-consuming steps to spec out, purchase, receive, and install new hardware and software.

Convenience: Cloud systems often are more convenient to set up, operate, and use than their on-premise or hybrid alternatives.

Cost: When it comes to the costs of cloud versus on-premise deployments, the scales increasingly are tipping in favor of cloud. Look at the software costs, of course, but on the on-premise side factor in additional costs such as hardware, additional software licenses, physical space, physical security, and the people to run, maintain, and secure the system.

Cross-border: If you potentially need to move data from one jurisdiction to another, say from China to the United States, you need to learn what limitations on cross-border data transfer apply and determine how to comply with those limitations at a practical level.

Data governance, disposition, and retention: At some point in your eDiscovery process, you will want to dispose of at least some portion of the ESI you put into the system. You may also want to dispose of – or retain – added content such as reviewer decisions. With on-premise installations, you supposedly have complete control over how long your data is retained, where it is retained, and when and how it is disposed of. Cloud providers will most likely offer you a narrower range of options and they may also have their own retention, backup, and destruction policies and practices that might not line up with yours.

Data transfer: No matter which deployment options you use, sooner or later you will need to transfer data into and out of your systems. With cloud systems, data transfer capabilities, speeds, and costs vary enormously. They also can be limited by contractual provisions. With on-premise approaches, if you can attach external storage media directly to your system, for example with a six-foot cable, generally you can transfer high volumes of data into and out of the on-premise implementation quickly. As distance increases, speed drops off, sometimes precipitously.

Geographical reach: While many matters take place entirely in a single country, many others span geographical and political borders. The advantage of eDiscovery in the cloud is that where your cloud of choice goes, you can go as well. With their public cloud offerings, Amazon and Microsoft both cover much of the world. On the flip side, no cloud system completely spans the globe and some jurisdictions frown on cloud; in those situations, on-premise and mobile options are the way to go.

In those situations, you want a cloud infrastructure akin to Reveal’s, which is available in the US and Canada, much of Europe and Asia, and Brazil, South Africa, and Australia.

Legal, regulatory, and policy requirements and compliance: You might be required by law, by regulation, or by internal policy to go down one path or stay away from another. HIPAA is but one of many laws, rules, and regulations that can come into play.

Privacy: As the importance of properly addressing data privacy needs and concerns grow, it becomes increasingly important to understand how the models you choose allow you to handle those issues.

If you are considering cloud options, you should make sure you know where, geographically, your data will be housed and you should find out what privacy requirements and restrictions apply in that location. If you want or need to house data in a specific geographical location, you want to know whether there are constraints that steer you more toward one deployment option and away from another.

If you deploy systems on your premises or at a data center, you have more granular control over the privacy measures that are put in place.

Scalability: Scaling up or down – adding more processing capacity, for example – generally is accomplished more easily and quickly with cloud deployments. In contract, increasing storage, processing, and similar capacities with an on-premise installation likely involves specifying, ordering, installing, and testing new hardware, obtaining additional software licenses, and adding backup capacity.

Security, physical and cyber: With on-premise, theoretically you can fully control security – physical security and cybersecurity – and access to data and applications. With cloud offerings, you need to rely on whatever security the providers put in place. It is important to note that cloud providers may be able to offer much greater security than anything you have the resources to deliver. If necessary, mobile options can be configured so that they are completely self-contained, with no external connectivity other than for power.

Security capabilities tend to be more robust in the cloud as you have access to a lot of services that if deployed on-premise would require upfront licensing costs. With the cloud, these services generally are “pay as you go” and usually are quite reasonably priced.

Software: Not all software will run on all systems. Determine whether and to what extent the eDiscovery solutions and other legal technology you want to use is likely to work with the deployment model you are considering. There will be different considerations for cloud applications – software users access primarily through the Internet – than for software applications meant to be installed on a network and yet different considerations if the software is to be loaded to an end-user’s computer.

Software updates: With cloud, it is easy always to be on the most up-to-date version of a software package. If you want to stay with older versions, on-premise may be your path.

Whose budget pays: On-premise often means capital expenditures. For cloud, the monies might come from operating costs.

Do I Have to Choose Just One?

You should not have to select one and only one way to deploy the eDiscovery platform of your choice. You should be able to use one eDiscovery platform across all four deployment options.

As you can glean from the list of factors above, no single deployment option is going to meet all needs. For a matter I worked on a year or so ago, we spec’d out and almost deployed a mobile appliance to be used to host data for review in Switzerland. With the ever-changing dynamics of litigation, at the last minute, we switched to an implementation where the eDiscovery platform was hosted in a data center used by a Swiss service provider. Had the matter not gone away, after Swiss review we would have moved the data to a cloud instance located in the United States.

To be able to address situations like this one, you are best served if you are able to use an eDiscovery platform that gives you the ability to deploy any combination of the four options, cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and mobile. By definition, a cloud-only solution will not be useful if you need to run the software on an air-gapped appliance. Similarly, an eDiscovery solution that requires software to be loaded on a local computer does not lend itself well to a cloud-only approach.

If your organization is interested in leveraging the power of legal AI software wherever you need it – eDiscovery in the cloud, on-premise, hybrid, or mobile – contact Reveal to learn more. We’ll be happy to show you how our authentic artificial intelligence takes review to the next level, with our AI-powered, end-to-end document review platform.

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