Legal Technology

Remote Wrap-Up of LegalTech West Coast 2009

Legal Technology Editor Sean Doherty monitored developments at LegalTech in L.A. One thing Doherty was sure about: The show went on without him. Many vendors focused on mobility features while e-discovery providers touted early case assessment, collection and advanced search tools.

Equivio launches 'Relevance'

Equivio, known for managing data redundancy, announced the launch of “Relevance,” a system designed to enhance the e-discovery process by automatically prioritizing documents. But Equivio learned from the 2008 Text Retrieval Conference, or TREC, and incorporates expert human guidance in Relevance.

At base, Relevance takes input from a lead attorney and uses statistics and self-learning  techniques to calculate relevance scores for each document in a data collection. This, combined with a statistical model to calculate precision and recall, aims to provide a new level of measure and control for e-discovery -- but one ultimately guided by a legal team.

Relevance also generates a list of key words that characterize the documents in a collection. A legal team can use these to enhance its original set of keywords and home in on relevance.

LegalTech Show Updates

The LegalTech show in Los Angeles is heating up and we are starting to get the summer’s newest updates in e-discovery and legal technology. This just in from CaseCentral.

CaseCentral just announced an “Early Case Assessment” tool that integrates with their review and production software. With CaseCentral, there may be no need to lease a Clearwell Systems unit to get an idea of what you have prior to a 26(f) (“meet and confer”) meeting with opposing counsel on discovery matters.

CaseCentral’s new ECA offering follows advice from George Soch Jr., Esq., of Socha Consulting. That is, early case assessment should be an integrated approach that works with the analysis and review process to provide “transparency and consistency” of relevant data from the onset of litigation. End point: The ECA tool integrates with CaseCentral’s litigation review and production software that includes a collaborative feature to bring outside counsel into the fray.

As I have said before, vendors like CaseCentral listen to customer needs and aim to satisfy them. Their ECA product offering sounds appealing to in-house counsel to reduce costs and keep data inside their own firewall, safe and secure, for analysis, review, and production.

The State of Legal Technology Conferences

I had a chance to speak with Sasha Hefler, the President of The Masters Conference, at LegalTech NY about the state of legal technology conferences in the current climate.  Listen to our interview here.

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
www.arikaplanadvisors.com
(646) 641-0600

Author of "The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development" (Thomson-West, 2008). Learn more at  TheOpportunityMaker.com.

E-Discovery Management in the New Economy

On day 2 of LegalTech NY, I had a chance to speak with Karthik Kannan, the VP Marketing/Business Development at Kazeon and we discussed the continuing trends for e-discovery management in 2009:

• Bringing e-discovery in-house
• Early case assessment
• End-to-end legal hold management
• In-place analysis and legal review

Listen to our interview here.

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
www.arikaplanadvisors.com
(646) 641-0600

Author of "The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development" (Thomson-West, 2008). Learn more at  TheOpportunityMaker.com.

A Return to the Basics - Organizations are Spending Less on the Next Big Thing

In an interview on Day 3 of LegalTechNY, Brett Tarr, General Counsel for eMag Solutions advised that the industry will see more proactive information management and a return to basics in 2009.  Organizations are spending less on the next big thing and focusing more on proactive information management.

Listen to our interview here.

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
www.arikaplanadvisors.com
(646) 641-0600

Author of "The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development" (Thomson-West, 2008). Learn more at  TheOpportunityMaker.com.

LegalTech Trek: i365

By Sean Doherty
The Legal Technology Blog

You might wonder how I missed some things at LegalTech New York. But if you attended, you would know. There is so much going on over the course of three days that it would take a platoon of technology editors to cover it all. And I hardly qualify as a platoon.

i365, a Seagate company, issued a new release of its e-discovery product, MetaLINCS E-Discovery Suite 5. MetaLINCS can take you from processing and review to production. With the upgrade, it claims new capabilities in search and review as well as redaction and early case assessment with improved analytics. Another thing to check out, looking forward to when an automated search will satisfy a due diligence privilege review, is i365’s defensible “Pinpoint Search.”

Despite the rumors of layoffs at i365, it was out in full force at LegalTech with updates that focus on needs identified in 2008: early case assessment and improved search capabilities.

Recommind's MindServer

By Sean Doherty
The Legal Technology Blog

No doubt there were a lot of things that I missed on the exhibit floor at the last LegalTech New York. So I am going to step back and bring forth some of the best news that slipped past me. At the very least, this will help me sort things out. Because I refuse to revolve around e-discovery and much prefer to focus on technology. For example, Recommind made some improvements to Decisiv Email with version 2.3 that enhanced the process of automatically tagging, filing, and storing e-mail messages.

One way to look at that would be from an e-discovery perspective. Ultimately, automatically tagging e-mail messages (and their attachments) will facilitate applying policies (e.g., retention policy) to those tags that will reduce EDD costs. Messages that relate to a business purpose or messages that are potentially responsive to pending or future litigation will be tagged, saved, and available for search and retrieval in response to litigation. This will reduce the risk that responsive e-mail will be missed during the collection stage of e-discover, thus avoiding costly sanctions and facilitating collection and privilege review.

Take a look at Recommind's base technology that enables the above: the MindServer platform. MindServer automatically identifies concepts within and across information resources like e-mail message stores as well as Interwoven WorkSite. Hence, it is able to automatically understand what words have multiple meanings and what concepts have multiple expressions and use that information to search and tag content, automatically. This has the potential to take the archiving or retention decisions out of the hands of users and ensure what needs to be retained for business and legal purposes, is retained.

So, when you look at the Recommind's technology, it will help an organization retain important content for regulatory and compliance reasons. All this before litigation ensues and all quite "left" of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. In fact, Recommind's technology can be used wide left of the EDRM, which is where you want your long-term technology investments to lie.

Court reporting and e-discovery

By Ari Kaplan, Esq.
Special to The Legal Technology Blog

At the end of day 3 at LegalTech NY, I ran into John Correggio, the founder of New Wave Legal, which announced its formation to coincide with LegalTech.  The company describes itself as "a single-source supplier of legal technology, discovery support and court reporting services" through partnerships with various organizations.  Listen to my interview on the floor of the show with Correggio and Matt Spievak of Sarnoff Court Reporters and Legal Technologies, part of the New Wave Legal consortium.

*[Disclosure: At the request of New Wave Legal, I attended the company's inaugural meeting in late January as an unpaid informal observer and it provided nominal travel expenses.  This interview was unscheduled and unscripted.]

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
www.arikaplanadvisors.com
(646) 641-0600

Author of "The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development" (Thomson-West, 2008). Learn more at  TheOpportunityMaker.com.

LegalTech New Year

By Sean Doherty
The Legal Technology Blog

The new year has come and gone on the Gregorian calendar. But the new year for legal technology is still in progress at LegalTech New York, where vendors are unveiling their new products and services and attendees are helping them celebrate. Read more.