Navigating eDiscovery in the Cloud Shouldn't Be That Difficult

In a follow up to my Blog post titled, "eDiscovery in the Cloud: The Sky Is Not Falling", this Blog post is dedicated to the premise that successfully navigating eDiscovery in the cloud is not as complicated as many are indicating it should be or as complicated as many are making it.

Successfully navigating the brave new world of eDiscovery in the cloud is really just a matter of education and a willingness to move beyond the status quo.  There is no doubt that if you don't pay attention, you and your team will perish on the rocks. However, don't pass on taking the eDiscovery in the cloud journey because it is too dangerous or give up before you at least make an attempt to learn how to save your ship.

First of all, in case anyone missed the memo, the cloud train has left the station.  As an example, independent research firm Forrester Research predicted in a research report published earlier this year titled, “Sizing the Cloud” that the global cloud computing market would reach $241 billion in 2020 compared to $40.7 in 2010.  So, more than likely, whether you want your data in the cloud or not, it is moving quicker than you think.  And, as an end-user, unless you have some kind of cloud storage phobia, it really shouldn't matter that much.  The real debate doesn't start until you couch the question(s) about cloud computing in terms of what happens when your have to perform the delicate and often times messy operation of eDiscovery in the cloud.  If you are a glutton for punishment and like to dwell on all of the negative things that could possible happen in the life then I encourage you to read "The Promise of the Cloud Meets the Obligations of E-Discovery", published on the Law.com website on October 12, 2011 by Brendan M. Schulman and Samantha V. Ettari.  This article does a great job of indicating that the sky is falling and that we are all doomed.  However, as I indicated in the my response to this piece, "cloud computing has already made it and most of us are just fine, eDiscovery in the cloud and all!!"  But, the devil is always in the details and therefore what does this mean in practical terms?

Further, please note that if you are currently doing a bad job of eDiscovery in general, you had better read the Schulman and Ettari article as the sky is going to fall if you attempt to perform eDiscovery in the cloud under your current practices. Once you have completed reading that article and if you still want a road map for successful implementation of eDiscovery in the cloud, come back and finish reading this blog post.

What is eDiscovery in the Cloud?To properly perform eDiscovery in the cloud,  you first have to understand what it is and, probably more importantly, what it is not.  The current crop of litigation technology vendors have done a great job of confusing the market in regards to eDiscovery in the cloud.  However, I believe that over the next 12-18 months, the market will become much more educated and some amount of consensus will begin to form regarding a more realistic and concise definition of eDiscovery in the cloud.

eDiscovery in the cloud is NOT uploading all of your potentially responsive ESI to a litigation service provider's data center and then accessing that ESI via the Internet to perform searches and document review.  That may be Early Case Assessment (ECA) or document review delivered under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.  But, it is not eDiscovery in the cloud.

Likewise, eDiscovery in the cloud is NOT manually collecting big chunks (that's a technical term) of potentially responsive ESI from your cloud provider and the performing eDiscovery with that ESI the same way you process ESI from your corporate network or from unconnected desktops and laptops (BTW - I am in the process of investigating the nightmare of collecting ESI from your cloud provider and plan to author a Blog post of my findings before the end of the year.  So, if anyone has any input, send it to me and I will consider including it in my post).

eDiscovery in the cloud ultimately means having a virtual eDiscovery process that actually runs in the cloud right alongside of your cloud storage and allows you to perform, Early Case Assessment (ECA) including First Pass Review, possibly preservation and legal hold management, definitely forensically sound collection and the generation of an industry standard load file and/or full on document review and production.  In addition, eDiscovery in the cloud also means that you can operate these processes remotely through an Internet based user interface and don't have to have operational bodies physically inside the cloud data center(s) to perform any of the normal magic that is currently required by many of the legacy hosted eDiscovery platforms. 

Further, eDiscovery in the cloud should also include what I am going to call (for lack of a better term at this point) federated eDiscovery to enable an organization to "perform eDiscovery" on data no matter where it resides.  Currently, users that are supported by competent IT organizations, don't have to worry about where ESI is physically located.  Therefore, eDiscovery professionals shouldn't have to worry either.  This would include ESI behind the corporate firewall, housed with different cloud service providers or housed with the same cloud service providers in different data centers potentially in different countries (don't get me started on the debate regarding the legal issues with moving ESI in and out of countries as that is the topic of a future Blog post). Please note that I am not oblivious to the challenges of moving large amounts of data around.  However, we all might be surprised to learn that class 5 rapids have been successfully navigated in other industries.

Is this Definition Realistic
This definition of eDiscovery in the cloud may sound like something that only Scotty, the engineer from the Star Trek Enterprise, could cobble together with technology from the next century and a good amount of duct tape.  However, the technology exists today and is ready to be utilized with little or no duct tape required.  Therefore, the only real speed bumps on this journey will be convincing the cloud service providers to install the appropriate eDiscovery technology as a standard part of their technology stack, enlisting a new generation of eDiscovery consultants to support the development of best practices for eDiscovery in the cloud and finally to show the market that eDiscovery is no longer a reason to NOT move your data to cloud.  I realize that these are not insignificant roadblocks.  However, providing eDiscovery as a standard part of it's technology stack is a homerun for cloud service providers and the associated services represents a blue water/green field market opportunity for eDiscovery consultants and possibly service provides. Therefore, resistance should be minimal and buy-in should be quick.

What's Next?
In the coming weeks I will be releasing my initial list of eDiscovery technology vendors that can support my vision of eDiscovery in the cloud along with an initial overview of the best practices.  If anyone has any input that you believe should be included in these upcoming Blog posts, send them to me and I will consider including them.

In the mean time, if you are concerned with moving your data to the cloud and are hesitant because you are concerned about eDiscovery or if you are currently faced with the daunting task of extracting your ESI from a cloud service provider, contact me as I can help you successfully navigate your way through this paradigm shift.

Labels: Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Service Providers, CSPs, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, Electronically Stored Information, ESI

posted by Charles Skamser @ 2:03 PM 1 Comments

Linear Review is an Outdated Methodology

As we trudge through the first week of 2011, I am going through my list of Blog posts that I wanted to comment on and the December 28, 2010 post on Linear Review by Venkat Rangan, Clearwell Systems CTO, seemed like a good place to start 2011.  The post titled, “Reinventing Review in Electronic Discovery”  discusses a topic that I am very familiar with and have been somewhat outspoken about it in the past couple of years.  Review costs still comprise over 70% of the overall cost of eDiscovery and therefore as an industry, we need to find better ways to approach review and, more importantly, reduce the costs.

Given my background in enterprise class applications development methodology and technology, I lived through the paradigm shift when that industry shifted from legacy waterfall methodology (i.e. linear) to rapid applications development (RAD) and now agile development methodology.  The increases in productivity were dramatic.

Mr. Rangan’s bases his Blog post on a excellent paper by The Demise of Linear Review by Bennett Borden of Williams Mullen.  Mr. Rangan states that the paper, citing several factual data from various studies, as well as drawing parallel to other similar anachronisms of the past, makes excellent arguments for rethinking how legal review is performed in eDiscovery.

I hope that in 2011, the litigation market begins to understand and embrace both the practical and financial benefits of replacing linear review with newer and more effective review methodologies and technologies.

The full text of Mr. Rangan’s Blog post is as follows:

In a recent workshop that I attended, I had the privilege of sharing thoughts on the latest electronic discovery trends with other experts in the market. Especially interesting to me was discussing the provocatively titled paper, The Demise of Linear Review by Bennett Borden of Williams Mullen. The paper, citing several factual data from various studies, as well as drawing parallel to other similar anachronisms of the past, makes excellent arguments for rethinking how legal review is performed in e-discovery.

When linear review is mentioned, the first mental picture one conjures up is boredom. It has generally been associated with a mental state that is a result of repetitive and monotonous tasks, with very little variation. To get a sense for how bad this can affect performance, one only needs to draw upon several studies of boredom at the workplace, especially in jobs such as mechanical assembly of the 1920s and the telephone switchboard operators of the 1950s. In fact, the Pentagon sponsored study, Implications for the design of jobs with variable requirements, from Navy Personnel Research and Development Center, presents an excellent treatise on contributors for workplace fatigue, stress, monotony, and distorted perception of time. This is best illustrated in their paper:

Mechanical assembly, inspection and monitoring, and continuous manual control are the principal kinds of tasks most frequently studied by researchers investigating the relationship between performance and presumed boredom. On the most repetitive tasks, degradation of performance has typically been found within 30 minutes (Fox & Embry, 1975; Saito, Kishida, Endo, & Saito, 1972). The early studies of the British Industrial Fatigue Board (Wyatt & Fraser, 1929) concluded that the worker’s experience of boredom could be identified by a characteristic output curve on mechanical assembly jobs. The magnitude of boredom was inversely related to output and was usually marked by a sharp decrement in the middle of a work period.
How does this apply to linear review? Well, a linear review is most often performed using a review application or tool, simulating a person reading and classifying a pile of documents. The reviewer is asked to read the document and apply a review code, based on their judgment. While it appears easy, it can be one of the most stressful, boring, and thankless jobs for a well-educated, well-trained knowledge worker. Even with technology and software advances a reviewer is required to read documents in relatively constrained workflows. Just scrolling through pages and pages of a document, comprehending its meaning and intent in the context of the production request can make it stressful. To add to this, reviewers are often measured for their productivity based on the number of documents or pages they review per day or per hour. In cases where large number of reviewers are involved, there are very direct comparisons of rates of review. Finally, the review effort is judged for quality without consideration for the very elements that impact quality. Imagine a workplace task where every action taken by a knowledge worker is monitored and evaluated to the minutest detail.

Given this, it is no wonder that study after study has found a straight plough-through linear review produces less than desirable results. A useful way to measure effectiveness of a review exercise is to submit the same collection of documents to multiple reviewers and assess their level of agreement on their classification of the reviewed documents in specific categories. One such study, Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery: Computer Classification vs. Manual Review, finds that the level of agreement among human reviewers was only in the 70% range, even when agreement is limited to positive determination. As noted in the study, previous TREC inter-assessor agreement notes as well as other studies on this subject by Barnett et al., 2009 also shows a similar and consistent result. Especially noteworthy from TREC is the fact that only 9 out of 40 topics studied had an agreement level higher than 70%, while remarkably, four topics had no agreement at all. Some of the disagreement is due to the fact that most documents fall on varying levels of responsiveness which cannot easily be judged on binary yes/no decision (i.e., the “where do you draw the relevance line” problem). However, a significant source on variability is simply attributed to the boredom and fatigue that comes with repetitiveness of the task.

A further observation on reviewer effectiveness is available from the TREC 2009 Overview Report, which studied the appeals and adjudication process of that year’s Interactive Task. This study offers an excellent opportunity to assess the effectiveness of initial review and subsequent appeals and adjudication process. As noted in the study, the Interactive Task involves an initial run submission from participating teams which are sampled and reviewed by human assessors. Upon receiving their initial assessments, participating teams are allowed to appeal those judgments. Given the teams’ incentive to improve upon the initial results, they are motivated to construct an appeal for as many documents as they can, with each appeal containing a justification for re-classification. As noted in the study, the success rates of appeals were very high, with 84% to 97% of initial assessments being reversed. Such reversals were across the board and directly proportional to the number of appeals, suggesting that even the assessments that were not appealed could be suspect. Another aspect that is evidenced is that the appeals process requires a convincing justification from the appealing team, in the form of a snippet of the document, document summary, or a portion of the document highlighted for adjudication. This in itself biases the review and makes it easier for the topic assessor to get a clearer sense for the document on their attempt at adjudicating the appeal. This fact is also borne out by the aforementioned Computer Classification vs. Manual Review study where the senior litigator with the knowledge of the matter had the ability to offer the best adjudications.

Given that linear review is flawed, what are the remedies? As noted in Bennett’s paper, intelligent use of newer technologies along with a review workflow that leverages them can offer gains that are demonstrated in other industries. Let’s examine a few of them.

Response Variation Response variation is a strategy for coping with boredom by attempting to build variety into the task itself. In mechanical assembly lines, response variation is added through innovative floor and task layouts, such as Cellular Layout. On some tasks, response variation may involve only simple alternation behaviors, such as reversing the order in which subtasks are performed; on others, the variety may take more subtle forms reflected in an inconsistency of response times. In the context of linear review, it can help to organize your review batches so that your review teams alternate classifying documents for responsiveness, privilege and confidential etc. Another interesting approach would be to mix the review documents but suggest that each be reviewed for a specific target classification.

Free-Form Exploration Combining aspects of early case assessments and linear review is one form of exploration that is known to offer both a satisfying experience and effective results. While performing linear review, the ability to suspend the document being reviewed and jump to other similar documents and topics gives the reviewer a cognitive stimulus that improves knowledge acquisition. Doing so offers an opportunity for the reviewer to learn facts of the case that would normally be difficult to obtain, and approach the knowledge levels of a senior litigator of the case. After all, we depend on the knowledge of the matter to be a guide for reviewers, so attempts to increase their knowledge of the case can only be helpful. Also, on a free-form exploration, a reviewer may stumble on an otherwise difficult to obtain case fact and the sheer joy of finding something valuable would be rewarding.

Expanding the Work Product Besides simply judging the review disposition of a document, the generation of higher value output such as document summaries, critical snippets, and document meta-data that contribute to the assessment can both reduce the boredom of the current reviewer as well as contribute valuable insights to other reviewers. As noted earlier, being able to assist the review with such aids can be immensely helpful in your review process.

Review Technologies Of course, fundamentally changing linear review with specific technologies that radically changes the review workflow is an approach worth considering. While offering such aids, it must be remembered that human judgment is still needed and the process must incorporate both increasing their knowledge as well as their ability to apply judgment. We will examine these technologies in an upcoming post.

Labels: 26(f), Discovery, Early Case Assessment, ECA, EDD, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, eDiscovery Costs, eDiscovery Market, EDRM, ESI

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:08 AM 0 Comments

The Early Case Assessment (ECA) Debate Continues

As we emerge from the Memorial Day weekend and head into a short work week, it appears from my standard morning perusal of news and updates in eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance) GRC, that there is a “raging” debate about the definition of Early Case Assessment (ECA).  Well, maybe its not really “raging”.  However, there does appear to be significant ongoing debate with legacy litigators on one side, technologists on the other and many others either misinformed, under-informed or uninterested.

The latest players to enter the debate are George Socha & Tom Gelbmann or EDRM fame.  In an article published on the Law.com site on June 1, 2010 titled, “Don't Box ECA”, the pair contend that Early Case Assessment (ECA) actually proceeds eDiscovery.  They go on to contend that, “Early case assessment is a process. It predates e-discovery and extends beyond the limits of EDD's range.  ECA is a traditional aspect of the work done by in-house and outside counsel as they decide what to do about a new matter. It starts when the attorneys pick up the first whiff of a lawsuit, and covers a broad swath of potential preliminary decisions to make and actions to undertake.”  All of these observations are true.   And, it shows that shows some great examples of how Early Case Assessment (ECA) is a process that includes and requires the participation of litigators and technologists.

Litigators have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can not appropriate complete an acceptable Early Case Assessment (ECA) process with the use of technology.  And, without the leadership of an experienced and knowledgeable litigator at the helm, the best Early Case Assessment (ECA) technology on the market is not going work.

For Early Case Assessment (ECA) to succeed, there has to be an experienced litigator using the right technology.  Any approach that leaves one or the other one the sidelines is doomed to failure.  Further and finally, I believe that the court system(s) and judges need to "get up to speed" on the technology of Early Case Assessment (ECA) and led the charge to ensure that "it" is used and used properly.

The full text of George and Tom’s article is as follows:

The latest electronic data discovery buzz phrase is most definitely "early case assessment." But if you examine the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (http://www.edrm.net/), which offers guidelines and standards for e-discovery consumers and providers, you will search in vain for a box entitled ECA.

By not including one, have we missed a crucial step in the e-discovery process?
No. In our opinion, the term early case assessment is misapplied in the e-discovery context. While ECA can — and often should — address e-discovery issues, early case assessment sweeps much more broadly. To the extent ECA connects with e-discovery, the EDRM diagram already accommodates it.

WHAT IS EDRM?
First, a bit of context for readers who may not be familiar with the Electronic Discover Reference Model project. Run by the authors, it includes more than 300 participants from 42 providers, 18 consumer organizations, and 48 individuals.

The group currently is tackling eight projects, ranging from an Information Management Reference Model, to Jobs, to XML, to Search. We held our 2010 Kickoff Meeting last month in St. Paul, Minn.
Participants pay fees ranging from $150 for an individual working on one project, to $7,500 for providers with more than 10 people, for all projects.

WHAT IS ECA?
Early case assessment is a process. It predates e-discovery and extends beyond the limits of EDD's range.
ECA is a traditional aspect of the work done by in-house and outside counsel as they decide what to do about a new matter.

It starts when the attorneys pick up the first whiff of a lawsuit, and covers a broad swath of potential preliminary decisions to make and actions to undertake.

For counsel inside and out, these ECA decisions and actions may include, but are not limited to:

• Is there a case? What is it about? What are the issues? Are they legal? Factual?
• How much does this matter appear to be worth? Is it only an issue of money? Is it an "above the fold" problem? Are important principles at stake? Is the matter likely to have an impact on the company's reputation? What about the stock price?
• Is this an isolated matter? Or part of a pattern? Are we looking at a class action lawsuit, maybe multi-district litigation?
• How much should I budget for this matter? How much for attorney fees, experts, EDD costs, other expenses? What about settlement?
• Is there insurance coverage? How much? Under what circumstances? Are we self-insured? Is excess coverage available? Do we need to set aside reserves?
• What resources do I need to devote to this matter? Internal versus external? Hard costs versus soft?
• Do I need outside attorneys? If so, whom? How many? At what level? With what expertise? Do I need local counsel? Do I want to share counsel with others?
• Who can tell me more about the matter? Can I get help from my colleagues in the law department? From current employees? Former employees? Consulting experts?
• Who has something I might need for the case? What do they have – insights? Experience? Information on paper? Information in electronic form? Tangible objects?
• Do we need a litigation hold? And if so, what does that entail? E-discovery can play a real and important role in ECA, as demonstrated by a quick examination of some of the EDRM stages. Think of the EDRM diagram as ECA writ small.

EXAMPLES
Here are a few examples:

Identification: Do I have quick and ready access to electronically stored information? What content can help me better address the issues listed above?
What types of ESI are we going to confront? E-mail? Structured data? Office files (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets)? The contents of wikis, blogs, and other social media?
Where might the ESI be located? On what systems? In what geographical locations? Who knows about it, controls it, can get me to it, or can get it to me?

Preservation and Collection: When do I need to begin preserving ESI? How should I do that? What forms of preservation should I consider? What legal hold process? How soon can I collect ESI for early analysis? Will it be part of a preservation process, or something separate?

Processing: If I have identified ESI of potential interest, does it need some level of processing before I can begin to assess or analyze that data?
Do I need to get ESI converted to forms I can more readily evaluate? Are there ways to help me quickly find some wheat in the chaff?
Should some ESI be indexed, for rapid iterative searches?

Analysis: Here is the "assessment" piece. What can I glean from the readily available ESI that helps address the topics listed above?

Review and Production: Is there any portion of this ESI that I need to get to someone else quickly, and if so, in what form?

Presentation: At this early stage, do I need to put any of this ESI in front of someone else — to draw out more information, attempt to validate or refute what I think I know, or attempt to persuade someone?

Labels: Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, EDRM, Socha

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:26 AM 0 Comments

Gartner Humming the Proactive eDiscovery Tune with Five Step Process for Better Use of Enterprise Search in eDiscovery

Having spent most of my career assisting IT departments worldwide provide more business relevant support to their business units, I have been very interested in following the paradigm shift that is going on within the IT deparments and their bretheran in the legal departments as they collectively deal with eDsicovery.

If you read my Blog with any consistency, you know that I believe that eDiscovery is part of a bigger issue called Goverance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). And, if addressed from a proactive standpoint with ESI archiving and leading edge enterprise search and analysis from forward thinking technology organizations such as Orcatec and ContentAnalyst, eDiscovery will eventually become a commodity process.

And, although Gartner has not exactly said this same thing, it is nice to know that they are at least begining to hum this same basic tune.

The full text of the Gartner press release is as follows:

By the end of 2012, enterprises that fully document their search processes in e-discovery will save 25 percent on their collection processes, according to Gartner, Inc. Enterprises of all sizes, and those facing any number of legal actions annually, should have a simple set of practices to follow anytime they need to embark on an e-discovery process in the near future.

Although no single relevance model or cocktail of relevance models will be effective in the next five years, Gartner predicts that by 2014, lawyers and technologists will use a customary means of recording search processes in e-discovery.

"Addressing the ongoing challenge of the IT perspective of litigation management demands both that the technologies be acquired and that procedures for using them be established," said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Companies need to own the products that will be necessary for them to address litigation and understand that those products will not have the same positive impact unless they are supported by repeatable, effective, systemic processes for lawyers and IT to follow."

Gartner identified five guidelines to ease the first steps of addressing e-discovery for litigation:

Open communication wide, and include potential custodians. The legal team, or teams, and IT must be able to communicate throughout the process. At the first threat of litigation, IT and the lawyers representing any company or government enterprise should initiate a planned round of meetings as though the e-discovery phase of litigation were a project with phased deliverables and expectations.

Get a senior litigator involved immediately. High hourly rates are compensated for through effective decision making.Waiting for the final product to be ready for delivery to opposing counsel is a mistake. A senior litigator, engaged at an early stage, will be able to advise on what document and data sources should be searched and examined, how to structure initial queries and what information should be searched, and how to record processes so that they are more defensible in the case of an inquisitive judge.

Analyze the corpus of documents and data early.Understanding the underlying content of the case holistically will allow IT workers and lawyers to discuss meaningfully what the impact will be of any collection strategy. It will also give the senior litigator the ability to call whether the case should proceed or be settled.

Estimate the price scale for collection based on what it will cost to pursue strategies of different degrees of intensity. Budgeting the cost of collection will allow IT workers and lawyers to work together to determine a proportional expenditure on e-discovery that is proper for a case, given its significance and the financial exposure it represents.

Document your decisions. Terms and methods of querying them should be saved in a grid such as a spreadsheet file for simplicity. Lawyers, in particular, continue to hope for a specific means of conducting searches that would allow them not to examine search processes as granularly as they must now. However, for the immediate future, lawyers' involvement will be critical to achieve recall that will be acceptable to the bench and opposing counsel.

"Codifying these guidelines in order will further enhance efficient proceedings and improve the successful resolution of litigation," Mr. Andrews said.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Five Steps for E-discovery to Improve Search and other processes." The report was generated as part of the e-discovery workshop that Gartner conducted with leaders in e-discovery, such as Robert Brownstone, law and technology director at Fenwick & West LLP, at the Gartner Risk Management and Compliance Summit, April 29-May 1 of this year. The report is available on Gartner's Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=1060612&subref=simplesearch.

Mr. Andrews will provide additional analysis at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 18-22, in Orlando, Florida. In the session "Gartner Magic Quadrant and MarketScope: Information Access Technology and E-Discovery," Mr. Andrews will offer a visual snapshot of e-discovery's direction and maturity, as well as the leading participants.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world's most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. It is the industry's largest and most important annual gathering of CIOs and their senior IT leaders. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world's leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees' annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/symposium/us.

Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Christy Pettey at christy.pettey@gartner.com.

About Gartner:

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.

Labels: 2009 eDiscovery Predictions and Trends, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, Enterprise Search, Gartner, GRC

posted by Charles Skamser @ 12:10 PM 1 Comments

Six Sigma and eDiscovery

Having spent most of my career providing the Global 500 with leading edge technology to improve their business processes and reduce costs, I have been intimately involved with Six Sigma for many years.

Now that I am focusing on brining leading edge technology and associated services to eDiscovery, I would imagine that once again I will be relying on Six Sigma and lean Six Sigma as the foundation to improve litigation processes and reduce eDiscovery costs.

Granted, terms like Six Sigma, Business Process Improvement (BPI) and Centers of Exellence (COEs) will make most litigator's eyes glaze over. However, now that the trend is clear that eDiscovery is moving to the enterprise, Six Sigma is alreay a well established practice and therefore applying it to eDiscovery will not seem at all odd or out of place.

As a place to start, I am planning to conduct an informal survey of players ni the eDiscovery market to determine the current status of Six Sigma utilization and any plans for futture use. As such, any input will be welcome and greatly appreciated.

Labels: BPI, Business Process Improvement, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma

posted by Charles Skamser @ 12:34 PM 1 Comments