LegalTech West Coast: Notes and observations from Day 2, and a wrap-up

Day 2 had some interesting events and some interesting technologies on the exhibitor floor so herein our run down.

The Greening Your Career networking breakfast

Day 2 kicked off with a breakfast hosted by Monica Bay (editor of Law Technology News) and featured a panel of experts in an upbeat discussion for members of the legal community who may be looking for jobs.

Monica welcomed all of the jobseekers, speakers, and vendors to the breakfast.  She introduced Chris Braun who announced the launching of a new website for public interest jobs (click here) which is free to both candidates and posters. 

There were 10 tables set up, each for 10 people.  One person at each table was a selected speaker, who spoke to that table with general information and then went around to interact with each person in sequence.  This evolved into a group networking event with exchanging of business cards and some one-on-one conversations.

Integreon’s Babs Deacon (Director of Consulting, Data Analytics) shared her personal story about her own recent job search that lead to her position with Integreon.  It was all about networking networking networking –  something Posse List members have been doing with great success by trolling the vendor shows.

At The Posse List table was Tom Collins, former owner of Juris and author of Mark Rollins and the Rainmaker (a murder mystery) and, of the other nine people, four were actively seeking work, one represented a staffing agency, one authored a legal blog and offered advice, one maintained a massive online legal directory of attorneys and law firms (bigger than Martindale-Hubbell), and one was a techie.

Of note is that one of the job seekers scored with the staffing agency rep at the table and is being considered for a project management position in San Francisco, close to where he lives.  He previously worked for an e-discovery company and had significant review experience, including team leader.  So, with one potential hire at our table, the breakfast worked!

Kudos to Monica Bay for fulfilling a real need.  All the participating job-seekers at the breakfast who were not registered at LegalTech were given comp passes for the day, so they could attend sessions, visit the exhibitors, and network.

Keynote Presentation: Ethics and E-discovery

The keynote presentation was “The Rule of Law in the Wild West: Ethics & E-Discovery” and the panel was composed of Carol Basri (Corporate Lawyering Group LLC and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania), Judge Andrew Peck (U.S. Federal Court, Southern District), Judge Dave Waxse (U.S. Federal District Court, District of Kansas) and Tom Allman (fromr SVP and General Counsel of BASF and an editor of the Sedona Conference Priciples).

Some takeaways from the panel discussion:

         From Carole Basri

         Ethics is the hallmark of our era.  But can we get it together with ethics?  The area of ethics in e-discovery is a   stepchild in the legal profession.

         The Chief Technology Officer is a new and emerging position in companies today.  Among other things the CTO can be someone with custody of the documents who knows how the system works and can archive the relevant documents and show a chain of custody.  We need business people to buy into this.  Critical, confidential, privileged documents cannot just be spread throughout the organization — rather, they need to be disseminated on a need to know basis.

          From Judge Waxse

         You need to have competent people in place.  Lawyers can be held ethically responsible for their employees and third parties (Rule 1 of Code of Professional Conduct) and they cannot say “it’s not my problem”.

         Note:  there are over 14,000 state laws related to record retention.  You need lists of what should be retained and what does not need to be retained.

         It is important for lawyers to get into detail.  Upfront discussion is needed.  And, when you get to court, do not be afraid to tell the court that you don’t know something.         And yes, you always have to look at the economics of the case.  The discovery should be proportional to the value of the case.  It is incumbent on counsel to make a pitch to the court on the value of the case.  Of course, if there is agreement with the other side, the court will not get involved.

       From Judge Peck

        If lawyers are cooperating, there is no problem and the court will not get involved.   Otherwise, if there is spoliation for instance, the court will look to see if there is a good document retention policy and effective training of employees.  It is important to get rid of junk if there is no possibility of litigation.  Use the test of “is litigation reasonably anticipated” for litigation hold purposes.

         We are seeing too many “drive-by” meet and confers.   We strongly urge preparation.  Know your client’s documentation system and come prepared to talk in detail.  Bring the IT folks with you.  It is important to carefully select your custodians — do not go for everyone in a department.  A one time meet and confer does not work — it has to be an iterative process.  Be cooperative.  You can be a vigorous advocate while cooperating with the other side.  Also note that if you fail to produce something, the other side will assume that you must be hiding something.

         Inadvertent production of documents:  this is the responsibility of counsel under the duty of client confidentiality.  However, jurisdictions vary on the duty of counsel to scrub the metadata.  It is best to ask for an agreement and, based on the agreement, get a court order.

       From Tom Allman

       A single retention policy?  What a lot of nonsense.  I completely disagree. It is ludicrous to have a single retention policy.  Instead what is needed is a corporate culture policy.  Have a compliance culture.  Each functional unit needs to make retention decisions for that unit. It is important that compliance (the culture of ethics) is customized.  

       Distinguish between structured and unstructured information.  Where you have problems is with informally produced information, like emails, spreadsheets and .pst files.

       The best thing is to agree on the limits of discovery.  Make a distinction between accessible and inaccessible documents.

Adopting Web 2.0 Technology

There was a great interactive panel on social media (which the Twitter panel should have used, quite frankly) that covered the infamous “Web 2.0” phrase used so often in legal circles.  The panel addressed the innovations in web technology and what it means for today’s legal practice and how can lawyers take advantage of them.

Our take aways from the session:

Social media in general:  John Lipsey says Ignoring Social Media is not an option.   Law firms/corporations should form social media teams to guide executives on social media policy.  Real time info is direct, frank, immediate and helpful.  Social media doesn’t replace face to face meeting, it’s just the first step now.   Social media is about building relationships.  Blogs and Twitter give you your own media channel,  where everyone has a voice.  Mark Beese discussed the importance of branding.  Using Web 2.0 is important next step in branding.   Many lawyers attending believe that online networks will change the law practice/law business.

Blogging:  if using blog and twitter as professional tool give personal info, but don’t be too personal.  Look for a good platform when setting up a blog.  Be careful when blogging.  Find something no one else is covering, people will want to follow you.  And Give credit where credit is due when blogging.  Don’t use blogging as a personal advertisement, don’t do a ghost writer.  “When blogging be yourself…but don’t be yourself  or be a jerk” D avid Gottlieb suggests.  And accoridng to Mark Beese, Google seems to love blogs.

Twitter:  Twitter as a search technology is an incredible tool: what are they saying about you, your clients, your company.   You don’t have to just follow people you can follow events, client names, conferences and relevant seach terms.    Twitter allows people to get immediate responses back, it’s like face to face, real time web is evolving quickly.  Twitter has changed, will keep changing the way we communicate with each other.

LinkedIn:  LinkedIn groups are a great marketing tool, with a great audience as an opt-in group.  Build your network in LinkedIn,  use recommendations to build credibility,  show personal interest.  Participate in conversations.  It is a social media platform for consistent message.  Multiple channels, building your message over time,  to a highly targeted audience.  It leads to intimacy.

Technologies

There was the usual forest of vendors/technologies at the show but there were a few standouts: 

Fios

Fios unveiled its “Compliant Disposition Methodology” which is designed to meet the challenges of dealing with ESI before litigation through:  (1) assessing what is required; (2) analyzing your existing affairs/policies; (3) establishing a decision framework; (4) building your business case/getting the right staff and technology; and (5) implementing a plan.   For more detail click here. 

      Note:   earlier this month we attended the Sedona conference in Barcelona, Spain which covered all the issues involved in cross-border litigation and international e-discovery.  We had the good fortune to interview Ken Rashbaum, Director of Fios Consulting at Fios, Inc., a recognized expert on all of these issues.   We will post that interview later this week when we publish Part  5 of our Trends series (click here)  when we address working in Europe, an ever expanding market for Posse List members.

Integreon

Integreon demonstrated a new release for its eView platform for hosted document review. The new release builds on the application’s foundation of workflow management and productivity tracking for attorney document review which we saw at LegalTech New York.   The new eView features make e-discovery review and production more efficient and cost-effective, and include:

        • Concept Search to Speed Review: Advanced clustering technologies allow litigation review managers to quickly understand the types of documents in the collection prior to assigning them for review. This can accelerate the review process by excluding non-relevant material altogether (or putting it at the end of the review queue). Users can also highlight a specific document or section of text and, with a single mouse click, immediately identify related documents ranked in order of relevance.

       • Centrally Organize Production Documents: eView improves production management with a central and secure location for organizing production documents. Various different production styles can be managed simultaneously, for example when producing to one or more parties with different requirements for one or more productions. Built-in processes prevent the same document from being produced twice and also reduce the risk of producing privilege documents. Detailed reports make it easy to track all productions. 

       • Save Time Managing Privilege Logs:   It also has the ability to quickly group similar privilege log entries by field and see the quantity of each occurrence. When preparing a final privilege log, bulk find and replace actions can be taken to selectively normalize the values of privilege log fields in order to ensure proper formatting of all entries.  We have not seen this before in a software.

The software is integrated with the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform which is used in-house by many corporations for early case assessment, defensible search, and intelligent culling.  For additional information click here.

Orange Legal Technologies

Orange Legal Technologies is a company we posted about before.  It provides a “one source” series of support services for litigation, audit, and investigation with a focus on the electronic discovery tasks of analytics, processing, and review.   For more click here.

At LTWC it announced the release of the OneO® Data Transport Service – a targeted data transfer service designed to allow users to quickly map and transfer data between disparate electronic discovery applications and services.   We interviewed Ronda Raymond, Vice President of Operations and E-Discovery Solutions, and as she said “one of the biggest challenges in electronic discovery today is the transfer of data between disparate and proprietary electronic discovery services and applications.   Different data formats, languages, and inadequate data transfer schemas all contribute to this challenge”.   So what Orange Technologies aims to accomplish through OneO®Data Transport Service is to see electronic discovery practitioners realize and benefit from the increased flexibility offered by a service that goes beyond the current limited XML-based standards offered today and begin to take advantage of the benefits of newer, more complete offerings.

With the capability to allow data mapping for initial ingestion or transfer from industry acknowledged platforms from providers such as Clearwell Systems and FTI Consulting (Attenex), it looks like the OneO® Data Transport Service provides complete mapping of ESI formats to include text, sound, still and moving images, web archives and generically accepted wrappers and encodings.  And this new service handles foreign languages and includes double-byte character languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  As we detailed in our coverage of the ILSL conference this is an important area in the explosion of foreign language reviews (click here).   To lean more about OneO® Data Transport Service click here.

For a nice wrap-up of other vendors check the law.com site Legal Technology by clicking here.

SUMMARY

1.  Our biggest take away from LegalTech West Coast was that the e-discovery vendors and legal technology recruitment managers/staff were very optimistic about an improving economy and many of those we spoke to were looking to hire in the next 3-4 months.   We’ll have a separate report next week on employment opportunities with vendors.

2.  And, yes, attendance was certainly down from the last few years (this was our 3^rd LegalTech West Coast) but there was not the negative buzz we felt at LegalTech New York.  

3.   The buzzword at the show: “pushing left” — the continued push to the left of the EDRM model with more and more emphasis on planning and protocols (Fios, Orange Technologies, Nuix). 

4.  Posse List members need to network network network via social media (or the old fashion “meet and confer”) and make things happen for themselves. 

5.   To get you started on networking, branding, blogging, and raising your profile click here and click here and go to all our helpful links on The Posse Ranch by clicking here.

For our complete coverage of LegalTech West Coast click here.