Interesting post on the various e-discovery certifications that are out there. I recently had someone else bring that same question up to me as well.
I remember flipping through my emails and seeing a note about all of this e-discovery education. Someone wrote:
“…can anyone comment on whether employers take these things seriously (e-discovery certifications)? I’ll take the exams if they are worth it, but I don’t want to spend time and money to get letters after my name that no one truly cares about.”
I love that question, because I remember back a few years ago (around 2000 or so) you could not turn around without hearing a commercial or a promo for schools pushing people to get MCSE and CCNE certified and I thought it would be a great opportunity to push my career along with a Microsoft cert.
The very important thing that I am trying to say is and I hope this gives you some clarity: “the information you learn carries far more weight than the certification you earn, but the certification is the tangible product…”
Continue reading the post here.
I really enjoyed writing this post for Above The Law:
The following tale of legal technology took place in our nation’s capital, although it seemed to draw more attention overseas.
Last December, as winter’s grip began to take hold over Washington, D.C., Rodney Knight Jr. found himself in serious need of a heavy jacket. So he did what any of us would have done in these circumstances: he broke into someone’s house and took one. Knight kicked down the back door to the home of Marc Fisher, a metro columnist for the Washington Post, where he found his new winter jacket. In addition, being in a proactive mood, Knight decided to swipe two laptops and a bunch of cash.
Knight was so proud of his little heist that he felt the need to do a little bragging. Check out what one of the greatest criminal masterminds of the early 21st century did next….
Continue reading at Above The Law…
I wrote a post for ATL on the newest “buzzwords” in legal technology, and named “predictive coding” the winner for 2011.
Since the computer was invented, technologists have worked tirelessly to find ways machines can replace humans. Of course it is no different with e-discovery. The vendor that has really taken a lead in this effort is Recommind. They have written extensively about this, and they have a review tool called Axcelerate. You can find a good review of Axcelerate predictive coding here.
And now, Recommind has gone a step further by launching predictivecoding.com. From a quick look at the site I do like their take on what predictive coding does NOT do.
Predictive Coding does not replace human review. It optimizes it. The solution takes all the documents related to an issue, ranks and tags them so that a human reviewer can look over the documents to confirm relevance. The beauty of this technology is that you can use your human decisions to teach the computer, making the relevancy suggestions more accurate over time.
Props for this vendor getting ahead of the curve on this one.
From their website:
The word “Venio” is derived from Latin and means “to arise; to come about.” Our ideas are “coming about” into the E-Discovery market by having pulled our resources together and introducing a cutting edge E-Discovery software solution created to save legal, government and corporate industries time and money called Venio FPR™.
Our Venio FPR™ platform allows forensic units, attorneys and litigation support teams to analyze data, provide an early case assessment, a total case assessment and a first pass review of any size data set. Unlike other E-Discovery management platforms, ours can export to ALL industry standard litigation support applications while providing extensive reporting options…
From their website:
FlexReview combines manual review and Cataphora’s Technology Enhanced Review, offering the best advantages of each. It is specially suited to changing review circumstances, including expanding volumes of data, looming deadlines, and unanticipated issues that need closer expert examination.
Manual review is labor intensive but is also tried and true. It is viewed as the gold standard, particularly for potentially sensitive data. It remains widely accepted as an adequate standard for review.
Cataphora’s Technology Enhanced Review offers an invaluable complement to manual review. Its results are measurable, transparent, and defensible, according with judicial rulings and widely-accepted scientific principles. Its use within FlexReview saves time and slashes costs compared with a purely manual approach.
Jeff Cox
This is my latest post over at Above The Law:
What in the world is going on with our state attorneys general?
First there was the amazing Andrew Shirvell, former Michigan assistant attorney general. Shirvell used every form of media, social and otherwise, to stalk make people aware of the demonic student body president of the University of Michigan, Chris Armstrong. Shirvell claimed that Armstrong, who is openly gay, was imposing his notorious “homosexual agenda” on the Wolverine faithful, and had to be stopped. After being banned from the University of Michigan campus and allegedly lying to his boss, Attorney General Mike Cox, Shirvell was finally relieved of his duties.
Last week, another news item caught my interest. Jeffrey Cox, a deputy attorney general in Indiana (no relation to the AG from Michigan), tweeted the liberal magazine Mother Jones that live ammunition should be used against the protestors at the Wisconsin Capitol. A few hours later, he was fired.
Such quick and harsh punishment struck me as going a bit overboard, and it seems that Jeff Cox might have a cause of action on his hands…
Continue reading over at Above The Law…
From their website:
Integreon’s eView™ application is a market-leading, highly scalable, secure, and specialized review tool that is field-proven by the world’s leading law firms and corporate legal departments. eView enables you to better manage the workflow, productivity, and quality of large, complex projects. You can choose to utilize just our hosting infrastructure or package it with services provided by our experienced reviewers and project managers. eView delivers:
- Built-in analytics – Enables project leaders to assess data collections prior to the start of reviews to determine the most efficient workflow and approach for managing each project.
- Intelligent review process – Unlike some systems that force you to adopt a pre-configured, one-size-fits-all approach, eView offers project leaders their choice of workflows.
- Integrated privilege management – Improves efficiency by automatically generating privilege logs while reviewers work.
- In-depth reporting – Managers can assess the real-time progress of all their document review projects as well as the progress of specific teams and individual
