LegalTech Day 1

The annual e-discovery and legal technology show kicked off yesterday morning. WortzmanNickle were there to see what’s hot, what’s not and what’s the same.

As expected, Predictive Coding led the charge of buzz words once again this year. Many vendors offered their flavour of machine learning technology. However, some vendors appear to have realized, as we have, that Predictive Coding alone will not solve the dilemma of ever increasing e-discovery volumes and ever decreasing budgets and timelines. These forward thinking software developers are now integrating Predictive Coding into a package that includes all the tried and true e-discovery technologies, such as concept clustering, near duplication, email threading, and our trusted friend, keyword searching.

While there are many claims of unique Predictive Coding approaches, they all generally fall into one of two main categories – either quickly teach the computer up front what you’re looking for and then have it find your relevant documents, or let the computer observe as you search and find relevant documents using other methods, so that it can subtlety influence the result and present you with more likely relevant documents to review.  Both methods should theoretically end up with the same results.

Wortzman Nickle will be exploring these two approaches over the next couple of months and report in upcoming blogs and papers on the costs and benefits of each methodology.

Cloudy Forecast for eDiscovery

The Cloud and social media are hot topics in the tech world. However, a recent study carried out by the eDJ Group last fall indicates that neither have gained widespread adoption within corporations.

It is widely expected that cloud computing and social media will have a significant impact on the way e-discovery is conducted. However, the study showed that it’s not high on corporate IT’s radar quite yet. In fact, it was found that:

• Less than 16% of respondents put an e-discovery plan into place before moving data into the Cloud
• About 26% did not put a plan in place
• A whopping 58% didn’t know if e-discovery was considered when data was moved to the Cloud (which probably means it wasn’t considered)

While the number of players in this area is still quite low, this report should be a wakeup call that organizations need to consider e-discovery in conjunction with the adoption of new technologies.

Wortzman Nickle can help you navigate through the ocean of new technologies and their impact on e-discovery and records management.