EDD: Issues, Law, and Solutions

Don't" Do it yourself " eDiscovery

2012-01-27T16:01:00.000-05:00

Recently I have been privy to discussions regarding the demise of the vendor and the rise of the self collecting and processing law firm. A false confidence pervades the concept and upon careful consideration, the cost savings in no way justify the associated risks. Improperly gathered ESI can be excluded from consideration with potentially devestating results.

My collegue Charles Skamser wrote a great piece on his eDiscovery Paradigm Shift Blog which illustrates my point more eloquently than I ever could. Below is an excerpt but feel free to click the link to read the whole article

Authentication of ESI. Any person who gathers ESI must be able to authenticate and lay a foundation for that ESI. “Authentication” simply means that the person called to admit the ESI must prove that the ESI is what he or she claims it is. That person must be able to lay a foundation for the ESI.

To authenticate the evidence, the person called to testify may need to establish the following, depending upon what is sought to be introduced and the issues raised:

How the ESI was gathered.
Where the ESI was stored.
Who had access to it.
Establish the chain-of-custody
Whether other ESI was also located.
Whether a thorough search was conducted.
Whether the ESI sought to be introduced was altered from its original state.
Other essential details.

Who should be entrusted with the responsibility to gather the ESI? Who should take the witness stand to testify at trial? Certainly, the law firm’s paralegal, secretary and investigator should not conduct the ESI search unless that individual is qualified to establish the above-listed details and will lay the appropriate foundation for introduction of the ESI.

When gathering evidence it is usually not clear whether the evidence will be challenged when the party seeks to introduce it. Thus, the evidence should be gathered in a thoughtful manner that will withstand future challenges.

If ESI is gathered improperly and a party is unable to lay an appropriate foundation to authenticate the ESI, that evidence will not be admitted into evidence. This could be devastating to the case, depending on how critical the ESI was.

Just as experts are hired to provide opinions and establish essential facts, experts should be used to gather ESI. Ideally, the expert will have both technical are needed to search for, gather and introduce ESI.

The person who gathers ESI should also be a good witness. Parties must generally take witnesses as they come. There is very little control over who witnessed particular facts. However, when gathering evidence, parties are given the opportunity to select the witness. So, there should be some assurance that the person who gathers ESI will be a competent witness who can be depended upon. This witness may end up being the critical witness in the case.

Anyone can be a hero and other thoughts for a postive 2012

2011-12-31T10:21:00.003-05:00

1. Anyone can be a hero.

So what exactly makes a hero? Simply put, a hero is someone who chooses not to watch and wait in the face of a crisis. You don’t need to save someone from impending death to be a hero. You just need to speak up when your instincts tell you someone is being mistreated. The world is a better place when we all look out for each other.

2. We can choose to decrease our pain by letting go.

We can’t change that life involves pain, but we get to choose what we do from moment to moment—and we can always choose to do something that helps us live peacefully in the now.

3. It’s okay to walk away from something that hurts you.

“Love and relationships require work and responsibility. We have to learn when to stretch and when to break.”

4. Learning to complain less can make us happier.

5. We can deal with anger most effectively when we resist the urge to
immediately act on it.

6. Criticism can actually have benefits

7. Peace is often a matter of asking ourselves the right questions.

What if there was nothing I needed to fix in me? What if there was nothing I needed to change? What if I was perfect just the way I am now?

8. We have more to appreciate than we may often realize.

look around and realize we’re fortunate, even on the days when we struggle.

9. We always have the choice to reinvent ourselves.

The future does not have to create you—you create the future.

10. Stay Away from what might have been and instead on what will be.

Introducing ReadySuite 4.0 w/OCR

2011-12-17T20:25:00.000-05:00

We’re excited to announce that ReadySuite version 4.0 has been released and is now available for download.

This version includes major new features, performance enhancements, improved stability and general fixes across the board.

Some of the highlights to this release include the new OCR add-on for generating OCR text files and searchable PDFs. Other features include the ability to save project files, specify field data types, and overlay existing documents. Please see our development blog for a more comprehensive list of changes made.

ReadySuite continues to be our flagship product – bundling specialized litigation utilities used by litigation support professionals, attorneys and paralegals. Using ReadySuite, users are able to handle various tasks related to converting and validation common load files, generating OCR text files and creating searchable PDFs, converting various image file formats, performing branding, numbering, and redaction of image sets and batch printing documents.

To learn about other features provided in ReadySuite, visit our product page. Additionally, you may get started with ReadySuite by downloading our 14-day trial or by contacting oursales staff.

Important Upgrade Information

This release of ReadySuite is considered a major release – with significant changes to the core product – and will require an upgrade for existing customers.

ReadySuite licenses issued on or after October 16, 2011 qualify for a free upgrade. Licenses issued before October 16, 2011 require an upgrade purchase for ReadySuite 4.0. Customers with a license to ReadySuite 3.x can upgrade to ReadySuite 4.0 with a 40% discount.

Now that ReadySuite v4.0 has been officially released, we want to highlight some of the important changes made in this release.

New Features:
Added ‘OCR Wizard’ utilizing RecoStar and Tesseract OCR engines
Added ‘Create PDFs Wizard’ for creating searchable PDFs using OCR engine
Added ability to create and save projects
Added ability to auto-save projects on a time based interval
Added ability to set field data types (text, memo, date, number, etc) during import process
Added ‘Manage Fields’ wizard for modifying fields and setting export masks
Added preference to parse Summation field data types or import only as ‘Text’
Added option to specify the ‘DOCID’ field when exporting load files
Added page level information: TIFF Compression, Width (in.), Height (in.), DPI
Added wizard for ‘Import Text Files’ to associate image sets with text files
Added ability to overlay images, text, and/or natives to documents already imported
Added record number output (;Record 1) for Summation load file export
Added ‘Open Output Folder’ links to wizards generating output
Added ‘Path Editor’ for globally editing existing document paths
Added advanced numbering to import wizards with identifier preview
Added preference to disable Page Rows in grid to improve performance/memory usage
Added ‘Memo’ as field data type to improve performance/memory usage
Added ‘Output bad records’ when importing delimited text files
Added check resources option when importing delimited text files
Added ability to parse multi-page and single-page files from a Summation briefcase
Added prompt to save project file when closing application
Added ability to create and delete custom fields using ‘Modify Fields’ dialog
Added ability to set the internal ‘DOCID’ field to a custom field
Added export mask to Number, Date and Boolean fields to change output format
Added page timeout to config settings for RecoStar OCR engine
Added project name and save status to title bar
Added ‘Link In Place’ option when exporting delimited text file
Created 64-bit version – available for download by request
Wizard for ‘Import Delimited Text’ can now populate new fields (useful for importing a “tag list”)
Wizard for ‘Number Documents’ can now track counters by their unique prefix
Wizards for importing Images, Text, Native and Load Files are more streamlined

Important Changes:
Changed folder browser in Wizards to sort alphabetically
Improved warning messages generated by various wizards
Improved error handling in ‘Import Delimited Text’ wizard
Improved remembering last folder paths for folder and file chooser dialogs
Improved drag/drop functionality to remove lock in Windows Explorer
Improved support for creating output with JPEG2000 and JBIG2 options
Improved display of various document and page count numbers
Improved document and page counts in status bar for grid when document set is filtered
Improved ability to sort by field data type in grid
Improved editing fields in grid and metadata panel by data type
Improved ‘Batch Update’ dialog, can search/replace during update and propagate to family
Improved validation of documents during and post import
Improved ability to check for duplicate pages across all imported documents
Improved ability to hash image, text and native files separately
Improved license check with new folder config setting and silent fail option
Improved reading ‘@D @V’ when improperly formatted for Summation DII load files
Improved memory usage and stability throughout application
Improved numbering by prefix
Improved ability to auto-detect file encoding
Improved ability to auto-detect field data types when importing delimited text
Fixed status bar display when document count 6 digits or more
Fixed sensitivity in Find/Replace dialog
Fixed issue where grid disappears under certain circumstances
Fixed crash with toolbar when application left idle for long duration
Fixed numbering documents when value is only in prefix field
Fixed crash with ‘Trim Documents’ wizard when modifying bounds
Fixed project 0kb by saving to temp file first under certain circumstances where saving fails
Fixed rare crash caused by splash screen
Fixed display of installed licenses, added reminder expiration reminder dialog
Fixed grid filter if count is zero after deleting records
Fixed various tab orders in dialogs and wizards

Note that the above list is not a comprehensive list, but includes more of the important changes we’ve made since the last release in October.

Tis the Season for Reasonableness : I-Med Pharma, Inc. v. Biomatrix Inc

2011-12-16T14:31:00.001-05:00

A federal judge in a contract case has excused compliance with a discovery agreement that would have required the plaintiff to produce an estimated 65 million documents, finding it would cost too much to screen them for privilege.

"This case highlights the dangers of carelessness and inattention in e-discovery," District Judge Dickinson Debevoise wrote in a Dec. 9 ruling. "While Plaintiff should have known better than to agree to the search terms used here, the interests of justice and basic fairness are little served by forcing Plaintiff to undertake an enormously expensive privilege review of material that is unlikely to contain non-duplicative evidence."

The materials at issue in I-Med Pharma, Inc. v. Biomatrix Inc., 03-cv-3677, were found on the computer system of I-Med Pharma, a Quebec medical supply manufacturer and distributor. It claims breach of contracts that gave it exclusive Canadian distribution rights for Biomatrix eye care products. After Biomatrix, of Ridgefield, combined with Genzyme of Cambridge, Mass., in 2000, the resulting company, Genzyme Biosurgery, allegedly began failing or refusing to provide I-Med the products.

The search of I-Med's computers was done pursuant to a May 17, 2010, stipulation that resolved discovery disputes between the parties. I-Med agreed to allow a forensic search of its computer network, servers, and related storage devices by a defense computer expert who would be required to sign a protective order.

The search would look for documents containing 58 specified keywords that included names of companies, products, and persons involved with the contracts as well as other terms like refund, FDA, credit, claim, complaint, and profit.

The search was not limited to active files or particular time periods and it included unallocated space, which holds deleted and temporary files. Part of the expert's job was to determine how and when the documents and files containing keywords were deleted or modified.

The expert was to summarize the findings for both sides. The documents and data recovered would go first to I-Med for review. Within 60 days of receiving the documents, I-Med was to designate what was confidential, create a privilege log and turn it the log over to Genzyme along with copies of everything else.

The expert gave I-Med the records in ZIP file format in September 2010, but after I-Med complained that it would require more than 10,000 hours just to open everything, the parties agreed on a more manageable format.

to enjoy the rest of Mary Pat Gallagher's excellent piece click here

Christmas 2011 -- Birth of a New Tradition

2011-11-16T15:38:00.001-05:00

Christmas 2011
Birth of a New Tradition

"As the holidays approach, the giant Asian factories are kicking into high
gear to provide Americans with monstrous piles of cheaply produced goods --
merchandise that has been produced at the expense of American labor. This
year will be different. This year Americans will give the gift of genuine
concern for other Americans. There ...is no longer an excuse that, at gift
giving time, nothing can be found that is produced by American hands. Yes
there is!

It's time to think outside the box, people. Who says a gift needs to fit ina shirt box, wrapped in Chinese produced wrapping paper?

Everyone -- yes EVERYONE gets their hair cut. How about gift certificates
from your local American hair salon or barber?

Ever consider using a local eDiscovery vendor instead of a big national chain. Do you like to be pampered and treated like gold. With a local vendor you are a big fish in a small pond. Superior Document Services is one such small business that loves to pamper you.

ym membership? It's appropriate for all ages who are thinking about some
health improvement.

Who wouldn't appreciate getting their car detailed? Small, American owned
detail shops and car washes would love to sell you a gift certificate or a
book of gift certificates.

Are you one of those extravagant givers who think nothing of plonking down
the Benjamins on a Chinese made flat-screen? Perhaps that grateful gift
receiver would like his driveway sealed, or lawn mowed for the summer, or driveeway plowed all winter,

There are a bazillion owner-run restaurants -- all offering gift
certificates. And, if your intended isn't the fancy eatery sort, what about
a half dozen breakfasts at the local breakfast joint. Remember, folks this
isn't about big National chains -- this is about supporting your home town
Americans with their financial lives on the line to keep their doors open.

How many people couldn't use an oil change for their car, truck or
motorcycle, done at a shop run by the American working guy?
Thinking about a heartfelt gift for mom? Mom would LOVE the services of a
local cleaning lady for a day.

Don't forget scanning and copying is available locally often at a better price than a
Kinko:s or UPS store. No cookie cutter approach here.

My computer could use a tune-up, and I KNOW I can find some young guy who is
struggling to get his repair business up and running.
OK, you were looking for something more personal. Local crafts people spin
their own wool and knit them into scarves. They make jewelry, and pottery
and beautiful wooden boxes.

Plan your holiday outings at local, owner operated restaurants and leave
your server a nice tip. And, how about going out to see a play or ballet at
your hometown theater.
Musicians need love too, so find a venue veaturing local bands.
Honestly, people, do you REALLY need to buy another ten thousand Chinese
lights for the house? When you buy a five dollar string of light, about
fifty cents stays in the community. If you have those kinds of bucks to
burn, leave the mailman, trash guy or baby sitter a nice BIG tip.

You see, Christmas is no longer about draining American pockets so that
China can build another glittering city. Christmas is now about caring about
US, encouraging American small businesses to keep plugging away to follow
their dreams. And, when we care about other Americans, we care about our
communities, and the benefits come back to us in ways we couldn't imagine.

THIS is the new American Christmas tradition. Pass it ON

The most important thing in life is to decide what is most important.

Are you a boy ( or girl) Genius?

2011-11-03T10:30:00.001-04:00

Superior Document Services is looking for computer savvy folks looking to get a foot in the door at a leading technology company. We are a fast paced, deadline oriented company with a work hard, play hard mentality.

If you have experience in Desktop & Web Solutions (C#, PHP, Java), M Server Architecture/Consolidation, Virtualization Technology, data base design etc - we'd like to talk to you.

Students welcome. - flexible hours.

A firm understanding of technology a must. Attention to detail is essential. Overtime highly probably. Nights and weekends probable too. Hourly pay depending upon skill set and experience. Great potential for growth.

Location: Richmond
Compensation: 12.00 + per hour or more

ReadySuite 3.5 Released: Litigation Supports' Little Gem

2011-09-03T08:56:00.000-04:00

We’re excited to release new features, enhancements, and fixes to ReadySuite – ourspecialized bundle of utilities for handling various documents and imaging tasks.

Features include a new ‘Check Resources’ wizard, which allows you to re-check the integrity of your documents after the import process. In addition, you can identify the pages in a document that are color or blank using our sophisticated object detection algorithm. Also, we added the ability to detect text in PDF documents, useful for determining files that may need to be OCRed.

Further, we’ve added the ability to export text along with your images using the ‘Export Documents’ wizard. Various options will allow you to roll single-page text to multi-page, word wrap lines at a specified column, force output file encoding to ASCII or UTF-8, and create placeholder text files for documents with no text.

Highlighted on our development blog are some changes we’ve made to the delimited text import process. Next week, we’ll post more updates outlining other important changes made, including the new ‘Batch Manager’, for updating paths of documents already imported.

Our pricing structure has also slightly changed – which primarily affects those using the functionality provided in ReadyConvert. We will now be pricing ReadyConvert with our standard support package at $79.95. If you’d like to upgrade to ReadySuite, you can purchase the entire package at $499.95 with our standard support package or for $579.95 with our priority support package.

To learn about other features provided in ReadySuite, follow our product page. Additionally, you may get started with ReadySuite by downloading our 14-day trial or by contacting oursales staff.

Service Is Job #1 in Litigation Support

2011-09-01T10:26:00.000-04:00

CASE STUDIES: HOLIDAY WEEKEND MAILER

Bankruptcy mailer totaling 2.1 million pages needs to be completed in less than 72 hours…

“Call Superior!

They can do it".....Oh YES WE CAN

Issue

Bankruptcy mailer for former Fortune 500 totaling 2.1 million pages need to be completed in less than 72 hours with no prior notice over Thanksgiving weekend.

Background

Superior is contacted by a law firm’s bankruptcy team at approximately 2 p.m. on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving day. Parameters included copying 525 pages 4,000 times; collating and clipping the 3 separate sections; stuffing the mailer into tyvek envelopes; affixing postage and delivery to post office before midnight Saturday. Scanning, OCR, burning to 600 CD's, labeling, QC'ing and Posting them was a secondary assignment.

Challenges

Finding 4,000 tyvek envelopes with 2 hours left before a holiday weekend.
Coordinating delivery of 1.5 million sheets of paper; 1000 additional paper boxes and 40,000+ clips with 3 hours to go before close of business on Wednesday of a holiday weekend
Coordinating employees’ schedules to ensure round the clock over the Thanksgiving holiday in production, quality control; packaging and delivery.

Solution

Utilizing Superior’s network of suppliers, we were able to arrange delivery of all job materials before the close of business. The Superior Document Services team pulled together and worked for more than 72 straight hours through the holiday weekend to complete the project on time and accurately.

Long time coming: EDRM Service Provider Code of Conduct

2011-07-20T12:17:00.000-04:00

On July 9 The Electronic Discovery Reference Model group posted an EDRM Model Code of Conduct for service providers. I applaud their hard work tackling what could be considered a thorny issue and I can only hope this code of conduct will start some serious discussions in the eDiscovery realm. While the code of conduct carries no enforcement authority it does put a long time in coming focus on important issues that should concern both vendors and end users in the eDiscovery marketplace. . The MCoC addresses five key principles: professionalism, engagement, conflicts of interest, sound process, and security and confidentiality. Each principle focuses on service providers and is accompanied by a corollary focusing on the client perspective.

The release of the Code of Conduct is particularly timely given the results of the just-completed second annual ALM Vendor Satisfaction Survey, which for the second year in a row found that the respondents consider customer service the number one criterion for choosing an e-discovery vendor. From my perspective that is not always the case, but as a small regional service provider peering from the outside looking in; I can only hope that this hypothesis is proven correct in the long run. Superior Document Services has always maintained a high touch and buck stops here approach to customer service.

An short version of the main principals is excerpted below ( the full version which is well worth reading in its entirety is here:

1. Service Providers should perform their work in a competent, accurate, timely and cost-effective manner, adhering to the highest standards of professionalism and ethical conduct.

2. Service Providers should collaborate with Clients to establish and memorialize the terms of their relationship including any reasonably foreseeable parameters as early as possible upon the initiation of any new engagement.

3. Service Providers should employ reasonable proactive measures to identify potential conflicts of interest, as defined and discussed below. In the event that an actual or potential conflict of interest is identified, Service Providers should disclose any such conflict and take immediate steps to resolve it in accordance with the Guidelines set forth below.

4.Service Providers should define, implement and audit documented sound processes that are designed to preserve legal defensibility.

5. Service Providers should establish and implement procedures to secure and maintain confidentiality of all Client ESI, communications and other information.

Guidelines

Service Providers should develop policies and procedures for ensuring the security and integrity of Client ESI, confidential communications and other information.
Service Providers should exercise reasonable diligence to remain knowledgeable and competent in regards to best practices related to privacy and data security in all aspects of handling Client ESI, confidential communications and other information.
Prior to engagement, Clients should make reasonable inquiry of their Service Providers regarding the level and types of security measures that the Client deems appropriate for that specific engagement.
Prior to engagement, and upon inquiry by a prospective Client, Service Providers should make full disclosure of all standard security measures implemented by the Service Provider, as well as security measures available and recommended for that specific engagement.
Service Providers should implement reasonable measures to secure their facilities from unauthorized physical access.
Service Providers and Clients should implement reasonable measures, appropriate to Client requirements, in connection with securing ESI, confidential communications and other information from unauthorized logical access.
Service Providers should implement reasonable measures, appropriate to Client requirements, to secure ESI, confidential communications and other information contained on portable devices taken outside the Service Provider’s facilities.
Service Providers working internationally or with Client ESI coming from international sources must be capable of complying with applicable foreign data privacy laws related to security and confidentiality.
All ESI, communications and other information received from a Client should be presumed by a Service Provider to be confidential unless otherwise stated in writing (See also, Principle 1 – Professionalism).
1Service Providers have the duty to promptly notify Clients of the unauthorized release, disclosure, or loss of Client ESI, confidential communications or other information in the custody of the Service Provider.
Upon request of a Service Provider, Clients should not disclose to any unrelated party any of the Service Provider’s proprietary or confidential information provided to the Client in connection with an engagement or prospective engagement; provided, however, Clients may make such disclosures as reasonably necessary.
Service Providers and Clients should agree in writing to the disposition of Client ESI, confidential communications or other materials upon the termination of any engagement, including its return or destruction.

Casey Anthony Murder Trial: The Computer Evidence

2011-07-19T09:52:00.000-04:00

Keith L. Jones of JDA wrote this informative and excellent piece:

Computer evidence was introduced into the highly publicized trial where mother Casey Anthony has been accused of first degree murder for the death of her toddler, Caylee Anthony. Three computer forensic experts were used by the prosecution: Detective Sandra Osborne, Detective Sergeant Kevin Stenger, and Mr. John Bradley. I also expect the defense team to have a computer forensic expert or two in order to dispute the evidence presented against Casey Anthony, as so far it seems to be the only evidence I have seen that could show premeditation. In a series of blog articles I hope to discuss the computer evidence and the use of expert witnesses in the context of this trial......

During his live testimony in front of the jury, Bradley went through the detailed Cacheback report line by line and discussed the Google searches a user at the computer conducted. Bradley also discussed the articles viewed as a result of the Google searches, such as articles found on Wikipedia. Some of the searches and article titles accessed by the user at the computer consisted of:

Chloroform
Alcohol
Death
Self defense
Rbsd
Hand to hand combat
Head injuries
Middle meningeal artery
Ruptured spleen
Chest trauma
Internal bleeding
Hypovolemia
Inhalation

The user at the computer also visited Facebook, MySpace, and PhotoBucket, which were accounts Casey Anthony also reportedly frequented. In addition to the searches listed above, the prosecution focused on the searches and article titles containing the following phrases:

How to make chloroform
Making weapons out of household products
Neck breaking

On cross examination the defense attorney zeroed in on the bug in Mr. Bradley’s software that originally brought him into the case. During cross examination Bradley also testified that he was not paid by the prosecution for his testimony. Bradley made a statement that there were discussions about payment by the prosecution, but it would be worked out after the trial and he was not there for the payment. The defense attorney then asked Bradley about the time difference between the user browsing the chloroform content and then browsing other subject material not related to chloroform. The period of time was approximately three minutes, according to Bradley and the Cacheback report he read from. The attorney then asked Bradley if three minutes was the longest time the user at the computer could view this particular chloroform material. Bradley answered that he was correct.

On redirect examination, the prosecution used a line of questioning that may have been headline of the computer forensic testimony in this trial. Bradley testified that it was recorded in the internet activity that the web browser had visited one particular website that potentially contained content about chloroform at least 84 times. A user visiting a website at least 84 times could show that the browsing was not accidental.

In case you were wondering, the defense attorney attempted to establish that Bradley was unable to determine which physical person was sitting at the keyboard in front of the computer and browsing this content. This is a common line of questioning because, in general, it can be difficult to determine which person initiated activity without additional information. Such additional information could be the act of logging into specific accounts belonging to a person, or perhaps the computer user knowing something only one person could know.

This was the end of the testimony on the first day. Personally, I disagreed with Bradley’s testimony about the user browsing chloroform content for only three minutes. I do not believe you can have that opinion, given the facts. For example, Firefox version 2 had support for tabbed browsing and the user could also open multiple browser windows. Every time a user visits a new site in a new tab or browser, a new entry is made into the internet history file (or the “visited” counter is incremented). Firefox version 2 internet history files will not record the time a browser or tab is closed, or when the subject matter can no longer be viewed by the user. I feel the defense attorney was trying to demonstrate that the user could not possibly have enough time to read about “how to make chloroform”, but in reality, in this case, it seems as if we are unable to tell how long the material was available to the user on the screen. However, Bradley did state that the article for chloroform was visited 84 times by a user on this computer. I believe this is strong evidence to support that a person had been reading the material numerous times in the past, and the amount of time the user spent reading about chloroform could not be accurately established with the data used in Bradley’s testimony.

The next morning Bradley finished his testimony. I was happy to see that the prosecution finally asked Bradley about tabbed browsing and if multiple tabs could be open. They also established that Bradley was unable to give an opinion on whether or not a web page could have been printed out. Although there are some artifacts in Windows that could potentially show that a web page was printed out, Bradley only had access to the one 3.2MB Firefox history file. I believe the door was left open to assume that the user could have printed the chloroform web pages to review at a later time. Mr. Bradley was excused and the trial continued with other witnesses not as relevant to the computer evidence. The only additional noteworthy testimony came from Casey’s brother who said he did not delete the internet history manually on that computer system and did not recall surfing to those sites in that timeframe.

Although potentially technically strong, I believe that the prosecution’s presentation of the computer evidence in this trial may have downplayed its potential importance. All three expert witnesses either read from their law enforcement report or from the output of a tool designed for computer forensic examiners, not jurors.

Read the entire article by Keith J Jones here

The Tragedy of Wrongful Convictions

2011-06-29T14:16:00.000-04:00

Because forensic science results can mean the difference between life and death in many cases, fraud and other types of misconduct in the field are particularly troubling. False testimony, exaggerated statistics and laboratory fraud have led to wrongful conviction in several states.

Since forensic evidence is offered by "experts," jurors routinely give it much more weight than other evidence. But when misconduct occurs, the weight is misplaced. In some instances, labs or their personnel have allied themselves with police and prosecutors, rather than prioritizing the search for truth. Other times, criminalists lacking the requisite knowledge have embellished findings and eluded detection because judges and juries lacked background in the relevant sciences, themselves.
In some cases, critical evidence has been consumed or destroyed, so that re-testing to uncover misconduct has proven impossible. Evidence in these cases can never be tested again, preventing the truth from being revealed.
One weak linkThe identification, collection, testing, storage, handling and reporting of any piece of forensic evidence involves a number of people. Evidence can be deliberately or accidentally mishandled at any stage of this process.

The risk of misconduct starts at the crime scene, where evidence can be planted, destroyed or mishandled. Evidence is later sent to a forensic lab or independent contractor, where it can be contaminated, poorly tested, consumed unnecessarily or mislabeled. Then, in the reporting of test results, technicians and their superiors sometimes have misrepresented their findings. DNA exonerations have even revealed instances of "drylabbing" evidence – reporting results when no test was actually performed. Read the rest of the article here

Created by: Forensic Science

How Superior Document Services Makes Great Customer Service Our Company's Culture

2011-04-28T11:14:00.000-04:00

Customer service is usually part of every company's policy but at Superior Document Services great customer service IS our corporate culture. Our bread and butter if you will. All of our employees are a empowered with decision-making capabilities to serve you - our customers in the best possible manner.

The cornerstones of Superior Document Services focus on service is worth elaborating on:

Lightning Fast Response Times

From our dead center downtown location to our 24 hour live on call services our focus is on being ready to do the impossible. Many large businesses do not reply to customer emails or calls promptly This sort of response won't fly in a customer-focused litigation support business. We strive to provide lighting fast responses to customer questions, comments, or orders. When an email or call comes in its treated like a fire alarm. We answer the phone and emails round the clock and - like a hospital emergency room; are available when you need us. where you need us.

The Extra Mile

If a client asks Superior to do something - we do it - with a smile. Our decades of experience make us a clearing house for all kinds of broad based knowledge that can provide priceless back up for whatever needs you may have. Our nationwide network of contacts is just a phone call away.

No Excuses

We Stand behind our work. We don't try to blame it on the customer, the circumstances, another vendor, or the position of the moon in the sky. We are 100% results oriented. We understand its not who made a mistake; its how fast can an issue be resolved. It's amazing what a difference it can make if you just say "An error has been made, but I will make it right".

Listen

Like we , reallylisten. We never assume you know what you want. We strive to understand what you are saying and ask for clarifications on things that might be ambiguous. We understand that our clients might be unfamiliar with certain terminologies in our profession. We are not order takers - we are proactive.

Keep Promises

If we say you’re going to do something, we do it. It’s part of being a professional. If, due to complexity or other complicating issues we need more time on something, we promise to let you know as soon as possible, not after you’ve already missed the deadline. Honoring our commitments is of utmost importance.

Expect Problems, Be a Solution

Expect problems.Knowing that there will be problems, you should be prepared to handle them when they come. .Customers that have had problems and believe they were treated fairly will often be your most loyal customers in the long run. Our profession is heavily reliant on communication skills.

Never Argue About Returns
Superior Document Services has a 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed return policy. We will never fuss about any return for any reason. Our concern is long term relationships, not "one and done". The more we know about you and your business the more assistance we can provide.

Use the Preliminary Conference to Save E-Discovery Costs

2011-04-19T11:56:00.001-04:00

I found a great article written by Michael B. de Leeuw and Eric A. Hirsch that strikes to the heart of the new ediscovery conundrum put in clear context by Senior U.S. District Judge Sandra S. Beckwith in Moody v. Turner Corp.,that the mere availability of vast amounts of electronic information can lead to a situation of the ESI-discovery-tail wagging the poor old merits-of-the-dispute dog.

Lawsuits are a every day reality for business entities today. The average U.S. company faces 305 suits at any one time; that number jumps to 556 for companies with $1 billion or more in revenue.

With each lawsuit comes the obligation for discovery -- production of evidence for presentation to the other side in a legal dispute. In the past, this evidence consisted primarily of paper records, such as contracts, bills of sale, printed correspondence and so on. However, with the dramatic fall in the price of electronic storage (I bought a 2 TB hard drive for under a $100 yesterday) , 95% of all business communications now are created and stored electronically. That places the focus on e-discovery: finding and managing electronically stored information (ESI)

All too often in today's litigation environment, electronic discovery issues turn into expensive deathtraps that threaten to overwhelm the merits of the actual dispute between the parties. But prepared litigants can and should take measures to avoid the "gotcha" pitfalls attendant to e-discovery long before the terabytes have been put through the thresher.

One of the best strategies for avoiding obvious e-discovery hazards (other than winning an early Twombly motion) is to become fully informed about a client's information technology structure at the outset of a case. By now, sophisticated litigants understand that taking this critical step helps clients comply with their production obligations and avoid spoliation claims. Of course, gaining the same familiarity with the other side's systems is equally important, particularly since doing so early in a case, before discovery requests are served, can lead to a more productive and efficient exchange of information.

The prevailing view in both New York state and federal courts is that parties are free to use discovery devices, such as the deposition of a corporate representative, to explore an adversary's information technology systems to discover the location of potentially relevant documents. But, as we know, formal discovery devices can be expensive and time consuming for both parties and are, therefore, not the most efficient ways to gather information.

While both the New York Uniform Trial Court Rules and Federal Rules of Civil Procedure contemplate that the parties will engage in a frank discussion early in the case about e-discovery, this process is all too often ignored or not fully taken advantage of. And that is a shame. By demonstrating to your adversary at an early stage that you understand your client's IT infrastructure and are prepared to answer basic questions about it on an informal basis, the costly use of formal discovery devices to explore these issues may be avoided.

Such preparedness may also force your adversary into a quid pro quo through which you can learn valuable information about the other side's systems.

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VCU Basketball :Dialing long distance to a National Championship?

2011-04-01T11:30:00.002-04:00

After barely making it into the NCAA Tournament, the VCU basketball team has advanced all the way to the Final Four. Everyone is buying VCU final 4 shirts like crazy - I'm waiting for the National Champion shirts to come out before I whip out my credit card!

ßome fans might not like that VCU and Butler have to play each other to advance to the NCAA Tournament's finale, but I like it for a few reasons: 1) The matchup between the two teams is very intriguing because each squad will be playing the underdog card; 2) how Bulter head coach Brad Stevens will game plan against VCU coach Shaka Smart (and vice versa) will be interesting to witness; 3) the fact that each team will be playing for a chance to take down one of colleges basketball's elite programs (either No. 3 UConn or No. 4 Kentucky) will crank up an already intense showdown; and 4) when Amazing (Butler) faces off with Miraculous (VCU), it does not get much better than that.

VCU has been arguably the most consistently impressive team in the NCAA tournament, going from one of the First Four participants to the Final Four. The Rams beat teams from five of the six BCS conferences, with four of the wins coming by double digits. In the Elite Eight, VCU pulled the biggest regional final upset since 2006, knocking off top-seeded Kansas.

VCU has been unreal from beyond the 3-point arc during the NCAA Tournament — the Rams have made at least eight triples in each of their five games, and have hit 12 in three of them. Butler has to figure out a way to make them uncomfortable from distance

Here are some amazing facts you might not know about VCU basketball:

Shaka Smart, currently VCU head coach - soon to be coaching a major school if history follows its normal course - is named after Shaka Zulu, the southern African king who united hundreds of thousands of people

John Calipari, coach of the University of Kentucky basketball team, will earn a bonus larger than the annual base salary of Virginia Commonwealth University coach Shaka Smart

Previously, VCU’s biggest accomplishment was producing the thrash metal band GWAR.

Don’t be surprised if … Brandon Rozzell shines on the big stage. The VCU senior can catch fire very quickly from beyond the arc — he had three 3-pointers in the second half against Florida State, then four in the first half against Kansas in the Elite Eight contest — and his confidence can invigorate his teammates. He could become a star, very quickly, on this stage.

The Colonial Athletic Association is experiencing a renaissance with an unbelievable stretch of two Final Four appearances in six years.That's one more than the Big 12, one more than Conference USA, two more than the Mountain West, Atlantic 10, WAC and any other conference outside of the Horizon (which has sent Butler in consecutive seasons) from the power six leagues.

VCU has now ruined more brackets than any team in tournament history. Diana Inch is the only person in the entire Yahoo! universe to accurately predict all four Final Four teams, an almost impossible task this year. Consider that Only 0.1 percent of entries had VCU in the Final Four.

VCU plays a style of basketball known as “wreaking havoc” through the heavy use of full court press (VCU led the CAA in steals this year).

Butler is among the smartest teams in all of college basketball and they're certainly the most experienced team left in this tournament. That said, they've been shaky with the basketball at the guard spot at various times along their journey. They almost collapsed and blew a 20 point lead when faced with Wisconsin's desperate full court pressure and they've had double digit turnovers in three of their four tournament games-without facing a true pressing team

Got ECA? Consider Data Sampling.

2011-03-22T13:18:00.001-04:00

It seems like everywhere you turn in litigation support circles Early Case Assessment (ECA) is thrown around like a frisbee at a frat party. However, despite its frequency in conversation, ECA can mean much different things to many different people in different cases. In the simplest of matters, ECA refers to the use of processing technology to "cull" or filter data that does not meet the scope of relevance in a given case. In more complex matters, ECA can entail the application of technologies to not only filter irrelevant data, but to leverage the processed information in order to gain a better understanding of the facts and merits of the case. Undoubtedly, both ECA applications are an important area of focus when it comes to reducing the risks and costs associated with litigation.

When confronted with an almost impossible data analysis problem, a tried and true technique to solve it has been the use of sampling. The mathematical analysis behind sampling is something that has been studied for quite a number of years. Also, sampling has also been put into practice for well over seventy years, in many fields from predicting results of elections and assessing quality of electric bulbs. Why not do the same for certifying your ESI productions, while also addressing defensibility and reasonableness?

Sampling as a way to assess quality is something the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Search Group authors covered in detail, with a strategy in a comprehensive EDRM Search Guide (see Section 9.5 and Appendix 2). And, while much of that work is still to hit the mainstream litigation scene as a general practice, I was pleasantly surprised to see it receive attention from a fellow blogger and litigator, Nick Brestoff, who highlighted this in a very thoughtfully crafted article in Law.com, titled A Strategy to Sample All the ESI You Need. I commend his article for helping the community understand the practical difficulties in getting a certifiable result that attorneys can stand behind. And, it is highly likely that the current practice is to certify your electronic discovery without a real measure of validity behind it.

That leads us to back to the mechanics of sampling, the math behind it, and its defensibility. As the EDRM Search Guide notes, meaningful sampling can only be done by the one who has the data, i.e., the producing party. While the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) Rule 26(a) lists required disclosures as well as signing and certification guidelines per Rule 26 (g), there is no agreed upon way to specify sampling parameters as well as the results of sampling.It is in this context, Nick Brestoff’s article is significant – it explores practical ways in which the producing party can shift the sampling mechanics to the requesting party. I do think, however,that there is a logistical problem with this–most litigators will balk at producing the largely irrelevant and non-responsive items to the other side.

Perhaps the real need is for the requesting party to specify in their Rule 26 (b) meet and confer, that the production be certified for completeness by also including a statement on sampling and its results. A simple request such as, “Sample the data for 98% confidence level and 2% error rate, and report the number of responsive documents” could be sufficient. The producing side can perform random sampling, per the sampling goals for the above request, selecting 13526 documents (based on the sampling table of EDRM Search Guide). This allows the attorneys representing the producing party to certify and sign off on an agreed-upon target.

In addition to the EDRM Search Guide, The Sedona Conference, Working Group Commentary, Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process is an indispensable resource for understanding the role of sampling. This paper discusses at length, several sampling methods, their applicability for various purposes, including certifying that the results meet a certain quality criteria. In addition, a number of electronic discovery cases have mentioned sampling as a way of overcoming the explosion of data volumes. A primary application of sampling is for evaluating proportionality claims, something that has moved from a simple assertion into an informed argument, with specificity on proving cost burden.

In Barrera v. Boughton, 2010 WL 3926070 (D. Conn. Sept. 30, 2010), the court ruled that a phased approach to ESI discovery is appropriate and quotes an earlier case, S.E.C v. Collins & Aikman Corp, 256 F.R.D. 403, 418 (S.D.N.Y. 2009), that “[t]he concept of sampling to test both the cost and the yield is now part of the mainstream approach to electronic discovery.” The sampling recommendation in this instance was both a reduction of number of custodians from forty to three, as well as a significant reduction in the date range for the search. What was initially a $60,000 ESI search and discovery effort was reduced drastically to under $13,000.

Similarly, sampling is suggested in both M. Adams & Assoc., L.L.C. v. Fujitsu Ltd., No. 1:05-CV-64, 2010 WL 1901776, and Mt. Hawley Ins. Co. v. Felman Prod., Inc. as a way to perform a small set of search terms on a smaller number of custodians so as to get a sense for the larger electronic discovery costs.Clearone Communications v. Chiang offers another example of sampling by the use of Boolean logic to combine more common search terms thereby avoiding over-inclusiveness.

Per the Sedona commentary definitions, this type of sampling is referred to as “judgmental sampling” wherein the practitioner has a general sense of which of the several custodians and date range is most likely to offer the greatest yield. As judgmental sampling becomes more widely adopted as a way of controlling costs, electronic discovery sampling can embrace the benefits of statistical sampling as well. It is a natural next step, as even with narrow sampling criteria of judgmental sampling, the cost of review can be high. One area where statistical sampling has an advantage is that quantifiable measures of error and confidence intervals are possible, while judgmental sampling has no such formal measurement. Again, if the requesting party wishes to ensure a level of completeness and quality and if the producing party needs a basis for certifying their productions, statistical sampling can be a powerful aid.

If you've gotten this far - I would be remiss if I failed to give a shout out to the VCU Rams and Richmond Spiders basketball teams for representing our fine city in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Basketball Tourney.

There's more to the Dalai Lama than Carl Spackler

2011-03-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

Dalai Lama’s 18 rules for living

At the start of the new millennium the Dalai Lama

apparently issued eighteen rules for living.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Does using the Internet in connection with a crime automatically create an interstate offense: PS3 Hack to decide

2011-02-10T09:18:00.003-05:00

The Internet and digital technologies broadly raise huge questions of federal law. Does using the Internet in connection with a crime automatically create an interstate offense, since information sent and received via it passes through many states? If illegal information is posted online, is it directed at the residents of other states, not just the user’s own? If someone utilizes an online business that is based in another state in commission of or connection to their violation, do they give more legitimacy to these claims?

For the past several weeks, Sony has been trying to stop the spread of a soft-ware based hack that opens the PlayStation 3 to installation of 3rd-party software and allows the use of pirated games. Hacker George Hotz, the man who released the hack’s code on his website and YouTube and a New Jersey resident, is being sued in California by Sony for breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, commonly known as the DMCA, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The company has been granted an injunction by the Californian district court; Hotz was told to remove the code from his website immediately (which he did) and turn over all of his hard drives, computers and devices involved in the hack to Sony within 10 days.

Hotz’s lawyer, Stewart Kellar, is now battling Sony over jurisdiction – that is, which court should hear the case. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, covering California, ruled in Schwarzenegger v. Fred Martin Motor Co. that a three-pronged test must be met to establish Californian specific personal jurisdiction. The test demands that a defendant “purposefully direct his activities or consummate some transaction with the forum [California] or resident thereof, or perform some act by which he purposefully avails himself of the privilege of conducting activities in the forum, thereby invoking the benefits and protections of its laws,” that Sony’s claim “arises out of or relates to the defendant's forum-related activities,” and that the “the exercise of jurisdiction must comport with fair play and substantial justice, i.e. it must be reasonable.”

This test requires that Sony show that Hotz’s activities were specifically directed at California residents – unlikely, considering that the information was posted online and not addressed specifically to Californians – or that Hotz had some sort of transaction with a resident of California. Sony argues that because Hotz used Twitter and YouTube to distribute his hack, and that since both companies are Californian, this requirement is fulfilled. Sony also points out that Hotz’s website had a PayPal donation button, that PayPal is a California-based company, and that Hotz received payment in relation to his hack. This connection is tenuous at best; according to Kellar, “Mr. Hotz expressly tells people on his website not to give him donations for his efforts,” and Sony’s only claimed transaction via PayPal was one the company initiated.

Sony also points out that its PlayStation Network user agreement includes a clause by which users submit to Californian jurisdiction, in cases Sony initiates against hackers. Kellar again argues that this connection is tenuous, pointing out that the PlayStation Network was not used to create or distribute the offending code.

The question of jurisdiction is hugely important; Sony is suing for costs and monetary damages. As a huge, multinational company with vast resources, the case is already balanced against Hotz. If he or his lawyer must also travel from his New Jersey home to San Francisco to argue the case, even more cost and difficulty would accrue against their already limited resources. Sony’s complaint asks attorney’s fees and court costs, for damages incurred against the company – lost profits from pirated games that might otherwise be sold – as well as statutory damages of $200-$25,000 per each violation of the DMCA, provided by USC § 1203(c)(3) and -(3)(B).

The case is hugely important. It may clarify precedent for questions of jurisdiction, and questions of the role of online activities in law more broadly; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was used, unsuccessfully, to prosecute Lori Drew, a mother accused of teasing a teenage girl to death over Myspace. It may create a chilling effect, warning users away from modifying their devices to install their own software on them – the Library of Congress recently protected users hacking their phones and bypassing copyright protection systems to install their own software, exactly the behavior engaged in by Hotz, albeit on a different device. It seems entirely possible that appeals to the Circuit Court, and perhaps even the Supreme Court, will be made to clarify these questions, and determine whether the California district court acted properly, however it rules.

Football for food

2011-02-04T10:53:00.005-05:00

Today's my birthday...yada yada yada. Another year older.

I awoke to the best present a father could get - a fantastic article about my son Austin in the local Richmond newspaper. I'm very proud of him - and it sure was nice to see him get some recognition for his selfless charitable activities.

Below is the article in its entirety.

Football for food

On Super Bowl Sunday, Atlee Freshman Austin Wilson will have, for the 4th straight time, a benefit football tournament.

By KATHERINE CALOS
Published: February 04, 2011

The big game for Austin Wilson on Sunday will be his own — the Rainmaker Classic, Super Bowl Edition.

For the fourth consecutive year, he's celebrating his birthday by inviting friends to Hanover County to play football for a cause. This year, he hopes the game will make money rain down on the Central Virginia Food Bank.

Austin, now 15, started asking for donations to others instead of gifts for himself when he was in fourth grade.

"I'm so fortunate," he said. "I couldn't figure out anything I wanted for my birthday. We decided to give to charity. It was a better choice."

That first year, each child brought presents for St. Joseph's Villa. In the fifth grade, Austin donated to the Hanover Humane Society.

The next year, the first Rainmaker Classic football tournament was held at New Highland Baptist Church near the family's home in AshCreek to benefit the food bank. They've kept it going, raising as much as $1,000 one year.

The year it rained, they moved the games inside at The Ozone in the Hanover Industrial Air Park.

Austin started playing football in recreational leagues when he was 5 or 6 years old. He was a quarterback at Chickahominy Middle School and on Atlee High School's freshman team.

For the Rainmaker Classic, 24 players are divided into teams. "Everybody has a big guy, a fast guy and a quarterback," Austin said. He's been on the winning team twice.

In previous years, the Rainmaker has been held closer to Austin's birthday on Dec. 3. He was sick this year, so it was postponed.

In the NFL, Austin is a big fan of the Rams, following the lead of his father, Kriss Wilson, who's president of Superior Document Services. The whole family – including mother Karen and brother Jack — went to St. Louis before Christmas to see a Rams game. They happened to sit next to the family of the team trainer, who had a pass that got Austin into the players' dining hall after the game. Austin had bought a football helmet, and it was covered with players' signatures.

The only thing that could make this Sunday better would be if the Rams were in the Super Bowl. Since that's a bigger birthday present than a Rainmaker can expect, he's rooting for the Packers.

Case law : Cops In California Don't Need A Warrant To Search Your Cell Phone For Info

2011-02-03T09:04:00.006-05:00

Search and Seizure
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particulary describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The next time you're in California, you might not want to bring your cell phone with you. Especially if you aren't planning on behaving yourself.

On January 3rd, 2011, California’s Supreme Court ruled in The People v. Gregory Diaz that phones carried at the time by suspects apprehended by police do not have Fourth Amendment protections. The case began in 2007 with the arrest of Gregory Diaz, for selling a controlled substance. Diaz was taken to a police station, where a detective removed Diaz’s phone from his person, and placed it with other evidence collected in the case. The arresting officer began to interview Diaz, and in the course of the interview, looked at the text messages on Diaz’s phone. One read “6 4 80,” or 6 pills for $80. Confronted with this text, Diaz admitted to selling drugs.

In court, however, he argued that viewing of his text messages, by police and without a warrant, violated his Fourth Amendment protections to be secure in is person, papers and effects against warrantless search. An exception to this protection exists: “incident to lawful arrest,” (United States v. Robinson (1973)) an officer may search an arrested suspect and the area immediately around him. Diaz argued that since cell phones today carry huge amounts of information, including information about associates, e-mails, text messages, records of calls and other such revealing data, it should not be subject a search, like clothing or a cigarette package were in prior case law, but rather should be treated like a closed container or box—that once separate from the actor in a significant period of time and space, it should not subject to warrantless search (United States v. Chadwick).

Dissenters on the California court found this argument persuasive; however, the court held that the character of seize evidence did not determine whether it could be searched; merely its possession or control by the actor at time of arrest made it eligible for a later search. The court made a comparison to a traveler carrying a paper bag with some personal effects, and an executive with a locked attaché case. Both, the court reasoned, should share equal protections. So then should a phone carry no more protection than other, unprotected methods of carrying personal information; perhaps an address book, or other “small spatial container” with “highly personal, intimate and private information, such a photographs, letters or diaries”.

It seems to me that the court seems to make fundamental misunderstandings about the digital nature of these devices; a cell phone can contain thousands of emails, photographs, text messages, records of meetings and birthdays, information about associates unlimited in depth and in breadth, and huge numbers of personal notes analogous to those found in a diary. A cell phone can easily hold, in its small form, more enough information to fill dozens of scrapbooks with photographs, stuff whole briefcases with e-mails and text messages, were they to be printed out on paper, fill many, many address books with information about friends and acquaintances, hold years’ worth of information that may take several calendars or planners to hold. In short, cell phones hold more information than could ever be carried by an individual, were it not in a digital form. In ignoring this fact, the court sets a dangerous precedent where a simple arrest can allow authorities to view records containing a record of the individual’s entire life since possessing a cell phone, a terrifying prospect for those with any desire to maintain protection from searches unreasonable in scope and breadth. Laptop computers and the like were not addressed and begs the question: If your phone is password protected, would they need a warrant to use some kind of equipment to get into it? Because having to break into a phone puts it clearly beyond the "plain view" rules to me.It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

This doesn't seem to apply to your everyday traffic stop, Still, this seems invasive, and not all the justices were in agreement with the ruling

Dissenters Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno wrote:

"The potential intrusion on informational privacy involved in a police search of a person's mobile phone, smartphone or handheld computer is unique among searches of an arrestee's person and effects."

California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson told the media that the split decisions in California and Ohio could lead the U.S. Supreme Court to personally look into the issue of police searching cell phones.

Superior Document Services provides customized support to law firms | Richmond Times-Dispatch

2011-01-03T07:46:00.008-05:00

A nice article in todays Richmond Times Dispatch touches on the essence of what we do at Superior Document Services, yet misses the human factor - the loyal and hard working Superior Document Services employees.

We have some of the most dedicated, passionate and tenacious employees on the planet. I can't tell you how many 24 hour shifts they have worked, how many holidays they have spent at Superior and how many thousands of hours Superior's team has spent learning and training to be the best they can be. "Making it happen" isn't just lip service - its what we do!

The heart of a business is the loyalty and strength of its employees - so this article is a testament to the backbone of Superior - its employee's. The soul of a business is its customers, Thanks to the Richmond legal community for your support and loyalty over the past 12 years.

the text of the article is below:

Kriss Wilson and Renee Covington of Superior Document Services usually can be found at their downtown office working early in the morning.

"Most of our business is on an emergency basis for the legal field to meet court-imposed deadlines for documents," Wilson said. "We do whatever it is we have to do."

Wilson and Covington, along with Jeff Neiman, started the Richmond-based company in 1998. Superior provides law firms with support including copying, scanning, forensic collecting, back-file converting and storing documents.

"We provide anything a lawyer needs to prepare a case for trial," Wilson said. "We provide start-to-end solutions."

Since its founding, Superior has grown from having three copy machines, two computers and six employees to 15 copiers, hundreds of computers and 30 employees. Sales are up 39 percent for the 12 months ending Nov. 1 compared with the same period a year ago.

"I think this is directly related to our large investment in infrastructure and software during 2009," Wilson said.

The company operated from a 600-square-foot office at Sixth and Franklin streets until November, when it moved to 707 E. Main St.

The three owners decided to start Superior so it would cater to the needs of the Richmond market.

Wilson and Covington met in the 1990s while working at competing national firms that provided niche services to the legal profession. Neiman worked in banking.

"We are nimble and small and can turn on a dime," Wilson said. "We wanted to customize our services to the customer's needs instead of using a cookie-cutter approach."

Lawyer John Craddock Jr. of the firm LeClairRyan likes that Superior is locally owned and operated.

"You are dealing with a person who understands your needs and is immediately responsive," he said. Superior "does whatever it takes to get the job done, and they do it right. We have used them on all kinds of different jobs. They are capable of doing high volumes of work."

In the beginning, Superior's main business was copying legal documents.

Superior added services such as managing electronically stored information used during the discovery stage of litigation as law firms and companies have moved from paper to electronic data storage.

"Electronically stored information has to be collected in a way that is consistent with best practices," said Michael Yager, director of e-Discovery at Spotts Fain PC, a Richmond-based law firm. "We use Superior in many instances to perform forensic collections of (electronically stored information). They can prepare data in a way to seamlessly upload it into our review platform."

Yager also discussed Superior's dedication during an out-of-state document collection and review project for the law firm that had to be done on a strict timeline.

"They picked me up at midnight on a Thursday and drove for 12 hours to another state to perform collection," Yager said. "They drove straight back and started processing the job on Saturday. At the end of the project, our client cited them for their level of commitment."

Most of Superior's larger clients have offices around the world. In recent years, Superior has sent some of its employees to China and Taiwan to collect data.

Confidentiality is of utmost importance.

"Everything we do is under the strictest confidence," Covington said. "We work in a secured facility that is not open to the public."

The company works with law firms, federal enforcement agencies, government agencies and corporations.

They often work on high-profile cases. "CNN showed pictures of our boxes going into the Michael Vick bankruptcy trial," Wilson said.

Gilbert "Bud" Schill Jr., a partner at the Richmond law firm McGuireWoods, uses Superior because of its reliability and impeccable customer service.

"It's an excellent company run by excellent people," he said. "They are very accommodating. When you need something on a weekend or holiday, they will go out of their way to help you out."

Predictive Pricing and other Ediscovery Trends

2010-12-29T10:28:00.007-05:00

As 2010 comes to an abrupt end with tons of work in our shop and a positive outlook for the upcoming year I thought I would take jump on the bandwagon and take a brief look at what I see as the upcoming hot topics and trends in eDiscovery for the new year.

Predictive Pricing: as data sets grow larger and larger AND LARGER the legal community will continue to search for ways to prevent electronic discovery costs from exceeding legal exposure and attorneys’ fees. I predict that the pricing models in play currently , that monetarily reward service providers based on the amount of data that is processed are going to disappear. The current model is dead. At present eDiscovery is a volume-driven activity-- more volume equals higher costs. Typically reactive approaches to legal edicts are executed without a clear eye on costs which pains everyone involved in the long run. This approach is unsustainable as volumes grow unabated. Creative vendors will find ways to implement predictive pricing models to everyone's benefit.

Sources of data will become more and more diverse : PST's, hard drives and network servers are standard locations for forensic collections. As e-mail is bypassed by informal discussion threads, facebook postings; foursquare and tweets, attorneys dealing with eDiscovery preservation issues must realize the importance of identifying evidence that may exist outide traditional e-mail boxes and server shares. Notice how little email your teen ager uses - as Mr Bob Dylan once said sagely.. " The times they are a changin'."

The "Cloud" will become increasingly relevant in the litigation support model : Gartner predicted that 2010 would be the year in which cloud computing would reach the 'peak of inflated expectations'. I think that in 2011 the cloud computing model will become mainstream, the technology will finally be ready to offer computing power on a consumption basis using a browser based apps. The cloud computing model will allow a firm or service provider to apply e-discovery best practices in a cost-effective manner.

Software suppliers will focus less on the functions of their own applications and more on the ease with which they fit into, and exchange data with, other systems. Similar to car manufacturers changing their talking points from performance to talking about their their eco-credentials instead, software suppliers and the vendors that use this software will increasingly be rated for the support which they give to their client.

Workflow: SIngle Source end to end eDiscovery with consolidated data identification, preservation, collection and processing can dramatically accelerate the document review process.. Reducing the number of discrete processes also decreases the amount of hands who may need to be involved in an eDiscovery matter. When eDiscovery involves manual effort, more people are required, which can strain budgets and result in reduntant steps.

The near future looks bright. 2011 will be a year of opportunities in the eDiscovery realm for those willing to grab them.

New technology, new ways of doing the work and new ways of funding the process all present opportunities in the coming year to those who can embrace and understand those chagnes

Attitude is what matters - Dan Waldshmidt and the Edge of Explosian

2010-12-28T09:05:00.002-05:00

I've been out of the office for a few days celebrating the holidays with family and friends. I've still been checking emails; writing protocols and generally keeping in touch with my business without physically being at the new national headquarters.

Sitting at my desk today - I got this article from boy genius and all around amazing marketing guru Dan Waldshmidt from his Edge of Explosion blog

I loved the story; I loved the message; I love how Dan brought his point to live. I cannot help but share his post in its entirety. I hope you like it as much as I did - if so please check out his inspirational blog here

What you see is what you get.

What you think is happening will happen.

It’s your attitude that drives outcomes.

Quite literally, how you allow yourself to interpret what happens to you, drives what you do.

A young girl was walking around the shore in the late afternoon where along the beach dozens of starfish were trapped in the sand, having been thrown onto the beach by an unsuspecting current.

A man stood watching as the the young girl began to pick up starfish and place them delicately back into the water. Step after step. Starfish after starfish. She worked with purpose .

Finally the man spoke,”You are most kind, but with hundreds of starfish lost on the beach, does it really matter?”

After finished placing another starfish in the water, the young girl replied, “It will for that one.”

Nothing matters more than attitude.
If you think that failure is permanent, then you’ll never allow yourself to learn from loss.
If you think that validation means you are doing something worthwhile, then you’ll never create anything world-changing.
If you think that “getting it right the first time” is the key to success, you won’t keep trying when it matters.
If you think that people are out to take advantage of you, you’ll never see the potential in those around you.

Your attitude doesn’t change anything that is.

It changes who you are…

It allows you to see that impossible really isn’t.

And that means that anything you want for yourself is as real as the attitude you have powering you.

Powering you past the impossible.

The Taxonomy of Data Security

2010-12-26T10:00:00.006-05:00

Occasionally Superior Document Services receives requests from customers and potential customers wanting assurance that their highly confidential data is secure while utilizing Superior's online hosting platform RELATIVITY. Superior thinks it is important for both our potential and current business partners to recieve full disclosure regarding how our data center partnership works. With razor sharp clarity I understand the importance of transparency when it comes to explaining our security process'.

First and most importantly our data center is interconnected by a high performance, fully-redundant private network that ensures the security, integrity and availability of our customers' business applications and technology infrastructure. Highly skilled technical personnel maintain the both data center and our review platform 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The data center, located right here in Richmond Virginia is engineered with multiple levels of security, uninterruptible power, redundant HVAC systems, fire suppression and around-the-clock monitoring and management.

Level 1: Proximity card access with PIN is required to enter the building. You are not yet in the data center.
Level 2: Proximity card access with Biometric (fingerprint) scan is required to enter the data center.
Level 3: All hardware is secured in a locked cage or steel mesh cabinets fitted with combination locks.
Level 4: Video surveillance cameras are placed throughout the facility.
Level 5: Staffed 24x7x365

Our data center is engineered with an uninterruptible power system and backup generator to deliver seamless power. In the event of a commercial power failure, our isolated UPS system will provide immediate backup power until diesel generators take over the load and continue operation of the center.

With best-in-class environmental HVAC units to control and monitor the temperature and humidity in the data center our redundant HVAC keep sthe average temperature in each data center at 70 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure a consistent operating atmosphere for your mission critical technology infrastructure.

The data center utilizes dry-fire suppression systems that can be deployed manually, or by a sequence of three failures anywhere in a data center zone. Each facility is also fully equipped with smoke and heat detection sensors as well as fire doors and handheld gas-based fire extinguishers.

Superiors' network infrastructure provides customers with reliable connectivity and fast performance and includes around-the-clock monitoring, notification and reporting Our management incorporates ‘best practice’ guidance from outside standards, such as ISO 27002, DSS, and others when designing and implementing our controls, but we customize our controls based on what makes the most sense for us and our customers. while minimizing or eliminating potential downtime regardless of matter size, number of reviewers, or the number of matters under active management.

Our data center's SAS 70 certification is intended to give our customers confidence that we are providing a high level of security, monitoring and management of their valuable business assets to help them meet the increasing compliance requirements of HIPAA, HITECH, Sarbanes Oxley, Graham Leach Bliley and other legal and regulatory regimes.

In today’s legal and regulatory environment, attorneys increasingly confront complicated electronic discovery scenarios involving multiple matters and numerous parties that can extend over many years. Superiors clients can be confident that we have implemented state-of-the-art security measures to protect their data - because in the end game - data security is priority one.

Our review platform - Kcura's Relativity employs a highly granular security architecture. This means that any object, such as a user, tag, field of metadata, document, collection of documents, or even highlights and redactions, can be secured, limiting access to users without permissions. Relativity system administrators have the ability to grant or deny any of these permissions on a customized basis

Relativity’s security architecture allows a collection of data to undergo expert review in a limited environment, or in an expanded environment by the case team, eliminating the need for multiple iterations of the same database. In addition to workflow-based security, Relativity provides a variety of secure authentication methods. With a standard Microsoft infrastructure, Relativity allows IT teams to secure and back up data with the same strategies they employ for other enterprise systems.

Benefits to our law firm clients of the Relativity security model include:
Native files and TIFF images streamed into local memory, preventing fragments of sensitive documents from being left on a workstation hard drive
User or group access restricted to specific IP addresses
Restrictions on printing, copying text, and even disabling “print screen”
Customized access where users see only the data, documents, and features to which they have rights
The ability to create secure subsets of documents for experts and clients
Securable coding forms, metadata fields, and document annotation/redactions, allowing for multi-party access
RSA integration to provide Two-Factor authentication
A secured 128-bit SSL encryption, the same used by online financial institutions storing personal information.

You know the Law.
We know litigation support.

Dave Tolleris: is he Richmonds very own Santa Claus?

2010-12-25T08:57:00.005-05:00

Wxrisk.com is a private weather forecast service located near Richmond VA specializing in providing Energy and Grain traders with weather forecasts from Day 3 to Day 30 and seasonal forecasting. Locally Wxrisk's main focus is on VA NC WVA and MD. Over the past week I've really enjoyed watching as Dave battles the charts and tries to predict what the forecast will bring.

I'd like to thank Dave for making weather not only interesting, but easier to understand. ! Thanks for your amazing abilities, your honesty in being able to admit a mistake and keeping us so accurately informed so we can all be prepared and take the precautions we should.

As of 9 AM this morning Dave is calling for a major storm- here's is exact forecast from 24 minutes ago

the local NWS forecast in in central & eastern VA is way too timid with this storm... They Have 3-6" for RIC- DOUBLE THAT please... ALL the data-- ALL of it... shows RIC east to the Bay in the 0.75 to 1.25" Liquid... NWS is assuming a 12:1 so DO THE MATH... HIGH WINDS... there is GOOD chance -JMHO BLIZZARD warnings might be needed Saturday Night and Sunday

So here's a holiday toast to Dave and his efforts on behalf of us Richmonders to enjoy a white christmas.

Check him out of Facebook and on the web or watch him go head to head with Richmond's own Mark Holmberg

Perspective: A wonderful holiday thought

2010-12-22T09:12:00.004-05:00

Another year has passed.

A monumental year. A year of change on numerous levels personally, professionally and on the world wide stage. Superior has moved to a beautiful new national headquarters, heavily invested in the infrastructure to make our products and services unique to our clients, and proudly watched the personal and professional growth of many of our employees

In turning my attention to family; friends and good cheer this holiday season - I feel compelled to share this tale sent to me by one of my wiser friends, Tommy Oliver.

this powerful story pretty much sums up the reason for the season to me and hopefully will to you too......

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.
They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.
On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, 'How was the trip?'
'It was great, Dad.'
'Did you see how poor people live?' the father asked.
'Oh yeah,' said the son.
'So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?' asked the father.

The son answered: 'I saw that we have one dog and they had four.
We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.
We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.
Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.
We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.
We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.
We buy our food, but they grow theirs.
We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.'

The boy's father was speechless.
Then his son added, 'Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are.'

Isn't perspective a wonderful thing?
Makes you wonder what would happen if we all gave thanks to God for everything we have, instead of worrying about what we don't have.

Appreciate everything you have, especially your friends, your family and your health. Give some hugs, sit back and enjoy all that is yours. Vow to let go of the stress and embrace the positive in 2010. Help someone less fortunate. Live.

Life is too short and good friends are too few.

God Bless you in 2010 and Happy Holidays!

Cloud Computing in Ediscovery - an evolution or an optical illusion?

2010-12-10T11:08:00.010-05:00

Is it inevitable that Cloud computing is coming to E-Discovery?

Yes I believe it is. And faster than anyone expects.

In layman’s terms, cloud computing enables users to access state of the art technology services without expertise with, nor control over, the technology that supports the service. I like the analogy used by Nicholas Carr in his book The Big Switch , which compares the evolution of cloud computing to the transition from personal power generation to modern utilities.

Rather than store data on an organization's own computer network, the data is stored on servers "in the cloud" and available on demand by the law firm or service bureau. Instead of installing , purchasing and maintaining data/software on a network or desktop computer, the data/application is hosted on computers in the cloud and available on demand ideally on a “ per consumption basis."

Utilizing “the cloud” can result in dramatic cost savings because companies using cloud services need not purchase their own infrastructure or software, need not hire people to maintain it, and need not regularly upgrade. In addition, cloud computing is highly scalable. So rather than maintaining an excess of computing power -companies can maintain variable capacity levels to suit their immediate needs using the cloud. More importantly, utilizing the cloud will allow companies to take advantage of the best and latest technology - since they will not have to disassemble and rebuild their entire IT infrastructure in order to upgrade.

Law firms that practice litigation are experiencing data growth rates which are estimated at 45% annually according to Gartner.

Consider that:

The world sends over 60 billion e-mails daily.
90% of all documents generated today are electronic.
A single hard drive can store the 40 million pages or more

For litigation support services such as Superior Document Services the problem is growing more acute as corporations provide increasingly more and more data as part of the discovery process to their legal council. The cloud solution allows law firms to push litigation support cases into the cloud immediately upon receipt of data, Both the data and the data processing can be accessed in the cloud for immediate and on-going access by both attorneys and service providers Cloud storage eliminates ongoing capital investments in expensive storage hardware to accommodate the unpredictable growth of litigation support data.

Of course their are numerous valid concerns about utilization of a cloud in the litigation arena - who has access?; where is my data?; is my data secure?; data segregation and just the uneasy feeling that your data is out of your physical control.. At first these concerns may seem daunting to a risk averse law firm. In fact that the risks can be minimized I think that the biggest disconnect for me was the issue of Public clouds. For all their benefits of low cost, elasticity and flexibility my perception is that public clouds are not yet able to offer service levels and ironclad security for me to entertain the possibility of recommending that solution to my clients.

A key distinction between public and private clouds, and one that is important from a legal standpoint, is that public clouds likely have multi-tenancy,where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations. With private clouds, analysis of risk may be very different. Private cloud helps deliver lower IT costs, improved quality of service and greater business agility while offering better control and more secure access to corporate information. The most important consideration is ithat the security controls in cloud computing are for the most part the same as in any IT environment.

Mark my words - Private Cloud computing is coming....fast and furious

ReadySuite Version 3.2 Released

2010-11-11T07:21:00.003-05:00

ReadySuite, a specialized bundle of utilities for handling various document and imaging tasks, has been upgraded to include various new features and maintenance fixes. This release includes a new text and OCR viewer, with support for single and multi-page text files. Similar to the image viewer, the text viewer can be re-arranged allowing you to easily view images, text and metadata all at once.

Other features added to this release are an advanced renumbering system, allowing you to number documents based on an existing coded field. Additionally, we’ve enhanced the endorse process to allow landscape images to be endorsed in portrait mode and included grayscale reduction for smaller image sizes. Finally, load files can be exported with the new “link in place” option, which will retain the absolute path to referenced image, text and native files.

Using ReadySuite, law firms and litigation support providers can handle simple tasks such as converting PDF files to single page tiffs, re-endorsing image sets with new production numbers while maintaining a cross reference file and batch printing with custom folder and cover separator sheets.

To learn about other features provided in ReadySuite, follow our product page. Additionally, you may get started with ReadySuite by downloading our 14-day trial or by contacting our sales staff.

Lawyer Files Motion So He Won't Miss World Series

2010-11-01T10:56:00.003-04:00

Poor guy - all this is for naught with the Giants up 3-1 in the series- GO GIANTS

Most legal motions are pretty dry documents -- but not this one.

Dallas attorney Darrell Cook has asked an Irving judge to postpone a routine hearing because he has tickets to Game 1 of the World Series -- and the judge granted Cook a continuance based on the following.
"To put it bluntly, Darrell must be in San Francisco to attend to very important baseball matters and really, really needs to not be obligated to attend the hearing scheduled for Oct. 27, 2010, as he has no one to cover for him so that he can see to his business in San Francisco," his heartfelt emergency motion for continuance states.
Cook explains how he had no way of knowing the Rangers would be in the World Series when the court date was set.

"So when this setting was received, Darrell was convinced he would be in attendance, as it was unimaginable that anything the Rangers could do would interfere with such setting," the motion states. "But then suddenly and without warning, the Rangers began a steady march toward credibility."
In the motion, Cook describes how his love affair with the Rangers began when the club moved to Arlington in 1972 when he "was but a lad of 13." He goes on to recap this year's roller-coaster season, from the revelations about Ron Washington's drug test to the team's bankruptcy filing to the signing of Cliff Lee to the utter defeat of the "Evil Empire known as the New York Yankees" just last week.
It could be the best legal motion ever filed. After all, what other legal document will ever say, "It should be pointed out that A-Rod, also known as A-Fraud, took a called third strike to end the series and secure the pennant for the Rangers?"
As the motion goes on to say, "It has no significance to this motion, other than the fact that Darrell likes to point it out as much as possible."
He ends by making a plea for justice.
"The continuance is not sought merely for delay alone, but so that justice may be done," the motion states. "In particular, so that Darrell can be present in San Francisco for Game 1 of the World Series while Cliff Lee wields his usual style of postseason justice to the hapless souls otherwise known as Giants lineup."
Cook, who hopped on a plane for San Francisco Wednesday, arranged for another lawyer to be at the court just in case. Turns out that wasn't necessary.
"That's how lawyering go," Cook tweeted Wednesday, while paying homage to Rangers manager Ron Washington's now famous analysis of the team's 8th inning Game 1 meltdown to the Yankees where he said, "That's the way baseball go."

Cook's twitter feed is well worth a look if you are a world series fan; dwcook at Twitter

Can Hash values leave your E-discovery Team with Egg on its Face?

2010-10-10T10:00:00.005-04:00

A lot of rhetoric has been focused lately on the use of the MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) hash code to uniquely identify one item and defensibly compare it to another. All of this stems from the fact that there has been at least one instance where two different documents resulted in the same MD5 hash. So how troublesome is this when including or (more importantly) excluding items from case review?

MD5 hashes are widely used today on countless file servers and P2P networks, as well as a way to guarantee file integrity in the E-discovery realm. It is more popularly known today as a “digital fingerprint.” Hash is the bedrock of e-discovery because the digital fingerprint guarantees the authenticity of data, and protects it against alteration, either negligent or intentional. Hash also allows for the identification of particular files, and the easy filtration of duplicate documents, a process called “deduplication” that is essential to all e-discovery document processing.

According to a report from security researcher Dan Kaminsky, the MD5 (define) cryptographic algorithm may be at risk. This means that files, applications and programs supposedly authenticated and verified by MD5 could potentially be compromised.
According to Kaminsky, this makes them blind to any signature embedded within MD5 collisions.

In a research paper titled, "MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Some Day," Kaminsky expanded on the theoretical work done by Chinese security researchers Xiaoyun Wang, Dengguo Feng, Xuejia Lai and Hongbo Yu on "Collisions for MD5 Hash Functions." Kaminsky released a tool Stripwire to demonstrate some of the attacks he describes.

A hash (define) collision essentially means that you could have two identical outputs from a hash function. That situation may lead to an algorithm that is not considered to be cryptographically secure and can be attacked. In August, French research Antoine Joux presented an unpublished paper at the Crypto 2004 show similar to the original Chinese research that Kaminsky expanded upon.

The 128-bit (16-byte) MD5 hashes (also termed message digests) are typically represented as a sequence of 32 hexadecimal digits. The following demonstrates a 43-byte ASCII input and the corresponding MD5 hash:

MD5("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog")
= 9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6

Even a small change in the message will (with overwhelming probability) result in a mostly different hash, due to the avalanche effect. For example, adding a period to the end of the sentence:

MD5("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.")
= e4d909c290d0fb1ca068ffaddf22cbd0

As you can see the simple addition of a period completely changes the hash value

i found an article written by Matt Harnish of Fios that states:

Since 1997, it has been known that, theoretically, two different items could produce the same MD5 hash. Only recently has it been shown with tangible data that two sets of data (“vectors” in this case) that were different produced the same MD5 hash code. Interestingly, it has taken a lot of dedicated effort over a long period of time to produce evidence of this single collision within a type of e-discovery data that is not very relevant to everyday loose data and email.
Also, remember that most of the studies have been with vectors looking at “multi-collision attacks” and “forced expansion failures” – typically with authentication. Not something your data deals with? I didn’t think so. And, yes, there has been a recent discovery of a short phrase that could be manipulated in such a way as to produce the same MD5 hash. Is this indicative of the types of documents and email that would be relevant in litigation? Highly doubtful. Even if it was, the metadata surrounding the items was not considered or factored into the offending MD5 hash. Any e-discovery providers worth their salt will consider both the data itself as well as the metadata in some proportions during processing. As such, the examples causing concern and controversy are not based on anything that resembles the data that is dealt with during e-discovery, and they do not include the parameters that legal professionals today incorporate.
Sure, there are those out there who raise scary-sounding issues (e.g., if two files have the same hash, then two files appended with the same data also have the same hash); however, the fact remains that the likelihood of duplication over two different sets of data using an MD5 hash is 2^128 (or, in more common terms, 1 in 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 or 340 billion billion billion billion or 340 undecillion). That is an incredibly low probability of occurrence, especially in light of the fact that the likelihood of two humans having the same fingerprint is somewhere between 1 in 6.4 billion (Galton study) and 1 in 100 billion billion (Osterburg study). Regardless of which fingerprint study you prefer, the MD5 hash is certainly much more unique than human fingerprints – this is why the hash code is sometimes referred to as data’s “digital fingerprint” – yet human fingerprints are often considered to be one of the almost “irrefutable” pieces of evidence in criminal matters.

The Federal Indentity Credentialing Committee (FICC) put it nicely when they reported on March 8th that a MD5 "compromise is not seen as a major impact to the security product and services industry". See page three of the FPKI minutes: http://www.idmanagement.gov/fpkipa/

in other words carry on ...for the time being anyway

eDiscovery Searching 101: Don’t Get “Wild” with Wildcards

2010-09-27T13:20:00.004-04:00

I just stumbled across an article by Doug Austin at the brand new eDiscovery Daily blog. The blog looks interesting and this article hit home from personal experience with deficient keyword search terms. To expand on this:

Presently litigants most commonly search repositories of electronic data for documents containing defined search terms (keyword searches) or search terms appearing in a specified relation to one another (Boolean searches). These search technologies have been in use for years. But keyword and Boolean searches are not perfect solutions; these searches will identify only those electronic documents containing the precise terms and will not catch documents using words that are close, but not identical, to the specified search terms, such as abbreviations, synonyms, nicknames, initials and maybe most importantly misspelled words.

On the other hand, using more search terms may reduce the risk that an electronic search will miss a relevant document, but only at the price of increasing -- often quite dramatically -- the number of irrelevant documents found in the search

Evidently weary of deficient keyword searches, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck recently issued a self-styled "wake-up call" to members of the bar in the Southern District. Instead of attorneys designing keywords without adequate information "by the seat of their pants," Peck appealed for keyword formulations based on careful thought, quality control, testing and cooperation. "

Here's part of Doug Austin's blog entry - it can be found in its entirety here

Several months ago, I provided search strategy assistance to a client that had already agreed upon several searches with opposing counsel. One search related to mining activities, so the attorney decided to use a wildcard of “min*” to retrieve variations like “mine”, “mines” and “mining”.

That one search retrieved over 300,000 files with hits.

Why? Because there are 269 words in the English language that begin with the letters “min”. Words like “mink”, “mind”, “mint” and “minion” were all being retrieved in this search for files related to “mining”. We ultimately had to go back to opposing counsel and negotiate a revised search that was more appropriate.

How do you ensure that you’re retrieving all variations of your search term?

Stem Searches

One way to capture the variations is with stem searching. Applications that support stem searching give you an ability to enter the root word (e.g., mine) and it will locate that word and its variations. Stem searching provides the ability to find all variations of a word without having to use wildcards.

Other Methods

If your application doesn’t support stem searches, morewords.com shows list of words that begin with your search string (e.g., to get all 269 words beginning with “min”, go here – simply substitute any characters for “min” to see the words that start with those characters). Choose the variations you want and incorporate them into the search instead of the wildcard – i.e., use “(mine or “mines or mining)” instead of “min*” to retrieve a more relevant result set.

Some applications let you select the wildcard variations you wish to use. As a result, you can avoid all of the non-relevant variations and limit the search to the relevant hits.

Ready Suite version 3.2 released

2010-09-14T09:14:00.000-04:00

Google Instant - the next Google Wave or the Next Big Thing?

2010-09-08T14:29:00.006-04:00

For a guy like me trying to navigate 20 sites a minute on average - this latest google feature is exciting and with it rolling out today I may have to work on finding the "end of the internet" in record time.

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits
Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Ohio Lawyer Suspended for Billing More than 24 Hours in a Day

2010-08-26T07:54:00.001-04:00

An Ohio lawyer has been suspended for overbilling local courts for her representation of poor clients, submitting bills for more than 24 hours a day on three different occasions.

The lawyer, Kristin Ann Stahlbush of Toledo, will be suspended for two years, with the second year stayed if she completes a one-year probationary period, the Legal Profession Blog reports.

According to an Ohio Supreme Court opinion (PDF) issued Tuesday, Stahlbush billed the courts in Lucas County for more than 24 hours a day on at least three different days, and more than 20 hours a day on five other occasions.

The court said Stahlbush failed to keep adequate records of the hours she worked, submitted inflated fee requests, and sometimes “merely guessed at the time she had spent on a case.” She had no prior discipline, however, and was known as a competent and hardworking lawyer.

If she was in one of the big law firms they’d probably have had a platoon of defense attorneys working for her, and they would have lauded her as a rising superstar.

2010-07-23T13:33:00.004-04:00

Just a reminder for all you guys out there, Art-180's 3rd Annual Jonny Z festival is Saturday, August 7th on the 200 block of Shields Ave. in between Joe's Inn and Shields Market. If you like fun, art, music and community then bring your butt down there, we'll be there for sure!

For those of you who may never have met Jonny Z - we at Superior were blessed to had an opportunity to work with one of the greatest people I have ever known. Personally I think of him everyday and am still in awe of his compassion; caring; energy; enthusiasm and love. Saying Jonny lived life to the fullest would be like saying Mt Everest is a "big' hill. RIP Jonny

An unstoppable force: Sherry Harris and Conor Crowley Join Forces

2010-07-14T08:47:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to one of my favorite people in the E-Discovery universe. Not only is Sherry a thought leader in E-Discovery best practices; she is a natural leader and a genuinely fantastic person.

MCLEAN, Va., July 13 /PRNewswire/ -- The Law Offices of Conor R. Crowley today announces the addition of industry leader Sherry B. Harris as Senior Discovery Advisor. Sherry was most recently E-Discovery Advisor at Hunton & Williams LLP where she was a valued thought leader in all litigation areas involving technology for over 30 years. Her contributions included development and implementation of firm-wide E-Discovery Best Practices, and assembling and training a firm-wide team of nearly 100 internal e-discovery consultants to provide knowledgeable resources to the firm's clients, attorneys and staff. Sherry's background includes vast experience in document-intensive, multi-jurisdictional complex litigation and regulatory investigations. She also has a strong background in antitrust compliance, corporate records management, legal hold procedures and information lifecycle management. She has worked with corporate clients to develop defensible legal hold processes and litigation readiness plans, providing customized training programs for in-house legal departments and business units in corporations throughout the world. Sherry also has tremendous experience assisting corporations with designing and implementing standardized litigation management protocols to achieve a consistent, defensible approach to litigation management across all practice areas.
Sherry is a charter member of The Sedona Conference® Working Group on Best Practices for Electronic Document Retention and Production, a member of The Sedona Conference® WG1 Steering Committee and a member of the RFP+ User Group. Sherry is co-editor of The Sedona Conference® Glossary: E-Discovery & Digital Information Management (Second Edition), and co-author of The Sedona Conference® Best Practices for the Selection of Electronic Discovery Vendors: Navigating the Vendor Proposal Process. She also serves on the Georgetown University Law Center E-Discovery Advisory Board, and has a long history of participation at CLE events, and involvement in pro bono activities.
Sherry can be reached at 804-513-0969 or sharris@crowleylawoffice.com
About The Law Offices of Conor R. Crowley:
The Law Offices of Conor R. Crowley brings together the expertise and experience of Conor Crowley and Sherry Harris to provide clients with an unparalleled team of thought leaders. With decades of practical experience in litigation and corporate best practices, we are uniquely equipped to provide solutions to the challenges posed by complex litigation and information management. We listen carefully to our corporate and law firm clients' concerns, issues and needs before crafting cost-effective, strategic advice in the areas of E-Discovery Readiness and Responsiveness, Records and Information Management, and International E-Discovery.
SOURCE Law Offices of Conor R. Crowley

Fifteen Lawyers leave LeClair Ryan

2010-06-07T14:18:00.003-04:00

Fifteen lawyers have left law firm LeClairRyan to form a new firm called Murphy & McGonigle. Murphy & McGonigle will focus on representing public companies and individuals in high-stakes litigation and governmental investigations and enforcement proceedings. The new firm announced that it has launched with offices in New York, Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia.

Fifteen lawyers have left Richmond-based LeClairRyan to form a boutique firm that will specialize in defending financial services companies and targets of Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions.

The new firm will be called Murphy & McGonigle, with James A. Murphy and Thomas J. McGonigle as co-founders.

Murphy will head the litigation group with offices in New York City and Richmond, and McGonigle will direct the securities enforcement group from an office in Washington.

Six of Murphy & McGonigle's partners served in the SEC's Division of Enforcement, some in senior management positions, including a former Associate Director, an Assistant Director and three Branch Chiefs. Thomas J. McGonigle, co-founder of Murphy & McGonigle, said that the “core of this Group has been working together since our days at the SEC.”

Murphy noted that state and federal authorities announced recently that the federal court in Alexandria will be the focus of white-collar and criminal SEC prosecutions.

Conflicts between corporations and their officers and employees are an inevitable consequence of such enforcement action, and Murphy said he believes the new firm will be able to provide those services at a much lower cost structure than Washington and New York firms that historically have performed such work.

The SEC doesn’t “look kindly on counsel who are not sufficiently sensitive to conflicts,” he said.

Christopher J. Forstner, an attorney with Capital One Services Inc., will join the firm later this month and direct a litigation support group in Richmond that will use contract attorneys to provide electronic discovery in support of the firm’s litigation efforts.

Murphy said he anticipates the firm will use 50 to 100 contract attorneys at a time during the next year. He also expects financial services firms to employ the support group for document review in matters outside of litigation, Murphy said.

Murphy and Gary D. LeClair, co-founder and chairman of LeClairRyan, said the departure of the attorneys is amicable. “We fully anticipate referring business to each other,” Murphy said.

LeClair said, “These are great lawyers. We’re going to have a win-win relationship going forward. … No one will be rooting for their success more than us.”

A major advantage for the new firm is that “they’re not going to have the same kind of conflicts in a boutique that we have in a big law firm like ours,” LeClair said.

The departure is the second high-profile exit from the firm in the last few months. A group of lobbying and administrative law attorneys left the firm to join Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC in that firm’s effort to expand its presence in Virginia.

Those departures have coincided with the addition of 26 lawyers this year at LeClairRyan, most of them in offices outside Virginia, LeClair said.

“We have a very disciplined, client-focused business plan that we’re executing,” he added. “We are making strategic moves that will get us where we need to go.”

The recent growth outside Richmond notwithstanding, “We are very fortunate to have grown up here in Richmond,” LeClair said. The area has a large pool of attorneys and legally trained support personnel that allow the firm to operate with a lower cost structure than that of many firms based elsewhere, he said.

The firm has about 300 attorneys nationwide and also have a substantial business providing document review and electronic discovery with contract attorneys. That number goes up and down, but about 130 are on the payroll now, he said.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best

2010-05-21T09:44:00.001-04:00

The Department of Energy employs more than 16,000 full time bureaucrats and 100,000 contractors. CW Roberts and his colleague show how to solve the oil spill problem. We can replace the entire Department of Energy with these two guys. They've produced more value in this video than 16,000 bureaucrats and 100,000 contractors.

ger er done!

SUPERIOR DOCUMENT SERVICES PARTNERS WITH RELATIVITY

2010-04-30T10:07:00.003-04:00

Press Release - Richmond Virginia - April 29, 2010 - Superior Document Services, the largest electronic discovery and services provider in Central Virginia, today announced that they have joined the Relativity family as a Premium Hosting Partner and are now offering the document review, analysis and production platform to all of their clients.
In conjunction with Superior’s move to a hosted environment in a world-class data center with a high performance, fully-redundant private network, the addition of Relativity will allow clients to gain more powerful access to their data.
“Relativity is an industry leading document review platform, and as such is a perfect match for Superior’s stated corporate vision,” said Kriss Wilson, president of Superior Document Services. “Our new network infrastructure provides customers with reliable connectivity and fast performance, and will allow them to seamlessly focus on the documents and not the associated technologies.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome Superior Document Services as a Premium Hosting Partner,” said Andrew Sieja, president and CEO of kCura. “By combining their industry expertise with our advanced technology, we’ve created an exceptional partnership that will bring significant time and cost savings to their clients’ review efforts.”
With the addition of Relativity, Superior Document Services now offers a complete suite of hosting solutions to provide clients with the best customized SAS technology for their document review teams. From early case assessment through document production, Superior Document Services is positioned to deliver unmatched value to its clients and partners.
About kCura
kCura are the developers of the e-discovery software Relativity. Relativity is a web-based application servicing the analysis, review and production stages of the EDRM. kCura helps corporations and law firms with e-discovery challenges by installing Relativity on premises, as well as providing hosted on-demand solutions through a global network of partners in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. For more information, visit www.kcura.com.
About Superior Document Services
Founded in 1998, Superior Document Services has successfully combined state-of-the-art technology with a detail-oriented commitment to creating a high quality work product. By applying industry-specific expertise to a creative, resourceful, and highly personal business model, Superior has evolved into the largest full-service litigation support company in the Richmond, Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Roanoke, Virginia markets. Its clients include not only Fortune 500 companies, but some of the world's leading legal, accounting, and consulting firms. For more information about Superior Document Services, please visit www.superiordocumentservices.com.
Press Contacts:
Kriss Wilson
Superior Document Services
(804) 648-2800
kriss@superiordocumentservices.com

Adi Elliott
kCura
(312) 676-5075
aelliott@kcura.com

Predictive Pricing for Early Case Assessment "what's hiding in your documents"

2010-04-02T12:45:00.004-04:00

Superior Document Services in conjunction with Earl Industries is proud to introduce a powerful new product that changes ediscovery landscape.

NO PER GB PRICING
NO SURPRISES

CaseMine is a private search engine that enables you to peel back the curtains of e-discovery content and find the who, what, why, where, when and HOW MUCH.

Check it out on the web at https://www.casemine.com/ o

Life in the Doldrums Continues for Civil Litigators

2010-03-15T14:57:00.002-04:00

A massive IP case skewed the outcome, but verdicts in many causes of action declined in 2009, according to Top 100 Verdicts of 2009 list

Anyone who hoped that commercial litigation might help law firms weather the recession was surely disappointed last year.

That's judging by the recoveries that National Law Journal affiliate VerdictSearch counted among its Top 100 Verdicts of 2009. Commercial verdicts, including breach-of-contract recoveries, fell from $1.4 billion in 2008 to $421 million last year. Fraud recoveries plummeted by nearly 70 percent to $561.3 million. Intellectual property litigation saw an increase -- from $2.2 billion to $2.6 billion. But that picture was distorted by a single massive recovery: Centocor Ortho Biotech Inc.'s $1.67 billion verdict against Abbott Laboratories in the Eastern District of Texas. Absent that result, patent judgments would have declined significantly.

In fact, absent the Centocor verdict, overall recoveries would have declined from the 2008 level of $8.93 billion to $7.3 billion. Counting Centocor, the bottom line managed to increase by 1 percent, to $8.98 billion.

What happened, according to law firm litigation department heads interviewed by The NLJ, was that corporate clients worked to control costs by waiting to file suits. They likely will continue do so through the first half of 2010, said Peter Haveles Jr., co-chairman of Kaye Scholer's complex commercial litigation department. "Part of it is deferring activity and not necessarily commencing a lawsuit if you can sue now or a year from now," he said.

the rest of the article can be read here :

Announcing the 10th Annual Superior Document Services “ Pick'em Right Challenge'

2010-03-10T15:08:00.006-05:00

10th Annual Superior Document Services “ Pick'em Right Challenge"

****************************************************************

For the last 9 years Superior Document Services has hosted an NCAA basketball pool - and this year is no exception. Please join us for fun, pride and the chance to win a $100 gift certificate (if you are in Richmond VA or $100 donation to your favorite charity if you are somewhere else)

If you are interested in joining the free pool, please follow these steps:

1. Go to http://www.runyourpool.com/join.cfm

2. Enter the following information:
a. In the Pool ID box, enter the number 6678
b. In the Pool Password box, enter 'superior' (without the single quotes)

3. Fill out the form information, including a personal username and password. (Rest assured, this information will NOT be sold or utilized for spam email under ANY circumstances.)

4. Make your bracket picks, with the ability to change them right up until your pool's deadline.

5. To encourage risk taking Bonus points will accumulate for picking upset winners

6. First prize is a $100 gift certificate to the locally owned restaurant of your choice OR a donation to your favorite Charity in your name.

7. Second prize IS a $50 donation to your favorite charity in your name

It's that easy. If you have any questions, let me know or e-mail runyourpool.com directly at support@runyourpool.com.

Did you know? Electronic Discovery Facts

2010-03-09T10:47:00.004-05:00

Jason R. Baron and Ralph C. Losey collaborated to create a "Did You Know?" type of music video on electronic discovery law. This video presents some of the amazing facts behind the information explosion and rapid advances in technology:

In a 1986 study by Blair and Marion the percentage of relevant documents lawyers thoutgh they had found using Boolean Keyword searches was 75% - the percentage they actually found was 20%

98% of all information is created electronically, over 80% are never printed to paper, yet less than 30% of rule 26(f)meet and confer conferences discuss electronic information

It also explains some of the negative impacts this is having on the law. Lawyers around the world are unable to keep up with these changes. The biggest problem now is how to find relevant evidence when our writings are all just bits and bytes hidden in unimaginably large haystacks of irrelevant information The video ends with their speculations about the near and far futures of the law and technology.

see the excellant work of 2 E-Discovery Ninja's here here

Plaintiffs Lawyers Jockey for Venue in Massive Toyota Litigation

2010-03-01T07:55:00.010-05:00

Ever since his 1996 Toyota Camry shot up an interstate ramp, plowing into the back of an Oldsmobile and killing three people, Koua Fong Lee insisted he had done everything he could to stop the car. A jury didn't believe him, and he was subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison. New revelations of safety problems with Toyotas have Lee pressing to get his case reopened and his freedom restored. Relatives of the victims — who condemned Lee at his sentencing three years ago — now believe he is innocent. The prosecutor who sent Lee to prison said he thinks the case merits another look. Lee’s accident is among a growing number of cases, some long resolved, that are getting new attention since Toyota admitted its problems with sudden acceleration were more extensive than originally believed. Numerous lawsuits involving Toyota accidents have been filed over the recent revelations, and attorneys expect the numbers will climb.

Plaintiffs lawyers have been positioning themselves for a front seat in the mounting litigation arising from the sudden unintended acceleration problems in vehicles manufactured by Toyota.

According to an article published today on law.com approximately 150 lawyers gathered at the InterContinental Chicago hotel to discuss sharing experts and legal strategies in the Toyota litigation, which now exceeds 80 lawsuits. Many of the lawyers have broken into camps based on which jurisdiction they believe should hear the multidistrict litigation against Toyota -- and, perhaps more importantly, which judge should decide the cases.

One of the most popular districts under consideration is the Central District of California in Los Angeles, near the headquarters of Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. Lawyers supporting this locale include products liability attorneys Mark Robinson Jr. and Richard McCune as well as Toyota's lawyers, Cari Dawson and Lisa Gilford, both partners at Atlanta's Alston & Bird. Richard McClune was the first lawyer into court against Toyota.

Another group is advocating Kentucky, where Toyota operates its largest manufacturing plant outside Japan. A third group is pushing for the Eastern District of Louisiana in New Orleans, which recently heard MDL proceedings involving Merck & Co. Inc.'s painkiller drug Vioxx.

Federal officials are focusing on the two major issues behind the recalls — gas pedals that can become lodged on floor mats and pedal systems that are "sticky," making it harder for drivers to press on the pedal or ease up on the gas.
The information requests seek detailed timelines on when Toyota first became aware of the problems, how it handled complaints, how much it have paid out in warranty claims over pedal problems, what internal communications there were about pedals and which company officials were involved in making decisions about the issue.

NBC News had reported a few weeks ago that a former Toyota product liability lawyer had accused Toyota of hiding information in product liability suits. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed his documents and found that they showed Toyota hid internal data recording Toyota testing data, collected in an electronic “Books of Knowledge.” The chairman of the committee (Ed Towns) had written the president of Toyota Motor Company US (Yoshimi Inaba) for more information.

All but one of the documents pertain to rollover suits, not the accelerator problem which triggered the fury. But given that Toyota hasn’t given Congress records from all the extensive testing that, it claims, prove that Toyota’s accelerators don’t have electronic or software issues the exposure of these “Books of Knowledge” are going to cause Toyota some big headaches going forward.

The document in question were from attorney Dimitrios Biller. The committee reviewed the documents and found evidence that Toyota “deliberately withheld relevant electronic records that it was legally required to produce in response to discovery orders in litigation”. Biller was a Managing Counsel in the Product Liability Group of Toyota Motor Sales (USA) from April 2003 to September 2007. As the committe letter noted “this was a very senior position, in which he led the defense of some of the largest tort cases filed against Toyota, particularly “rollover” cases involving seriously injured victims, including quadriplegics”. Lest we forget, less than a year ago the Ford Motor Company – which got no bail-out money – recalled over 4 million cars due to a fire hazard that had affected about 500 of its vehicles. Several days ago an editorial in the Washington Examiner pointed out that the United Auto Workers union is among the most powerful special-interest groups pouring millions into the campaign coffers of the very Congress members who now serve as Toyota’s prosecutor, judge and jury. We are told that 19 of the 36 Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were given sizable checks by the UAW for their election campaigns. We also learn that 12 of 25 Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee got checks, too. In my opinion, such a conflict of interest puts Toyota at quite a disadvantage.

According to " the posse list " As far as work for e-discovery vendors, staffing agencies and contractor attorneys — it sure looks like work is coming for both the plaintiffs and defendants sides. We suspect the Toyota case(s) will follow the pattern of previous product liability cases that employed legions of contract attorneys such as the Bridgestone/Firestone tire case (the treads on tires mounted on Ford Explorers, Mercury Mountaineers, and Mazda Navajos were separating from tires and causing rollovers if the SUVs were moving quickly), the Vioxx case (Merck launched its signature arthritis drug in 1999, and Vioxx proved to be a blockbuster. Unfortunately, it also later proved to cause elevated chances of heart attack or stroke in its users), and the Guidant implantable defibrillators case (flaws in electronic devices installed in patients’ chests to control irregular heart activity).

On the Toyota side, everybody seems to be banging on the door of Alston & Bird, King & Spalding — and maybe Morgan Lewis. Alston & Bird and King & Spalding have been Toyota’s go-to firms for major pieces of litigation over the last two years, with Alston recently overtaking King & Spalding as the company’s preferred counsel. But it was King & Spalding that Toyota turned to when facing Congress, specifically Theodore Hester, a partner in the firm’s D.C. office … who was in all the photos and sitting just in front of Peter. The firm has a long history of representing corporations under congressional investigation. Hester is also registered to lobby for defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp., pharmaceutical companies and others. And Hester was involved in another inquiry into auto safety when he helped counsel Bridgestone/Firestone after the company recalled 6.5 million tires, the case we cited above

Early-adopter criminals embrace cloud

2010-02-15T13:30:00.002-05:00

Executives unsure of the viability of cloud computing need look no further than the criminal fraternity for a ringing endorsement of the technology, according to a security expert.

Cloud computing has been enthusiastically taken up by criminals for a range of activities, Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro, told delegates at a Westminster eForum on Wednesday.

"One of the things that persuades me personally that the cloud is absolutely a viable model and has longevity is that it has already been adopted by criminals," Ferguson said. "They are the people who are leading-edge adopters of technology that is going to work and going to stick around for a long time.

"We already see customers of Google, customers of Amazon, who are criminals and who use those services, among others, to run command-and-control services for botnets, to launch spam campaigns and to host phishing websites. They see the power, the scalability, the availability and, for them, the anonymity that is possible through cloud services and they are using it to its fullest extent."

Click here to see the rest of the article on Early Adoptor criminals

Ready Suite adds Trial Director Support

2010-01-18T08:03:00.007-05:00

ReadySuite 3.1 is now available, including minor bug fixes, enhancements and new Trial Director support.

Using ReadySuite, you can now import a Trial Director load file (OLL) and export it to any of the supported formats. As with other supported formats, verification options like checking all referenced files exist can be ran against the OLL file. Adding support for the OLL format lets us provide a neat package for preparing your images and OLE records for trial. As described in an earlier post, ReadySuite supports numbering exhibits for trial and exporting multi-page images to single page (tiff/jpeg).

We’ve made some significant enhancements to the Import Delimited Text wizard, adding the ability to automatically detect the qualifier, delimiter and file encoding. If the detection fails, you can still manually specify the correct settings or choose from a list of common combination’s. Additionally, we’ve incorporated support for reading tab-separated files (tsv) with a bit more ease.

Additional options have been added to the endorse and stamping process. Originally, users were given the option to add white space to the top and bottom of pages only. We’ve now included the ability to add more white space to the left and right side of pages. This is an important option to have as endorsements can run vertically down and up a page.

Along with more control over added white space, you can now specify if you want to maintain the original page size or allow the page size to be extended. For example, if you’re adding 0.5” to a page that is already 8.5” x 11”, you can choose to keep it at the original size or allow it to extend to 8.5” x 11.5”. Other options now allow you to adjust the margins in each of the nine quadrants, allowing endorsements to be closer or further from the edge.

Lastly, we’ve updated the export process to allow images to be endorsed on the fly. Previously, the endorse process would override an existing image set.

Head over to the download page to check out these new features and let us know what you’d like to see added or changed in a future release using the comments box below.

Court Finds Claims of Burden and Expense "Exaggerated," Declines to Find Emails "Not Reasonably Accessible

2010-01-13T13:28:00.005-05:00

I stumbled across this opinion on KLA Gates website, thought it was generally very interesting and in turn figured I would share it here. Upon further analysis I realized that my interest stemmed more from the fact that outside vendors were willing to complete a job estimated to cost between 88k and 800k for less than 26K than from the fact that the court ruled that ADT was in fact obligated to produce the emails.

Sometimes it pays to have another set of eyes looking at things from the outside.

Starbucks Corp. v. ADT Security Servs., Inc., 2009 WL 4730798 (W.D. Wash. Apr. 30, 2009)

In this recently released opinion written earlier this year, the defendant, ADT Security Services, Inc. (“ADT”), sought to avoid its obligation to produce archived emails by arguing the emails were not “reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost,” as that term is used in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(B). In support of this position, ADT’s Manager of Information Technology, John Mitchell, provided various estimates regarding the potential cost of time and money to restore the requested email. In response, the plaintiff, Starbucks Corporation (“Starbucks”), provided its own estimates of the potential cost which were significantly lower than those proffered by ADT. Finding Mitchell had “at every turn, provided exaggerated reasons and exaggerated expenses as to why ADT allegedly cannot and should not be ordered to comply with its discovery obligations,” the court declined to find the information at issue “not reasonably accessible.” Moreover, the court indicated that even had the information been deemed not reasonably accessible, the court would have found that good cause existed to order the production. Accordingly, Starbuck’s motion to compel was granted.

Starbucks sought to compel the production of archived emails from the years 2003 through 2006 regarding “five specifically identified current and former employees.” ADT objected, arguing that the emails were not reasonably accessible because of the “cumbersome” nature of the system on which they were stored and the resulting burden of retrieval. Specifically, ADT represented that the emails were stored in a format that could only be read by proprietary equipment, that restoring the emails could take up to four years (if all 5 custodians had 25,000 relevant emails to restore), and that such retrieval would result in significant disruptions to ADT’s business. Regarding the cost of the production, including processing, etc., Mitchell initially estimated a cost of $88,000. Just six months later, Mitchell amended the estimate to a potential cost of $834,285. Notably, despite the allegedly significant problems with the Plasmon System (the system on which the archived emails were stored), ADT continued to utilize it in the operation of its business and had not migrated the archived emails to its newer, more easily accessed system.

As discovery continued, two alternatives for production arose. First, the court became aware that ADT could produce “email stubs,” containing limited information such as the “To,” “From,” and “Subject Matter” data and about 80 characters of email. These stubs could be retrieved “relatively quickly” (subject to a clawback provision) and Starbucks could then specify which emails it wanted to see. Second, the court learned that “more than half” of the DVDs in the Plasmon system were not, in fact, in the Plasmon-format, and thus could be read by a vendor. However, ADT argued that the disks still “could not be read by all equipment,” that the processing would still take an extended period of time, that additional equipment would need to be purchased, and that approximately 2 terabytes of storage would need to be stored. Anticipating the need for outside assistance, ADT provided an estimate of “several hundred thousand dollars” for a vendor "just to make copies and thousands more to purchase a hardware system to house the data", but failed to include the vendor’s proposal with its submission to the court.

In response, Starbucks provided its own estimates (procured from two outside vendors) which indicated the likely cost to be between $17,000 and $26,000. These estimates were attached to the declarations provided to the court.

To read the rest of the article and the full opionion feel free to click here

is Predictive Pricing the new wave in Ediscovery?

2010-01-12T11:49:00.001-05:00

Superior Document Services, Richmond VA, an innovative client centric provider of ediscovery and litigation support solutions and services unveils its Predictive EDISCOVERY Model. In response to the growing demands of our corporate and legal clients to quantify the expense of discovery prior to or in anticipation of litigation while not sacrificing quality service Superior was inspired to devise a fixed cost solution to meet the demand.

Superior Document Services EDD and Cormine Intelligent Data partnered to develop an Early Case Assessment (ECA) product. The ECA tool offers ingestion , extraction, analysis, hosting and “first pass” review of up to 1 terabyte of raw data on one data source for less than $12K. Superior receives your electronically stored information on disk and shortly thereafter you receive a web interface and project manager that gives you the power to quickly assess your information and build your case strategy.

Superior’s ECA solution features include:
• DNisting
• Deduplication
• Text Extraction
• Entity Extraction
• Keyword Frequency
• Keyword Suggest
• Keyword Stemming
• Conceptual Search Analytics
• Custom Tagging
• Secure Web Interface
• Export to Linear Review Platform
• Experience!

About Superior Document Services
Superior Document Services has successfully combined state-of-the-art technology with a creative, resourceful, and highly personal business model. The result: a detail-oriented work product of unsurpassed quality. Our clients include not only Fortune 500 companies, but some of the world's leading legal, accounting, and consulting firms. For more information visit, www.SDSEDD.com

About Cormine Intelligent Data
Cormine Intelligent Data, LLC was founded in 2006 to provide solutions to the commercial and government intelligence community. Our team of software engineers, process engineers, and text analytics experts provide solutions for unique and complex problems using our Zoogma Intelligence Platform. Cormine Intelligent Data is a joint venture between Earl Industries, one of the largest privately owned subcontractors serving the U.S. Navy, and Perfect Commerce, a leader in procurement related services. All Cormine employees maintain an active US security clearance of at least Secret. You can trust us with your sensitive data. For more information visit, www.CORMINEID.com

Just enjoy the Eye Candy

2009-12-03T12:29:00.006-05:00

My friend John Salem at Telemedia Productions in Harrisonburg Virginia was kind enough to shoot a commercial for my company this fall. I found it amazing that he could come into my business, look around for 15 minutes; decide what to shoot and come away with something so in tune with what I do for a living. I expect that those of you living outside of the ediscovery or litigation support realm are flumoxed by this commercial and to this I say... "just enjoy the eye candy"

I found this tidbit on Kroll's website and found it worth sharing

COURTS CONTINUE IMPOSING SANCTIONS FOR ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY SHORTCOMINGS

From Jan. 1, 2009 to Oct. 31, 2009, 108 significant opinions representing e-discovery rulings were analyzed. The breakdown of the major issues involved in these cases is as follows:

* 39 percent of cases addressed sanctions
o 66.67 percent of sanctions involved preservation and spoliation issues
o 16.67 percent of sanctions involved production disputes
o 16.67 percent of sanctions involved other discovery abuses
* 27 percent of cases addressed various production considerations
* 12 percent of cases addressed privilege considerations and waivers
* 12 percent of cases addressed various procedural issues (such as searching protocol)
* 4 percent of cases addressed cost considerations
* 4 percent of cases addressed computer forensics protocols and experts
* 2 percent of cases addressed preservation and spoliation issues (but not sanctions)
* 1 percent of cases addressed discoverability and admissibility issues

THIRTY NINE PERCENT - WOW!

Giving Thanks this Week and Beyond

2009-11-25T07:46:00.008-05:00

So another Thanksgiving is upon us and here at the Wilson household we are celebrating with family and friends over 3 days from Richmond to Roanoke and ending up Saturday at the UVA vs Va Tech football game in Charlottesville. Enjoying friendship and fellowship, catching up with family, and reflecting on the shared joys of life are enough to make me lose sleep at night in anticipation of this weekend. I expect there will be some somber moments this weekend as well as we reflect on those friends and family who are no longer with us and try to draw strength remembering the love and joy and laughter we shared. "count your blessings"!

On December 3rd my oldest son Austin turns 14. I'm proud of him in many ways but I give special thanks and realized how lucky I am again this week - when he asked if i could facilitate his 3rd annual football game to raise money for the Central Virginia Foodbank
The concept is simple - 24 of his middle school friends gather to play football (mudball?) and instead of bringing presents for Austin - the bring donations in the form of $$ and canned goods to donate to the food bank. He started this when he was 11 and its become a tradition that I am profoundly proud of. His awareness and generosity will serve him well in the future.

Should you feel so inclined Austion would welcome your donation to food bank either with food or a monetary donation, or heck just send him a note enforcing his generosity and good will @ footba10363@gmail.com

Defining a Legal Strategy ... The Value in Early Case Assessment: PowerPoint

2009-10-22T10:47:00.003-04:00

Take a minute to check out this SlideShare Presentation by Aubrey Owens, Vice President-Technology at Superior Document Services

Defining a Legal Strategy ... The Value in Early Case Assessment: PowerPoint

View more documents from Aubrey Owens.

Compiled Services announces new product: ReadyEndorse

2009-10-21T11:35:00.003-04:00

Many users of our ReadyConvert and ReadyPrint products have asked for new ways to work with their existing image sets. We’ve built an incredible base product handling multiple image formats and load files. Now, we are extending that functionality to include features that will allow the user to endorse, redact, recognize (OCR), renumber, and create new image sets. Over the next several weeks, we will be highlighting these changes in a multi-part series to our development blog

Using ReadyEndorse, litigation support teams can efficiently apply endorsements to their existing image sets. Endorsements can comprise of bates numbers, page numbers, metadata fields, confidential endorsements and any custom text. With nine regions to apply endorsements, and multiple alignment settings, endorsements can be added virtually anywhere.
Need to remove an existing endorsement? ReadyEndorse allows you to redact existing endorsements by specifying regions or portions of a page. Removing the footer of an image is incredibly fast and easy.
With a built-in spell checker, ReadyEndorse will check behind you as you type. Don’t worry about those silly errors and see those misspelled words underlined with the familiar red 'squiggly' line.
ReadyEndorse handles industry standard load files, including Summation, Concordance, IPRO and EDRM XML. Additionally, ReadyEndorse supports most common image formats, including PDF, TIF and JPG files.
Features:
Endorsing
• Apply endorsements to multiple image types, including TIFF and PDF,
• Position endorsements in up to nine specific quadrants,
• Use identifiers, page numbers, metadata fields and custom text in endorsements,
• Adjust the images header and footer by increasing its canvas,
• Instantly preview endorsement settings before you start the batch process, and
• Spell checker provides reassurance as you type.
Endorsements
• Choose font family, style and size for each quadrant,
• Specify color endorsements for color images,
• Align endorsements to the left, right, center or full-justify,
• Change text orientation to horizontal, vertical or a specific angle,
• Enter multiple lines of text, and
• Synchronize settings across all quadrants with ease.
Redacting
• Trim portions of the page, including the header, footer and sides,
• Redact regions by selecting areas to remove,
• Move the redaction selection using the preview window and adjust its size,
• Use a white or black background for the redaction region, and
• Instantly preview redaction settings before you start the batch process.
General Features
• All features included in ReadyConvert,
• Filter options include first page only, even/odd pages, and landscape or portrait,
• Intuitive interface requiring no training to get started,
• Wizards guides the user with step by step instructions,
• Supports automatically checking for updates,
• Fully Unicode compliant,
• Help documentation provides useful notes on each feature.

eDiscovery Solutions Group Adds Kriss Wilson to its Advisory Board.

2009-10-19T10:30:00.001-04:00

Washington DC (October 15, 2009) - eDiscovery Solutions Group, an emerging leader in providing comprehensive eDiscovery and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) consulting, services and technology worldwide announced today that it has added Kriss Wilson to its Advisory Board.

Mr. Wilson is the founder and president of Superior Document Services in Richmond Virginia. A lifelong entrepreneur, Mr. Wilson has been involved in numerous business start ups in industries as diverse as property and casualty insurance; video production, software solutions, and process service. Founded in 1995 as a simple litigation support copy shop, Superior Document Services has grown to the largest provider of e-discovery services in the central Virginia region. With a client base stretching from Fortune 250 Corporations to working with some of the largest law firms in the Country; Superior has leveraged its hands-on approach providing exceptional customer service into a groundbreaking technology company utilizing innovative and creative custom solutions.

With a background of over 17 years of industry specific expertise, a passion for technology, and a lifetime of business achievement Mr. Wilson’s business acumen is attributed to a resourceful, creative, and highly personal business model. His management skill set puts an emphasis on results through detail oriented quantifiable processes. Under his guidance, Superior Document Services has grown from its original 600 square foot copy shop / office to its state of the art, secured 10,000 square foot production facility. As Superior has grown to encompass more regional, national and international document productions, Mr. Wilson by necessity has evolved into an expert on all phases of electronic data discovery including defensible forensic collections; on- line review hosting platforms, early case assessment and the need for transparency in these processes.

Behind the scenes Kriss has managed to gather some of the brightest innovators in the litigation technology business. This includes a team consisting of project managers, programmers, database administrators, and systems analysts - the infrastructure at Superior Document Services is second to none. By utilizing exceptional talent and empowering the concept of “thinking outside the box” Superior has become a trailblazer in the litigation support and e-discovery community. Solutions include creative early case assessment models, offering “predictive” pricing, to “Compiled Services” (Superior’s in house custom software business). Kriss manages to leverage the creativity and drive inherent in his employees and business partners.

A native of Wilmington Delaware; Mr. Wilson attended James Madison University on a swimming scholarship and majored in Public Administration and Business. His spare time is utilized coaching and mentoring the youth of tomorrow.

Founded in 2009, eDiscovery Solutions Group is a consortium of leading regional litigation service providers, eDiscovery consulting firms, independent eDiscovery consultants and best in class eDiscovery technology companies that have come together to provide all of the services, consulting and technology necessary to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle.

Lessons in Customer Satisfaction :Dellstyle

2009-09-14T10:26:00.008-04:00

Yesterday I lost 8 hours of my life. One of my favorite days of the year - opening day of the NFL season - was completely ruined when I made the mistake of calling Dell to attempt to resolve a technical issue . The support session lasted several hours ( read 8) and was completely futile. I dealt with first level support people. I dealt with second level support people. I was disconnected numerous times. Sometimes they called back; sometimes I got to start the whole process over again. Some insisted they had fixed the problem; some charged me. Several tried to sell me ad on services ( extended support and new virus protection for example) All wanted to repeat painful steps taken by previous support techs. I finished my eight hour stint talking with a supervisor who finally refunded my tech support money and then took glee in taunting me that Dell was no longer going to help resolve my issues! It seems to me that they hired the most arrogant, know nothing, support people on the planet to man the operation.

During my full 8 hour day on the phone I discovered one of the many reasons why outsourced tech support sucks -the rep has a decision tree and script they have to read from. What this means to the average customer is that no matter how many times you call support for the same issue, they always ask you the same questions over and over and over again. It appears that they are not allowed to go "off-script" or use any other resource than what Dell provides them regardless of what common sensce might dictate.

In the classic old school business structure, where you walked in and bought something then walked back in when a problem arose, nobody would EVER consider doing what Dell does, because within a few months everybody in town would know the business did that and nobody would shop there.

Dell counts on the anonymity of online/phone transactions, and their ability to stonewall you precisely because you CAN'T walk in, to basically rob people. In the classic structure, a single pissed off customer costs the business 100 customers. Each piss off will tell at least 10 people, who will each tell 10 more. Under Dell's business plan, they will piss off masses of people, figuring the money they stole will pay for ads to entice another 100 people who don't yet know what charlatans they are.

Yes, they actually operate that way and believe it will succeed. At least for THIS fiscal quarter, which is all they EVER consider. Once the darling of NASDAQ, Dell will soon be the subject of business texts titled "Don't let Dell happen to you".

Remember:

1) An unhappy customer will bad-mouth you to everyone they know. (see above)

2) It’s a lot easier to retain your current customers than to acquire new ones.

3) The cheapest way to grow you business is though positive word-of-mouth from satisfied customers.

It’s truly mind-boggling how many large corporations ignore these three basics!

eDiscovery Solutions Group Announces Partnership with Third Coast Consultants

2009-08-18T18:26:00.001-04:00

Premier Consulting Firm to Provide Comprehensive Strategic Services for Proactively Managing Electronically Stored Information (ESI) to Improve the Overall eDiscovery and Compliance Process

August 18, 2009 --
Boise, Idaho - eDiscovery Solutions Group announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Third Coast Consultants to provide litigation readiness, general data retention and management strategies and information security services designed to help corporations and their outside counsel better understand and manage the risks and costs associated with the accelerating volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI).

Under the terms of the partnership, Third Coast Consultants will provide a wide range of litigation readiness consulting and data retention policy development for eDiscovery Solutions Group clients throughout the United States and South America. In addition, other partners from the eDiscovery Solutions Group consortium will enable Third Coast Consultants to expand its eDiscovery offering with additional eDiscovery consulting, services and technology with support in most of the major metropolitan markets in the US, Canada, Europe and the Far East.

The Company indicated that its partnership with Third Coast Consultants is a major component of an overall strategy to provide a comprehensive solution to corporations worldwide to proactively manage the accelerating volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and associated costs of compliance and eDiscovery. The Company points out that according to a January 9, 2009 article by Debra Logan and John Bace of Gartner, Inc, entitled “Reduce The Cost and Risk of E-Discovery in 2009, “Electronic discovery will be close to the top of many organizations’ IT project agendas in 2009, and will remain important for years to come, regardless of the state of the economy.”

“Given the exponential increase in the volume of ESI within our client base worldwide that is straining every aspect of the information management process, we wanted expand our core offering beyond the standard eDiscovery process as defined within the Electronic Discovery Reference Model as established by Socha and Gelbmann,” stated Charles Skamser, Founder and CEO of eDiscovery Solutions Group. “With a strategic foundation firmly rooted in providing litigation readiness consulting for Rule 26(f) conferences as required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and vision to further assist corporations with a wide range of data retention analysis and policy establishment, Third Coast Consultants will provide the leadership to extend our current eDiscovery offering(s) to be more strategic, proactive and reach beyond the eDiscovery paradigm,” continued Mr. Skamser.

As part of the strategic planning services designed to support the requirements of the FRCP Rule 26(f) conference, Third Coast Consultants coordinates communications and activities between the corporate client and the supporting law firm to analyze and understand: (1) historical and current information preservation processes; (2) corporate content repository structures and locations; (3) the total cost of responding to the potential eDiscovery requests; (4) content accessibility; (5) collection methodologies, and; (6) eDiscovery production recommendations.

“Based upon our membership in the eDiscovery Solutions Group Consortium, once we have completed our Rule 26(f) analysis and made our recommendations for collections and eDiscovery production, we will then be able to offer a comprehensive and seamless solution to deliver everything that our clients require to fulfill our recommendations,” states Alan Blakley, Esq. Senior Consultant, Third Coast Consultants. “As such, we are very pleased to be joining the eDiscovery Solutions Group,” continues Mr. Blakley.
In addition to strategic planning support for the FRCP 26(f) conference, Third Coast Consultants is also equipped to provide data retention analysis and policy development, data security analysis and policy development and general strategic consulting to better understand and manage corporate information.

“One of the main reasons that eDiscovery is so expensive is based on the fact that most corporations are not proactively setting up data retention policies that enable them to easily and cost effectively respond to eDiscovery requests,” states Charles Skamser. “The methodology and technology exists to support these needs and Third Coast Consultants have the expertise to develop the right data retention policies and recommend the most cost effective data archiving technologies to any corporation in the world before the next matter becomes an expensive issue,” continues Mr. Skamser.

With a growing consortium of partners worldwide, eDiscovery Solutions Group offers a broad array of eDiscovery consulting, services and technology along with project management to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle. Following the eDiscovery processing paradigm of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), eDiscovery Solutions Group has developed an eDiscovery best practices framework that includes consulting, collection, analysis, processing, production, review and presentation.

Within this framework, the eDiscovery Solutions Group can deliver data retention policy, development, data archiving, eSecurity, eCompliance, eDiscovery readiness, strategic planning, implementation support, paper and ESI collection, investigations, expert testimony, data recovery, computer forensics, early case assessment, data analysis, data redundancy management, conceptual search, de-dupe, near de-dupe, scanning, copying, coding, language translation, EDD, TIFF conversion, hosting, on-site, on-shore and off-shore review, legal process outsourcing (LPO), courtroom graphics and presentations, tool training, systems integration and custom solutions.

About Third Coast Consultants
Third Coast Consultants is an international information management consulting firm focusing on litigation readiness, compliance, records management, and data retention strategy. With experienced information management professionals throughout the United States and South America, Third Coast Consultants work with corporations and their outside counsel to analyze, develop best practices and policies and manage Electronically Stored Information (ESI) to support corporate business objectives, governance, compliance and litigation. Our mission is to limit risk and manage costs with solutions that fit the specific needs for each of our clients. To learn more about Third Coast Consultants, please visit http://www.3rdcoastconsultants.com.

About eDiscovery Solutions Group
eDiscovery Solutions Group is an international consortium of leading independent eDiscovery consultants, eDiscovery consulting firms, regional litigation service providers and best-in-class eDiscovery technology companies that have come together to provide all of the services, consulting and technology necessary to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle for the legal departments of corporations, the IT departments of corporations that need to support eDiscovery requirements and litigation centric law firms. For more information about eDiscovery Solutions Group, please visit: http://www.ediscoverysolutionsgroup.com/.

The Eleventh Annual Sedona Conference® on Antitrust Law & Litigation

2009-07-29T07:56:00.001-04:00

The Eleventh Annual Sedona Conference® on Antitrust Law & Litigation features a blue-ribbon faculty including two FTC Commissioners, a trial judge, a DOJ economist, in-house counsel, and renowned practitioners from both the plaintiff and defense bars from around the world. This year's Conference will focus on a number of extremely timely and important topics, including:

(1)The Underpinnings and Presumptions of Antitrust Enforcement
(2)The New Administration and Antitrust Enforcement
(3)Unilateral Conduct: The Hot Button Issues
(4)Bundled Pricing/Discounting
(5)Standard Setting
(6)Vertical RPM and other Vertical Restraints
(7)Update on International Enforcement Efforts
(8)Merger Enforcement in the Current Economy

To ensure an intimate environment for meaningful dialogue, registration is limited to 45 persons, and is by invitation only. To apply for an invite, just click on the "To Register" Navigation Bar, complete the form, write "Application" on the top, and fax it in to the number indicated on the Form. We will advise you if and when your Application is accepted. We will be looking for diversity and experience in the participant base to contribute to insightful dialogue and collective wisdom.

Panelists
Chair
Daniel R. Shulman
Gray Plant Mooty, Minneapolis, MN

Faculty
Joseph M. Alioto
Alioto Law Firm, San Francisco, CA
Tyler A. Baker
Fenwick & West, Mountain View, CA
David A. Balto
Center for American Progress, Washington, DC
Howard J. Bergman
3M Europe S.A./N.V., Diegem, Belgium
John DeQ. Briggs
Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider, LLP, Washington, D.C.
The Hon. Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour
Federal Trade Commission, Washington, DC
Joseph Seon Hur
Yoon Yang Kim Shin & Yu, Seoul, Korea
R. Hewitt Pate
Hunton & Williams, Washington, DC
The Hon. Commissioner J. Thomas (Tom) Rosch
Federal Trade Commission, Washington, DC
The Hon. James M. Rosenbaum
U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Joseph P. Simons
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Washington, DC
Jeane Thomas
Crowell & Moring LLP, Washington, DC
Gregory J. Werden
U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

eDiscovery Solutions Group Announces Support for Equivio Near-Duplicates and email Thread Management

2009-07-09T06:50:00.004-04:00

eDiscovery Solutions Group has announced that it has entered in to a partnership with Equivio to provide comprehensive consulting, training and systems integration support for Equivio’s near-duplicates and email threads technology.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Jun 30, 2009 – eDiscovery Solutions Group - announced today that it has entered in to a partnership with Equivio to provide comprehensive consulting, training and systems integration support for Equivio’s near-duplicates and email threads technology.

Equivio’s grouping, analysis and management of near-duplicates and email threads enable litigation knowledge workers to easily identify and skip redundant data and focus exclusively on the unique information in each document. Equivio reduces the risk of missing key information, ensures a consistent approach across the entire data set, enhances review productivity and reduces the amount of time required for litigation knowledge workers to meet tight deadlines.

Under the terms of the partnership, eDiscovery Solutions Group professionals -including Superior Document Services - and certified consortium members will be available to assist Equivio clients with comprehensive eDiscovery consulting, document review best practices and end-user training for leading industry document management platforms such as Concordance, Summation, Ringtail, iConect, Relativity, CaseCentral and CaseLogistix. In addition, eDiscovery Solutions Group technologists and certified consortium members will be available to assist software vendors with integrating Equivio into commercial product lines and end users with integrating Equivio into internal legacy systems.

eDiscovery Solutions Group will also begin selling Equivio as a component of its eDiscovery services, consulting and technology offering designed to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle for the legal departments of corporations, the IT departments of corporations that need to support eDiscovery requirements, and litigation-centric law firms.

“In today's complex corporate reality of managing ever increasing volumes of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and changing eDiscovery demands, the cost of document review is the single most expensive component of the eDiscovery lifecycle,” states Charles Skamser, Founder, President and CEO of eDiscovery Solutions Group. “We believe that Equivio near–duplicates and email threads technology can have a profound effect on increasing the productivity of litigation knowledge workers, reducing the amount of ESI that has to be reviewed downstream and thereby reducing the overall cost of the entire eDiscovery lifecycle,” continues Mr. Skamser.

eDiscovery Solutions Group offers a broad array of eDiscovery consulting, services and
technology along with project management to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle. Following the eDiscovery processing parameters of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), eDiscovery Solutions Group has developed an eDiscovery best practices framework that includes consulting, collection, analysis, processing, production, review and presentation.

Within this framework, the eDiscovery Solutions Group can deliver data retention policy,
development, data archiving, eSecurity, eCompliance, eDiscovery readiness, strategic planning, implementation support, paper and ESI collection, investigations, expert testimony, data recovery, computer forensics, early case assessment, data analysis, data redundancy management, conceptual search, de-dupe, near de-dupe, scanning, copying, coding, language translation, EDD, TIFF conversion, hosting, on-site, on-shore and off-shore review, legal process outsourcing (LPO), courtroom graphics and presentations, tool training, systems integration and custom solutions.

“As our installed base continues to grow, we are very pleased to have eDiscovery Solutions
Group as a partner to assist with providing review consulting, training end-users and providing systems integration for our clients,“ stated Amir Milo, CEO of Equivio. “eDiscovery Solutions Group staff of experienced eDiscovery professionals, along with their network of consortium members, will be a welcome addition to the Equivio community

eDiscovery Solutions Group is an international consortium of leading independent eDiscovery consultants, eDiscovery consulting firms, regional litigation service providers and best-in-class eDiscovery technology companies that have come together to provide all of the services, consulting and technology necessary to support the entire eDiscovery lifecycle for the legal departments of corporations, the IT departments of corporations that need to support eDiscovery requirements and litigation centric law firms. For more information about eDiscovery Solutions Group, please visit: http://www.ediscoverysolutionsgroup.com/.

Thanks Dan !- If you have never failed you have never lived!

2009-07-06T20:44:00.002-04:00

Dan Waldshmidt - who is not only a friend but also an awe inspiring bundle of marketing energy posted this piece online today -

Its great, its simple, its spot on, its motivating and for anyone with any self doubt - its a must see.

Check Dan out at HERE and HERE and at his newest incarnation SALESMATTERS

A petabyte is no laughing matter

2009-07-02T11:16:00.007-04:00

Ever feel like you need a break from work just to get your work done? You're not alone.
Information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more, according to preliminary data from a report coming later this year, an update of the 2003 "How Much Information?" report.

According to the report The daily flow of emails worldwide is currently 1,829 TB. Over the course of a year, the total would be 3.35 petabytes. It goes on to say that only half of the email traffic will be personal messages. Unsolicited email (also known as spam), commercial notifications and news alerts account for one-third of today's email load and will comprise nearly half of the traffic four years from now, the report said.

While this is fascinating and eye opening data - I got sidetracked wondering exactly what is a petabyte?..

How about this to quantify?:

A peta- is one quadrillion. That is one thousand trillion. A trillion is one thousand billion, which is one thousand million. So a quadrillion is one billion million

A petabyte of storage is a thousand terabytes. A terabyte of storage is one thousand gigabytes. So a petabyte is one million gigabytes

Steering the conversation back to laymans terms - a petabyte is 20 million 4 drawer filing cabinets or 13 years of recorded HD - TV (58K plus movies)

Most of us nowdays have a gigabyte of memory in our laptops. A thousand laptops is a terabyte and a million laptops is a petabyte.

To refocus back to litigation technology -

If the size of the data involved in litigation is growing by 50% per year and by all accounts will continue at this rate , the only way to effectively control litigation costs is to embrace the use of electronic discovery tools - tools specifically designed to reduce data populations. The good news is that understanding and using the basic electronic discovery tools is relatively straightforward.

1. Data collection. How the data is collected will have a significant impact on the overall cost of the case.
2. Filter the data by custodian and/or date ranges.
3. Cull out the system files.
4. De-duplicate the data.
5. Search the data using well conceived keywords - preferably obtained using a early case assesment tool.

Here’s a recent real life example of the power of eDiscovery tools. Superior Document Services recently worked on a case in which we performed a full forensic image of 10 computers and laptops. The total data size collected was over 1 terabyte. Using the five eDiscovery tools listed above – collection, filtering, culling and de-duplication -- we reduced the data set to 150 gigabytes. Working with counsel to develop key word terms for searching, we were able to reduce the 150 GB to 5 gigabytes. This represents a reduction of over 99% of the data size prior to attorney review. The attorneys reviewed the data and we produced one gigabyte of responsive data or under 50,000 documents.

Smart work processes are critical to success in e discovery. Always seek professional help. In other words kids - Do not try this at home without consulting an e discovery professional.

CALIFORNIA PASSES NEW ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY ACT EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

2009-07-02T07:23:00.003-04:00

On June 29, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed California’s Electronic Discovery Act into law. Because the Act contains an urgency provision, it is effective as of June 29, 2009.

Assembly Bill 5, which was signed by the governor Monday, immediately enacts new electronic discovery provisions into the state Code of Civil Procedure. The ultimate goal of the bill is to improve discovery practices for lawyers on both sides of a case.

The bill -- supported by the Civil Justice Association of California and Consumer Attorneys of California -- establishes procedures for a person to obtain discovery of electronically stored information.

The full text of the Act can be read here

All discovery propounded or responded to must now comply with the new law. These rules are very similar to the recent revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and bring California in line with the federal e-discovery standards and for the first time offer state litigants specific definitions of what constitutes electronically stored information.

Under the new Act, the party requesting production of electronically stored information (ESI) may specify the format in which it should be produced (e.g., native format, or TIFF, with or without certain metadata, etc.). If no format is specified, the responding party must produce the ESI in either the same format as it is ordinarily kept (likely in native format or an archived/compressed format) or in a "reasonably usable" form. The responding party need only produce the ESI in one form. If a requesting party fails to specify the format of production in its request, and the responding party produces the ESI in a "reasonably usable format," the requesting party cannot then compel a different form of production.

Lawmakers adopted almost identical legislation last year only to have the governor veto it during a bitter budget battle with the legislature.

The Vendor Client Relationship ??

2009-06-29T10:16:00.003-04:00

While I know that there are always 2 sides to every story after 17 years of providing litigation support services; I found this video quite amusing. I'm confident I am not the only vendor who can relate.

The phrase "the customer is always right" has been the mantra of Superior Document Services since the beginning. While I know that we have been stepped on by the big boys or at times taken advantage of - I always have strived to treat our customers just like I would like to be treated. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn't. Either way I go to bed with a clean concience.

Looking forward to seeing the rebuttal video from the "customers" Point of View

RIP: Gary Gerloff

2009-05-25T12:34:00.019-04:00

Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend 2009 was asthetically perfect. Pristine blue skies, low hanging, almost 3d clouds ...smooth sailing as they say

The days perfection broken by voicemail.

Gary Gerloff, who passed away Saturday morning, made an indelible impression on not only me but on everyone he encountered. A gregarious, warm, larger than life character -Gary always brought his "A" game. Always.

He had a natural ability to draw everyone to him; an uncanny abilitiy to make bring out the best in everyone he encountered and an amazing knack for encountering life's most interesting characters. To put it in layman's terms: following Gary through a 7-11 could leave you smiling for days.

Gary was blessed and in turn we were blessed to know him. One adventure of many comes to mind - I had the great pleasure of accompanying Gary to Vegas for three nights of Grateful Dead concerts - and a lifetime of memories; From meeting and partying with Jerry Garcia's guitar builder Doug Irwin to being threatened by a drug dealer on the Vegas strip with an Uzi to winning a grand playing blackjack at 4 AM - hell it was all expected with Mr Gerloff. His magic was contagious.

Gerloff generosity was well known in the community . He helped launch an annual concert series to support the Positive Vibe Café, a restaurant in South Richmond with many handicapped employees He performed at numerous fundraising events, helped organize an anual benefit for the Massey Cancer Center and was on the program committee for the Richmond Folk Festival.

I found this exceptional interview with Gary over at a blog called cool stretch of highway - and being at a loss for words as I try and wrap my head around this tragedy - well I can't say it any better than Gary himself can - click over to check out the entire interview.

After 25 years on the road, in the noisy clubs and the beery bars, he’s signed a major-league Hollywood contract, and now his “Psychedelic Dixieland” music, once confined to Virginia and the Carolinas, delights fans the world over.

He’s never left his hometown for more than a month. And if the former capital of the Confederacy, an aloof and well-mannered place, never will be considered a musical Mecca, it does hold special appeal for him.

“I just love the dignity of living in a once-defeated city,” he says. “A great deal of pride once carried us here. It gave us a noble cloak, and adorned us with the air of some ancient Greek city-state. Richmond is like some old whore or piece of architecture. She’s been around forever, it seems. But when you notice her in a certain light, why, there’s a real charm to behold.”

He’s talking in his basement over a 20-foot bar with three sinks. (“One to wash your hands. One to wash your face. And one to throw up in.”) Behind the bar are display cases jam-packed with the things he holds precious: bobble-head dolls of Satchel Paige, Grady Little and Keith Richards; miniature ceramic hand-painted jazz ensembles from New Orleans; an autograph from Hunter S. Thompson; a collection of Three Stooges shot glasses; an English nose whistle; two James Brown posters from concerts at The Arena; a stuffed and mounted bear’s head casually draped in a feathered Mardi Gras mask and beads; and a 1970s photograph of his late brother Peter, arm-in-arm with the family’s maid.

Behind him, on a 9-foot Brunswick regulation pool table, lie seven bamboo fly rods, an assortment of air horns, one birdhouse in the form of the Parthenon and two Halicrafter short wave radios. Behind the pool table stand 15 vintage guitars and six worn-out, antique tube amplifiers.

He says he’s tempted to call his 1960s split level, with its 1400 sq. ft. terraced deck, “a tumbled-down shack in BigFoot country,” but instead refers to it as his roost, his outpost and his thinking line of defense. He lives here on a densely wooded hill a half-mile from the James River with his wife who’s an accomplished pianist, his 11-year-old daughter who’s an aspiring writer, and his seven-year-old son, whom he tags a “yellow-haired monkey.”

All are unimpressed with his musical persona, one that plumbs the depths of American music and its attendant emotions.
.... he labels himself a relic from another era – a living fossil. “I see myself as a bluesman first. Second, I am a champion of heartfelt emotions. I like awkward displays of love. I am an encourager of dreams,” he says.

Gerloff picked up his first guitar at age 12, and promptly abandoned all other ambitions; music became his life.

His music became our life. I am honored to have know you Gary Gerloff

Happy Trails my brother.

Compiled Services : Gaining Traction one User at a Time

2009-05-08T12:04:00.003-04:00

As you may know – Superior Document Services has a new company COMPILED SERVICES ; that writes small software applications for the litigation support industry.

Compiled Services began as an “in-house” software development group in June of 2005. The group’s initial goal was to provide software utilities to aid in meeting tight deadlines while respecting strict quality guidelines. The utilities developed ranged from simple console applications to full scale image processing and form recognition based applications. Our goal was simple: develop easy-to-use software while increasing production capacity of the e-discovery department.

Our intial free offering - ReadyConvert - helps litigation support teams by quickly and accurately verifying their product deliverables.

Yesterday we noticed a HUGE increase in the number of downloads and after some internal investigation discovered that the application is now available on CNET. I am stil not convinced that this is the source of the major activity shift but as Bob Dylan once sang "something is happening and I don't know why it is"

Needless to say we are excited about our product and even more excited to see it getting traction not only in the USA but as far away as Australia.

Ready Convert on Cnet

If you haven’t had a chance please check us out on cnet or on our web page www.compiledservices.com

As always we truly appreciate your support/ Comments and suggestions most welcome.

All our products conform to the guidelines outlined by the EDRM for electronic discovery.

I can't help myself...

2009-04-23T07:27:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered why we still send our legislators to Wash D.C.? If we can bank online, trade stocks online and send videos of our children to the other side of the world in seconds why can't our legislators work & vote from home? Not only would they have to hire staff locally & boost our local jobs, but the Lobbyists wouldn't be able to corral all of them.....hmmm

ReadyPrint 1.1 released

2009-04-20T12:38:00.001-04:00

RICHMOND, VA (April 16, 2009) – Compiled Services, the company behind the load file verification and conversion tool ReadyConvert, is pleased to release a new version of ReadyPrint. ReadyPrint streamlines the document printing process for service providers and law firms alike.

ReadyPrint allows litigation support professionals to print directly from image folders or by utilizing industry standard load files. New to version 1.1, users can now easily print metadata on custom folder and document separator sheets to help organize and identify documents.

Designed with high speed printing in mind, ReadyPrint combines documents by a set number of pages to reduce the overall printer cycle time, while maintaining folder and document sheets.

ReadyPrint handles industry standard load files, including Summation, Concordance, IPRO and EDRM XML. Additionally, ReadyPrint supports most common image formats, including PDF, TIF and JPG files.

ReadyPrint benefits litigation support professionals in many ways:

• Print single-page and multi-page images,
• Design and preview folder and cover sheets containing metadata fields,
• Print document cover sheets separate from documents,
• Designate up to three paper trays allowing different color separator sheets,
• Print common image formats, including TIF, PDF and JPG files,
• Send documents in groups to allow for high speed printing,
• Auto-rotate landscape images,
• Verify page compression and identify color documents before printing and,
• Track the number of documents, pages, folder and cover sheets printed.

To get started, try our fully functioning 14-day trial by visiting http://compiledserv ices.com/ readyprint/ . To learn more about ReadyPrint and how it can benefit your firm, contact our sales team at sales@compiledservi ces.com today.

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Compiled Services
http://www.compiled services. com

Confidentiality vs marketing

2009-04-08T14:14:00.007-04:00

I've been providing litigation support services for more than 15 years. In all that time I have worked on innumerable cases that are / were on the front page of the national papers or are the flavor of the day on the nightly news. These cases may have involved Tobacco; Finance; Construction; Mergers and Aquisitions, Corrupt Politicians; or sometimes even a poor celebrity who has run afould of the law. Whatever the situation the bottom line is that I cannot talk about the details. Heck, I don't want to even talk about who I am working for or what is involved in broad general terms. At times I have stopped reading the paper when working on a high profile case. Its just easier that way...I don't need to know the backstory.

Lawyers are often required by law to keep confidential anything pertaining to the representation of a client. The duty of confidentiality is much broader than the attorney-client evidentiary privilege, which only covers communications between the attorney and the client. Superior Document Services has in a sense evolved into a legal "Switzerland". We understand that every client; has a right to privacy and confidentiality. We are impartial to a fault and fastidious in our protection of our clients and their cient's identities.

Superior Document Services has no exterior signage beckoning the general public; a locked secure facility and digital camera's at each and every point of egress and ingress. More importantly I have many trusted long term employees bound by formal confidentiality agreements. The bottom line is "CONFIDENTIALITY IS A GIVEN"

So - this all leads to a conundrum in litigation support marketing. I can't shout from the rooftops that I did ALL the ediscovery work on the Exxon Valdez lawsuits ( I didn't ) without violating; in my mind at least, the implied trust. So as you can see by the above picture published by the AP; Superior Document Services got some free publicity the other day during the trial of a major major ex NFL star. I still am thrilled when I see someone carrying a box with my Superior logo down the street so as you can imagine I was ecstatic when I got calls from friends that our boxes were prominently featured on both local and national tv news.

After some internal personal debate - I'm posting the picture here. I think its pretty ...err, cool?

Judge Andrew Peck's Recent Opinion on Search Terms and ESI

2009-03-25T14:32:00.006-04:00

Zelda Owens - Managing Director at HIRECounsel sent this to me this morning. Not only was the timing perfect but the article touches on a subject near and dear to my heart - KEYWORDs and search term design.

According to Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck:

This Opinion should serve as a wake-up call to the Bar in this District about the need for careful thought, quality control, testing, and cooperation with opposing counsel in designing search terms or “keywords” to be used to produce emails or other electronically stored information (“ESI”). While this message has appeared in several cases from outside this Circuit, it appears that the message has not reached many members of our Bar.

The case of William A. Gross. Constr. Assocs., Inc. v. Am. Mfrs. Mut. Ins. Co., 2009 WL 724954 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 19, 2009) arose from disputes over alleged defects and delay in the construction of the Bronx County Hall of Justice. In the course of litigation, The Dormitory Authority of New York (“DASNY”) agreed to produce the relevant documents of the non-party construction manager, Hill International (“Hill”). Disagreement arose amongst the parties, however, regarding appropriate search terms to segregate project related emails from Hill’s unrelated emails. Hill, despite being in the best position to contribute, suggested no potential search terms and the court was forced into the “uncomfortable position” of crafting a search without adequate information.

Having been put in such a position, the court took its opportunity to write a brief opinion addressing the need for care and collaboration in crafting search terms in light of its assessment that “the message has not gotten through.” First, the court presented an excerpt from an opinion of Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm, regarding the proper selection and implementation of terms:

While keyword searches have long been recognized as appropriate and helpful for ESI search and retrieval, there are well-know limitations and risks associated with them, and proper selection and implementation obviously involves technical, if not scientific knowledge.

Selection of the appropriate search and information retrieval technique requires careful advance planning by persons qualified to design effective search methodology. The implementation of the methodology selected should be tested for quality assurance; and the party selecting the methodology must be prepared to explain the rationale for the method chosen to the court, demonstrate that it is appropriate for the task, and show that it was properly implemented.

Next, the court excerpted an opinion of Magistrate Judge Facciola, taking the warning even further:

Whether search terms or "keywords" will yield the information sought is a complicated question involving the interplay, at least, of the sciences of computer technology, statistics and linguistics. Given this complexity, for lawyers and judges to dare opine that a certain search term or terms would be more likely to produce information than the terms that were used is truly to go where angels fear to tread. This topic is clearly beyond the ken of a layman and requires that any such conclusion be based on evidence that, for example, meets the criteria of Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.

Having considered the prior opinions, the court observed that “the best solution in the entire area of electronic discovery is cooperation among counsel.” It then “strongly endorsed” The Sedona Conference® Co-operation Proclamation

The opinion then concluded:

Electronic discovery requires cooperation between opposing counsel and transparency in all aspects of preservation and production of ESI. Moreover, where counsel are using keyword searches for retrieval of ESI, they at a minimum must carefully craft the appropriate keywords, with input from the ESI's custodians as to the words and abbreviations they use, and the proposed methodology must be quality control tested to assure accuracy in retrieval and elimination of "false positives." It is time that the Bar--even those lawyers who did not come of age in the computer era--understand this.

Thanks Zelda !!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Zelda Owens
Managing Director
HIRECounsel
575 Madison Avenue, Suite 3000
New York, NY 10022
zowens@hirecounsel.com
Direct: (646) 356-0529
Fax: (646) 356-0565

11 days 10 hours and counting

2009-03-04T07:50:00.004-05:00

Its nearly time for the most exciting sporting event of the year - in my opinion anyway.

For 9 years now Superior Document Services has run a FREE March Madness pool for clients; business associates and friends. This will be the first year I have opened it up to the blogosphere - but what the heck; the more the merrier.

I've switched from CBSSportsline to a new easier to enter site this year and am eager to see how it pans out

Below is the text of the email I will be sending out next week along with a link to the host site ; but don't wait - there's no time like now!

You are receiving this email inviting you to play in the Superior Document Services / Kriss Wilson FREE March Madness Bracket Pool because you are an honored business associate; a personal friend; or a victim of circumstance.

Non the less please join in the fun and compete for big prizes

Superior Document Services 9th annual March Madness Basketball pool is back and better than ever!!

First and most importantly the pool has moved to a better EASIER to use web site. No personal information; no emails , no passwords to remember- just straight up basketball fun!

The NCAA Bracket Pool is at runyourpool.com. When you sign up ofr the pool, please follow these steps:
1. Go to http://www.runyourpool.com/join.cfm

2. Enter the following information:
a. In the Pool ID box, enter the number 6678
b. In the Pool Password box, enter 'superior' (without the single quotes)

3. Fill out the form information, including a personal username and password. (Rest assured, this information will NOT be sold or utilized for spam email under ANY circumstances.)

4. Make your bracket picks, with the ability to change them right up until your pool's deadline.

5. Feel free to request entries for coworkers and friends.

6. Prizes for First, Second and last places - a donation in your name to a favorite charity is an honorable option too.

First $125 gift certificate
Second $50 gift certificate
Last - intense scrutiny
It's that easy. If you have any questions, let me know.

Where's my Bailout?

2009-02-27T21:41:00.014-05:00

So as the owner of a small business I struggle daily with balancing fiscal responsibility with my dreams of better equipment, higher salaries for my hard working employees and making a fair profit for my investors.

Trust me its not easy and in this economy my goals are much simpler.

The goal for 2009 is to remain a viable business entity while still providing exemplary service.

Sounds simple right?

Trust me life would be simpler if someone were to give ME a "bailout", a "handout" or a gift......in spite of having a lengthy laundry list of shovel ready projects I'm not holding my breath.

However the United States Government saw fit to give Northern Trust Bank $1.6 billion in bailout money in November 2008.

Northern Trust laid off 450 workers in December 2008, 4% of its workforce.

The layoffs didn’t stop the bank from paying millions to sponsor a PGA golf tournament 2 months later. Not only that, but TMZ reports the bank also invited hundreds of clients and employees to L.A., put them up in ritzy hotels, then threw fabulous parties with performances by Sheryl Crow, Chicago, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Women got trinkets from Tiffany’s. They rented out the House of Blues.

Your tax dollars at work! My tax dollars at work!

I make no claim of being an economist but I do know if the Federal Government saw fit to give Superior Document Services 1.6 billion dollars of bailout money, well my parties wouldn't feature washed up bands like Sheryl Crow and Chicago.

Obama administration tries to kill e-mail case

2009-02-23T18:09:00.005-05:00

If ever there was a critical situation that called for the hiring of Superior Document Services this is it!

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

During its first term, the Bush White House failed to install electronic record-keeping for e-mail when it switched to a new system, resulting in millions of messages that could not be found.

The Bush White House discovered the problem in 2005 and rejected a proposed solution. Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department “apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

A little background here on the email issues

Things that make you go hmmmmmm

2009-02-16T09:14:00.007-05:00

The core of the story published Saturday Feb 14, 2009 by several major news organizations is that a Socha Gelbam 2008 award winning firm providing eDiscovery systems, software, and services to law firms and corporate legal departments mishandled its own eDiscovery process. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the story but I must say it is a bit disturbing. I think its important to point out that the allegations put forth in this article have not been proven; or even directly discussed by the parties. As is often the case things are not what they first appear.

Superior Document Services uses their Encase forensic analysis software as does more than 100 of the Fortune 500 and over half of the Fortune 50. I am going to assume in this case its the archer not the arrow since EnCase eDiscovery has been deployed on more than 2 million desktops, laptops, and servers without any serious pushback.

Electronic evidence firm grilled over absent memos
By JESSICA MINTZ, AP Technology Writer
Guidance Software Inc. bills itself as the leading provider of technology that helps companies dig up old e-mails and other electronic documents that might be evidence in a lawsuit. Yet when Guidance itself had to face a judge, it was accused of bumbling its internal digital search.

Whether Guidance intentionally hid documents or just couldn't find them is a matter of dispute. The company said it did all that was required. But its inability to cough up certain e-mails, even over several months, led an arbitrator to accuse it of gross negligence and proceeding in bad faith.

At the very least, the case shows how thorny electronic evidence searches can be, even for a specialist.

The mountains of digital information piling up on hard drives and backup tapes have made discovery _ the exchange of information between parties at the start of a lawsuit _ increasingly complex. "E-discovery" software and services boomed from a $40 million business in 1999 to nearly $2.8 billion in 2007, according to George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, directors of the industry group Electronic Discovery Resource Model.

Pasadena, Calif.-based Guidance Software is one of the largest software specialists, with sales of $89 million over the last four quarters. The company began in 1997 making tools to help criminal investigators search computer hard drives. In recent years Guidance added new programs for scouring corporate networks for digital evidence.

Guidance needed to turn that expertise on itself in a case involving its former marketing director, Cassondra Todd.

Todd believed Guidance's chairman pressured her manager to fire her, in part because she is a woman. After she got a scathing performance review in 2007, she asked for an investigation.

"I was quite confident that whatever information was produced would wipe clean what was going on," Todd said in an interview. "That's what we did for a living."

But Guidance told Todd it found no evidence of discrimination. It apologized for the harshness of the review but wouldn't delete it from her file.

Todd responded by hiring Arnold Peter, an attorney with Los Angeles-based Raskin Peter Rubin & Simon. A few weeks later, she was laid off.

Todd filed a wrongful-termination claim, and both sides were required to perform discovery, a hunt for documents that might matter to the case.

The results of Guidance's initial run of e-discovery seemed scant to Todd. She expected to see far more e-mails from her days in the company. But she couldn't argue Guidance was holding back _ intentionally or not _ until she got a break a few months later.

Tim Leehealey, Todd's first manager at Guidance and now the head of a rival company, had printed and saved some memos from the time of Todd's bad performance review. When Todd reviewed his stash, she found e-mails about her that Guidance hadn't turned over. In one, Leehealey questioned whether someone in the company was setting Todd up to be fired.

"Other than (Guidance Chairman Shawn McCreight's) hatred of her, she was a good employee and produced for me," he wrote to Victor Limongelli, now Guidance's chief executive.

Whether Guidance didn't find Leehealey's memos or whether it chose not to hand them over, "either one was extremely damning," Leehealey said in an interview.

"Those documents were on people's hard drives for sure, and they didn't produce them," said Leehealey, whose company, AccessData Inc., tried to buy Guidance last year but was turned down.

The arbitrator handling Todd's case, a retired judge, ordered Guidance to do a more thorough round of e-discovery. The company came back empty-handed _ except for news that one of its e-mail backup tapes had been corrupted. The arbitrator lost patience.

"I want this game-playing stopped," the arbitrator, William McDonald, told Guidance's attorney, according to a court transcript.

McDonald stopped short of saying Guidance was sitting on a smoking gun. But he was disturbed that Todd kept identifying documents the company hadn't unearthed. When he learned the corrupted backup tape had purportedly gone unnoticed for nearly a year, he had harsh words for the company.

"These are routine things in this business. And it wasn't done until pulling and screaming and kicking and facing the ultimate sanction," McDonald said, referring to his option to end the case in Todd's favor. "We're looking at people who should be very sophisticated in this area, given Guidance's business."

As punishment, McDonald ordered the company to pay for Todd's expert witnesses and her travel costs, plus the cost of rescheduling the trial. He also forced Guidance to search the backups, despite its arguments that it would take weeks, amounting to a task Guidance would charge customers $100,000 to perform.

In an interview, Limongelli said he didn't know in detail why Guidance didn't initially find many of the files Todd identified as missing, though he blamed a lost laptop for one oversight. Guidance executives also say the company was not legally required to search its backup tapes at first, given the expense of reading them.

"It wasn't an attempt to hide any information," Limongelli said. "We think we followed what is a quite normal course."

Some experts not involved with the case said there is support for Guidance's argument about the backup tapes. Under federal rules, all electronically stored information is potentially discoverable. But the rules distinguish between "reasonably accessible" files and ones that are too expensive to tackle, at least in initial e-discovery. Backup tapes often count as overly burdensome, said Scott Carlson, co-chair of e-discovery for the law firm Seyfarth Shaw.

Outside experts hired by Todd gave the arbitrator more critical assessments of Guidance's actions.

Brett Harrison, a director in FTI Consulting Inc.'s electronic evidence consulting group, wrote that the way Guidance saved documents once it knew of Todd's legal actions "was not performed to commonly accepted standards within the e-discovery field and in great part did not occur at all."

A second expert, William Moylan of Aon Consulting Inc., questioned why Guidance asked that deleted files be ignored during discovery because hunting for them would be a burden.

"Recovery and searching of deleted files is at the very heart of computer forensics," he wrote.

Ultimately, the arbitrator found enough information to decide in Todd's favor. He awarded her more than $300,000, about twice her annual compensation. A federal court is also set to consider whether Todd should receive damages under separate laws that prohibit discrimination. With most of the facts of Todd's dismissal already established, her attorney plans to focus on whether Guidance attempted to thwart e-discovery during arbitration.

Guidance was "egregiously in violation of everything they report to be best practices," Todd says. "They had every resource at their disposal. They didn't want to take it seriously."

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

Job Loss and the Economy

2009-02-13T11:26:00.007-05:00

The headlines screamed 800 Law Firm Jobs Lost in One Day.

Law firms cite a declining demand for legal services, decreased fees for the work that's left and a lack of usual attrition as reasons for cutting attorneys loose. In plain english : "its the economy...dummy"

It is now apparent that this downturn will be deeper and broader than past recessions, and all business sectors will be adversely affected in some way," Goodwin Procter Chairwoman Regina Pisa wrote in a memo announcing that the firm would lay off 38 associates and 36 staff, about a 4 percent reduction. DLA Piper cut 80 associates, or 5 percent of its U.S.-based lawyers DLA also let go of 100 staff members across the firm's 26 U.S. offices. Before the cuts, DLA Piper had about 1,500 attorneys in the United States and 3,800 attorneys worldwide.

“In light of the deepening economic downturn over the last number of months, we have carefully considered and reduced expenses across virtually all of our operations,” the firm said in a statement last weej. “While we had hoped for a rebound in economic activity, we believe that a major improvement in 2009 is increasingly unlikely.

The lawyoffs have hit all levels of the Amlaw 200 and the Global 100.
It is important to realize that most attorneys don't work for top Am Law firms so in reality is the news is much worse for the legal industry. . Imagine how many jobs have been lost at small to mid size firms with no press or fanfare.

We are in the middle of what will likely be the worst U.S. economic contraction since the 1930s. I can understand various attempts to prop up the financial system but as the owner of a litigation support business I think that more of the government's focus should be on incentives for people and businesses to invest, produce and work.

I know I am severely underqualified to comment on and understand the policy and decison making that goes into the stimulus package - as is 99.9999% of the U.S.- so I find myself watching; worrying and hoping that Obama gets it right and I ask - who has more incentive to get it right than President Obama?

At the end of the day however , a great deal of the debate between the Democratic and Rebublican parties is about how to apportion our nations wealth.

It's too bad the debate has ceased being about whether the government should be in the business of apportioning wealth.

Shrek IS the new Gumby; Steelers new Super Bowl Champs

2009-02-02T07:53:00.005-05:00

Forty-three years, and a championship has never been this exciting, this breathless, this much fun. Forty-three games, and none of them has measured up to this: Pittsburgh 27, Arizona 23

This was everything you ever wanted in a Super Bowl and more.

Last nights game had everything There was Harrison's 100-yard interception return, a 14-point swing, at the end of the first half. There was Roethlisberger pump-faking and finding Holmes for a 40-yard reception on the final drive. And there was a Bob Dylan sighting ( i'd guess Dylan is a Steelers kinda guy)

I maintain that any Bob Dylan sighting is noteworthy, and hearing him and Will.i.am perform "Forever Young" stood out to me more than even B-R-U-C- E at halftime. The legendary singer-songwriter and the Black Eyed Peas‘ Will.i.am both made what I think was much more that a cameo appearance during this Sunday’s Super Bowl

Good stuff - check it out here

http://tinyurl.com/djnmnw