Orbit One Ruling Challenges Montreal Pension

Mistakes Will Be Made: U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis IV, of the U.S. District Court, Southern District, New York, has issued an electronic data discovery ruling that is already the talk of the EDD community.

In the  November 19 ruling in Orbit One v. Numerex, Francis held that an "executive's purging of information from acquired corporation's server did not merit adverse inference instruction based on spoliation," and "executives removal of acquired corporation's laptop hard drive did not merit adverse inference instruction."

Says Anne Kershaw, president of New York's eDiscovery Institute: "It is the first decision that says, basically, 'reasonable' in discovery includes an expectation that mistakes will be made;  the issue is whether the mistakes matter. He also says flat out that he disagrees with the Pension Committee case," referring to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin's controversial January opinion (also S.D.N.Y.) 

More: K&L|Gates Electronic Discovery Law blog. Includes link to opinion via Westlaw.

P.S. LTN's e-discovery columnist Craig Ball, and Cecil Lynn, who writes LTN's annual summary of key EDD cases, will discuss Orbit One and other key 2010 rulings, on Virtual LegalTech, December 14 at 3:45 pm. EST. 

Update: Ralph Losey's post here. (Hat tip: John Waid)

 

Tick Tock!

Accolades from your peers not only help your own career, but reflect well on your law firm or law department. So here's an opportunity to spotlight your achievements: Submit a nomination for our eighth annual juried LTN Awards. Winners will be honored at LegalTech New York 2011.

We have five awards including IT Director of the Year, IT Champion of the Year (someone other than IT staff), and three awards for the most innovative use of technology: in a law firm, in a law department, and in a trial.

The nomination process is painless. Just download, complete, and submit the simple Nomination Form. The instructions are on the form. There is no fee, and you may nominate folks from outside of your organization. Deadline: Wednesday, December 1, 2010. (Technology projects must have been completed between Aug. 1, 2009, and July 31, 2010.)

The nominations will be judged by Andrew Adkins III, director of the Law Technology Institute; Fredric Lederer, chancellor professor of law and director of the Center for Legal and Court Technology at the William & Mary Law School; and David Whelan, manager, legal information, Great Library at the Law Society of Upper Canada.

As they say in the lottery, you can't win if you don't submit a nomination! Questions? Send a message to lawtech@alm.com or call Heather Schultz at (212) 457-9601.

Thanks Giving

On behalf of the entire Law Technology News team, we wish you a healthy, peaceful, refreshing Thanksgiving holiday.

And thanks to our wonderful legal technology community for your continued passion, drive, thoughtfulness, story ideas, feedback, compliments and gentle critiques, commitment to quality, pro bono work, and spirit. We truly are a community.

Onward!

Much ado about little?

Last spring, CBS News created quite the ruckus when it ran a story about used copiers that were, in its words, "digital time-bomb[s] packed with highly-personal or sensitive data."

The blogosphere went just a bit bonkers, including yours truly, but Richard Melville, litigation support manager at Maynard Cooper & Gale, decided to run a few tests to separate "[t]he sensational from reality."

The process and the results are fascinating, and yes, surprising: Check it out in the current edition of Law Technology News. (The original version of the story ran on our Law Technology News website in October.)

Darwin Watch: TR Acquires Pangea3

Thomson Reuters reports that it has acquired Pangea3, a legal process outsourcing provider that serves corporate law departments and law firms worldwide. As usual, the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With dual headquarters in Mumbai and New York, Pangea3 has 650 employees at its delivery centers in Mumbai and New Delhi. Its client base includes both Am Law 250 firms and large corporations (pharma, finance, tech, food/beverage, consumer, etc.) The company was founded in 2004 by David Perla, formerly with Monster.com. He and co-CEO Sanjay Kamlani will remain in their roles.

Pangea3 services are organized into four business lines: legal document review; corporate transactions; IP; and risk management/compliance; the company embraces Six Sigma methodologies. 

Peter Warwick, TR's president and CEO, says the acquisition complements his company's portfolio of "specialized information and workflow [systems].The LPO marketplace is growing at more than 20% annually, and projected to exceed $1 billion this year, he said.

TR very recently realigned several of its units into a "GRC" operation (governance, risk management, compliance), so this seems to fit right into that plan.

Nirvana @ Georgetown

Thursday's opening sessions of the Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute were pure bliss for e-discovery professionals, featuring the top judges who are shaping the development of EDD with their landmark decisions.

The opening keynote featured the Honorable James Holderman, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the self-proclaimed chief cheerleader of the 7th Circuit Pilot Project, which is trying to reform EDD protocols.

It was followed by the Judge Shira Scheindlin show, the e-discovery equivalent of Katy Perry on "Saturday Night Live." The discussion, with fellow judges querying her landmark rulings, was positively electric.  Scheindlin, right, is a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York.)

Tweeted one attendee, "Judges Scheindlin and Rosenthal on the same panel. Been waiting all year."

Read more about it here and here.

Update: Chris Bright of Zapproved posted a transcript of the Scheindlin et. al program, here on his Legal Hold Pro Tracker blog.

George's Town

I'm headed to D.C. to participate in the 7th annual Advanced E-Discovery Institute, Thursday and Friday at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., which has a reputation of drawing the creme de la creme of the EDD judiciary.  We are all looking forward to hearing from the authors of so many opinions that have obsessed us during the last year.

Among the jurists on the panels are John Facciola (right), James Rosenbaum, John Carroll, Lee Rosenthal, (left), Francis Allegra, Shira Scheindlin, James Francis, Paul Grimm, Elizabeth LaPorte, Nan Nolan, Andrew Peck, and Joseph Slights. Doesn't get any better than that.

I'm speaking today at 1:30 p.m., on "The Business of E-Discovery," with Robert Eisenberg (Precise), Mark Michels (Cisco), Robert Owen (Fulbright & Jaworsky), and moderated by attorney Jonathan Redgrave. Based on our voluminous correspondence and several conference calls, these guys know their stuff.

The conference is sold-out, but they are maintaining a waiting list if you are interested in attending.

Soothsayer Season

With the anticipated aroma of pumpkin and turkey already distracting everyone, and annoying Christmas advertising in full tilt on television, vendors are beginning the annual ritual of predicting the future.

One of the first out of the gate is Mountain View, Calif.-based Clearwell Systems, who offer five predictions about the state of e-discovery in year 2011:

• Data Collection: Manual, forensic "imaging" will continue to take a backseat to automated techniques. • Proportionality: We'll continue to search for ways to prevent EDD costs "from exceeding legal exposure and attorneys fees."
• Collision of cloud, social media, and EDD: "2011 will undoubtedly be the first year that meaningful legal decisions crop up" addressing these issues.
• Consolidation of vendors will continue and will "impact market forces and the balance of power."
• Global EDD will mature, with jurisdictions looking to the U.S. and Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for guidance.

O.K., pretty obvious and bland, with nothing that would engender a heated argument after a couple drinks at this week's Georgetown Advanced Discovery Institute, even if Craig Ball, Patrick Oot, or Ralph Losey were picking up the tab.

Who else has predictions? What will surprise us? Shock us? Depress us? Inspire us?

Comment below or e-mail me.  We may very well revisit this!

Sneak Preview of Microsoft Lync

Microsoft will hold both a virtual and a bricks-and-mortar launch party Wednesday to introduce Microsoft Lync, the latest upgrade of its unified communications software.

The company says the Lync line has been a hit with law firms, for its ability to track calls to reduce unbilled hours and lost revenue. "Firms have also reported reduced teleconferencing costs, more flexible phone access, and easier internal collaboration and training," says senior vice president Chris Capossela, who will present a keynote at the event, which will be broadcast live from New York's The Altman Building at 11 a.m. EST.

Copy Cat

Some of the most interesting technology toolseem to be emerging from the intellectual property battlefield. In the November issue of Law Technology News, consultant Michael Barr discusses how new technology can help legal professionals "automatically detect copying of copyrighted software source code, even if it came from open source packages."

"Some of the most powerful tools for conducting direct comparisons between a pair of source code sets are from Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering (www.safe-corp.biz)," says Barr, who also discusses offerings from Black Duck Software and Canada's Protecode.

A most interesting area that we will continue to monitor!

Bench Press

Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie report that their "Judges Guide to Cost-Effective E-Discovery" is hot off the cyber-press, just in time for next week's Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute. Kershaw is president of the nonprofit eDiscovery Institute, the publisher of the handbook that is available online at www.eDiscoveryInstitute.org and is being distributed in print to 500-plus U.S. magistrate judges. Howie is director of metrics development and communication.

The guide is designed to provide judges with information on cost-reduction processes, to help them make decisions when confronted with arguments from counsel. Lawyers, says Kershaw, often overstate cost or burden because they don't know about, or fail to use, proven processes that can significantly lessen the workload.

It also addresses ways to improve consistency of results, including de-duplication, e-mail threading, document categorization, predictive coding, etc.

Kershaw and Howie wrote our October issue cover story about predictive coding, and discussed that feature on our Law Technology Now podcast.

Channeling John Lennon

The word "revolutionary" is the 2010 buzzword of the year; about 95% of the press releases we receive at Law Technology News use the word to describe a company's new product, service, or version 6.725x maintenance upgrade of a legacy product.

As far as I'm concerned, there's only one person who can use "revolutionary" with a straight face: Steve Jobs. Unquestionably, the Apple iPad is quickly penetrating even the most Luddite of law firms (and shaking up publishing). In our November issue of LTN, Ross Kodner highlights how firms of all sizes are adopting the tablet; and Latham & Watkin's John Cleaves walks you through how to create an "app." (His firm has already launched its U.S. Book of Jargon app, an interactive glossary of capital markets and banking terms and slang.)

Check out my interview with Cleaves on the February edition of our Law Technology Now podcast.

Just Do It - Reprise

Bad news arrives from our colleague Vivia Chen, via The Careerist blog, regarding the 2010 survey from the National Association of Women Lawyers, which documents absoluty no movement of women into equity partner posts — it remains at 15%, the same rate it has been for the last five years.

Women, she writes, are barely represented on influential committees at their firms, and there's not a single woman among the top 10 rainmakers. (The study looks at the 200 largest U.S. firms. Click here for survey data.)

What's not surprising to LTN readers who follow e-discovery staffing: NAWL found that 80% of Am Law 100 firms (and 50% of the second 100) employ staff lawyers (non-partnership track positions) -- and more than 60% are filled by women. These are jobs that by definition offer "little possibility of career advancement," Chen notes. (Minorities also tend to occupy these posts, which often do not include benefits.)

  In 2008, when the U.S. Census office reported depressing figures chronicling absurd gender pay discrepancies within the legal profession — women are making only 51% of what men make in comparable jobs —  I challenged "every GC, law firm managing partner, and legal vendor CEO to check their own employee records and remedy this."

It's unacceptable and an absolute embarrassment for the legal profession -- with all our self-righteous rhetoric about equality — to produce such dismal statistics. We need to fix this, now.

Compliance Looms

 

MergerTech, a San Ramon, Calif.-based investment banking firm that targets small- and midsize technology companies, has established a new practice area dedicated to legal, compliance, and information management.

"The abundance of investment capital and the rapid growth of legal technology software and service companies has created an environment of rapidly intensifying M&A transactions," says executive vice president Prashant Dubey, the leader of the new unit. "We have a number of buyer mandates from private equity firms and strategic buyers focused on applying their capital to the legal technology marketplace," advises the company, which focuses on mergers and acquisitions of tech and tech-enabled companies "from $5M to $100M in valuation."

The MergerTech Blog includes an ongoing series on "Classic Mistakes in Exit Strategy."

Help, Please!

Want to start an heated discussion? Just ask any lawyer how they feel about their firm's IT Help Desk. Or ask IT staff how they feel about the attorneys they serve.

No question about it: It's hard to hire effective entry level IT staff. In CIO|Insight, Dan Resinger cites a York College of Pennsylvania survey of 520 HR professionals/hiring managers to see what they look for (beyond baseline tech skills). The results were obvious, but why is so difficult to find candidates with these traits: 1. Courtesy and respect, 2. communication skills, 3. appropriate appearance, and 4. accepting responsiblity.

A third of respondents said that professionalism has eroded over the past five years; and 60% of hiring managers complain about "a sense of entitlement" among first-year, college-educated employees. And 39% reported problems with IT etiquette among new employees. But maybe the economy has kicked a little, um, er, attitude. Forty percent of respondents said the diminished job market has helped improve the quality of candidates.

Candidates' top concerns: opportunities for advancement, and work/life balance. 

Does success boil down to basic customer service? Castle & Nicholson CIO Erica Greathouse and I recently discussed why law firms sometimes prefer a less-competent IT staffer to an aloof expert. 

What's your take? Lawyers, what is your pet peeve about Help Desk? IT staff, what drives you crazy about lawyers? Post a comment below? 

Darwin Watch: Huron Acquires Trilantic

  Huron Consulting Group has acquired London-based Trilantic International, which offers electronic data discovery technology to clients in Europe and the Middle East.

Huron's flagship EDD software V3locity (pronounced velocity) offers processing, hosting, document review, production, and project management tools. Trilantic's products integrate "a detailed knowledge of the European Union data protection rules," says Huron CEO James Roth.

About 15 Trilantic employees will transition to Huron, including managing director Nigel Murray, who will now serve as a Huron managing director. Terms were not disclosed.

Frequent Flyer

SNR Denton (née Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Denton Wilde Sapte) has hired the vivacious Sally King as its new global chief operating officer. King, formerly a leader of ALM's Counsel Connect (the predecessor to Law.com), most recently served as COO for the Americas region at Clifford Chance. Her resume also includes Cooley, General Electric, and Verizon.

She's guaranteed to stay in Virgin Airlines' Gold level because she's going to split her time between the firm's London, New York, and Washington, D.C., offices, as well as spend time at the firm's other 45 offices in 32 countries. Probably helps that she is a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K.

King will lead operations and implement, direct, and manage firmwide "best practices," support structures, and resources as the two firms integrate into the new entity, explain co-CEOs Elliott Portnoy and Howard Morris.

"I'm really excited to be at SNR Denton so early in its combination, it is an opportunity for me to help build one-firm approach to our operations, to implement global best practices, and to build best-in-class support functions in all facets of SNR Denton's operations," King told Law Technology News today.

Says CIO Andrew Jurczyk, a member of the LTN Editorial Advisory Board, "I've recently had the pleasure of meeting with Sally and am looking forward to working with her to help define our new global technology services and systems. Sally is an excellent addition to our leadership team."

The U.S.-based Sonnenschein and U.K.-based Denton merged last month.

Tornado Warning

Larry Bodine is screaming at the top of his lungs to alert lawyers -- especially small firm practitioners -- about the American Bar Association's Commission on Ethics 2020 Work Group's Issues Paper Concerning Lawyers' Use of Internet Based Client Development Tools.

"The ABA is quietly gathering support to choke off lawyer marketing on the internet," cautions Bodine, a Chicago area marketer and lawyer. Under fire are online social networking and profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter), blogging, pay-per-click advertising, gathering information through networking websites, discussion forums, document uploads, lawyer websites, case histories on law firm websites, and more. While the ABA itself only enacts model rules and has no enforcement power, many states adopt the rules, and some states promulgate their own rules to limit marketing.

"In my opinion, the ethics boards should keep their hands off the internet. We don't need more regulation, we need less," argues Bodine on his Lawmarketing.com blog. "It is sufficient for the ethics rules to state that a lawyer may not make a false or misleading statement online; that's enough. The commission's activities are a waste of time and a threat to the public and the profession. The ethics police should focus on lawyers who steal from client trust accounts, not bring disciplinary actions against lawyers for their Facebook pages or what a lawyer said in a Twitter message."

Deadline for comments is Dec. 15. Our colleagues at The National Law Journal recently reported about the controversy here.

Good Omens?

  First quarter results are out and Microsoft beat Wall Street predictions, with a net income rise of 16% to $5.4 billion (or 62 centers per share), reports The Associated Press. That figure excludes the impact of revenue deferrals last year. Its revenue jumped 25% to $16.2 billion, AP notes.

Why? Sales of Windows 7, Office, and server software helped fuel the spike. Experts seem to agree that businesses are pulling out the checkbooks again and finally moving to Windows 7.

"We are seeing improved business demand and adoption. Our enterprise agreement rates were strong, reflecting business commitment to Windows 7, Office 2010, and our server and database products," said COO Kevin Turner on Microsoft's press release. "Customer demand and excitement for our cloud and commercial online services continue to grow as demonstrated by major new customer wins this quarter for Windows Azure and by the significant customer interest in our recently announced Office 365 service."

Law.com Re-Launches

Kudos to our colleagues at Law.com, who have just launched a major upgrade of ALM's Law.com website.

The understated, fresh design sports a surprising hot pink and cool blue color palette. The upgrade adds many new features, including a "carousel" that rotates in the middle of the site to highlight top stories from ALM's roster of publications. (It also can highlight our company's products and services, such as our LegalTech conferences.) A video box plays right from the home page.

Also new is a "most mentioned" box so you can easily follow the most relevant or controversial stories of the day. And the site adds a feature sure to please those of us who get very frustrated trolling sites and having to constantly sign in -- a new registration tool that facilitates moving through the site without having to re-register. You can take a virtual tour of the site by clicking here.