The Morgan Lewis eData team and Recommind are sponsoring what looks to be a very informative live seminar on March 18th (next Thursday) at 4:00pm in the New York offices of Morgan Lewis.   The seminar will focus on successfully leveraging technology to improve early case assessment (ECA), preservation, collection, and document review.

For the Morgan Lewis team:  Stephanie “Tess” Blair and Denise Backhouse

For Recommind:  Craig Carpenter

Both Morgan Lewis and Recommind are powerhouses in the e-discovery area.   Morgan Lewis and Tess Blair (a partner in Morgan Lewis’s Litigation Practice and leader of the firm’s eData Practice) were doing e-discovery before it had a name.   And Recommind and Craig Carpenter (Vice President of Marketing for Recommind who oversees all aspects of marketing at Recommind) have become the leaders in search-powered information risk management (IRM).

We profiled Tess, Denise and Morgan Lewis in an extensive interview (click here for the full interview), as well as Craig Carpenter and Recommind (click here for the full interview).

Seats for the seminar are limited so reserve as soon as possible.  To register click here.

This seminar will provide best practices and guidance for complex litigation and regulatory investigation responses. Get a firsthand look at customer case studies that demonstrate the power of sophisticated techniques such as concept grouping, advanced analytics, pre-collection ECA, and computer-generated review (i.e., Predictive Coding™).

Title: Defensible Legal Hold & Early Case Assessment — Advanced Technology Best Practices & the Changing Reasonableness Standard (sponsored by Autonomy)

Date: March 3, 2010

Time: 1:00 PM (EST)

Best practices and technology for eDiscovery are rapidly advancing. What was state of the art yesterday may no longer be a defensible process today.

During this informative web seminar, you will hear from a broad range of eDiscovery experts on the following:

• An understanding of the rapidly changing reasonableness standard
• The judiciary and technology
• Best practices for managing legal hold and early case assessment
• The evolving expectation around a reasonable and defensible process
• State of the art, advanced technology for legal hold, preservation, collection, and early case assessment
• Effective methods for mitigating risks, reducing costs, and minimizing process challenges

To register click here.

Topic: Defensible Legal Hold and Early Case Assessment

Thursday, March 11, 2010
5:30pm-6:30pm Houston, TX
1 hour CLE Credit, The State Bar of Texas

(Optional dinner reception immediately following)

Event Contact: Norris Tran  (norrist@autonomy.com)    415-615-1530

Speaker:
Jack Halprin, Esq.
VP of eDiscovery and Compliance
Autonomy 
Best practices and technology for eDiscovery are rapidly advancing. What was state of the art yesterday may no longer be a defensible process today. At the same time, both corporate and outside counsel are dealing with increasing volumes of data, rising litigation costs and shrinking budgets.

The challenge is to manage eDiscovery in a cost-effective and defensible process that will avoid sanctions and meet the ever evolving standard of reasonableness.

During this informative seminar, you will learn different methods on how to build a defensible process to mitigate risk and protect your organization or clients from fines, sanctions, and spoliation of crucial data.

This seminar will cover the following:

* An understanding of the rapidly changing reasonableness standard
* The judiciary and technology
* Best practices for managing legal hold and early case assessment
* The evolving expectation around a reasonable and defensible process
* State of the art, advanced technology for legal hold, preservation, collection, and early case assessment
* Effective methods for mitigating risks, reducing costs, and minimizing process challenges

About the speaker:

Jack Halprin, Esq., Vice President of eDiscovery and Compliance, Autonomy, serves as a subject matter
expert and advises clients on building best practices and defensible processes around electronic discovery, legal hold and compliance related issues. He is actively involved in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) forum, leading the EDRM Metrics 3 working group

Reported by:  Gregory Bufithis

InsideLegal counted 96 eDiscovery/litigation support vendors present and as they said — and we agree — everybody’s theme was predictable, up-front, and simple to understand pricing.   Makes sense: increased competition in the e-discovery space, smaller budgets all around. 

The two “big” technology launchs were: 

1.  Thomson Reuters Legal’s launch of WestlawNext, the self-proclaimed “next generation in legal research”.  There was a major press conference, and first-class multimedia show which touted “the most comprehensive and expensive R&D project in the company’s legal history”. 

2.  LexisNexis announced their tie-up with Microsoft. Their new offering, LexisNexis for Microsoft Office, aims to “empower lawyers to search and find relevant research in the Office applications they already use”. 

For a good “starter” review click here.

Everybody seemed to be selling “pre-review data culling/processing” as part of their ECA package  and they all seemed to be hawking per-gigabyte contract review. As the 451 Group mentioned (link below) all the ECA product releases in the last year seem to have made it a de facto step in the ediscovery process, the only argument remaining is how early it should occur – as early as the initial data gathering at identification and collection, or just before review but after processing?

The 451 Group review does a great job reviewing three trends: price sensitivity, new software releases, and changes in the nformation management reference model.  For their full blog post click here.

And for a great analysis of the vendors that offer all-in-one e-discovery software that sweeps from the far left to the far right of the EDRM see Sean Doherty’s post for law.com (click here). 

We spoke with 20+ software and service providers at LegalTech (including briefings we were invited to) and we attended the EDRM luncheon where we spoke with Sandra Song of H5, one of the co-chairs of the group tasked with building the Information Management Reference Model (IMRM).  For some background click here and click here.  We’ll have an in-depth interview with Sandra in the coming weeks about the model, and about her company H5.

A major trend we see:  multilingual software and service has risen and will continue to rise in importance.   Many firms are now recognizing the need to localize applications and content across cultural and geographic boundaries. Though the technology has been around for a while to enable that, a mindset shift is propelling the requirement forward.  It is the recognition that employees and partners operate more effectively in their native language rather than using English as a second language.   But it has an ecoonomic bend, too:  the potential to sell outside of the saturated English language market.   The Internet era, rather than push us toward the goal of English as the lingua franca, has given us the tools to revitalize and re-recognize native tongues.   It the reason we have seen a proliferation of foreign law web sites, and foreign law social media sites.

And it is why we saw a doubling of the vendors offering foreign language software and services and vendors who are integrating non-English language translation into document review workflows (as an example see the Merrill Corporation press release here).   And it explains the spike in Asian e-discovery vendors at LegalTech as Asian-based e-discovery soars.  

Part of it is outsource/cost driven.  In America, Britain and Canada, most commentary on legal process outsourcing refers to providers in India, where English is commonly spoken and the common law prevails. But for in-house counsel whose primary work language is French or Spanish, other countries contend for the work.  For example, as explained in the current issue of European Lawyer , “outsourcers are looking at other regions, such as Morocco and Romania to cater for the French, Italian and German markets and where a full-time equivalent lawyer will typically cost one-fifth of what it does in those European jurisdictions.”  The search for low-cost providers of legal-related services extends to another common language:  “They are also beginning to target Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras for the Spanish market.”

We’ll explore this trend in more detail in a later post when we launch our foreign language e-discovery site.

Reported by:  Alexis Gambetta / The Posse List 

There were multiple sessions covering early case assessment (ECA) so we’ll summarize a few of them.  We followed the  General Counsel Track and attended “Data Retention Plans and Early Case Assessment-Moving Towards a More Effective System In-House” which was sponsored by Merrill Corporation.  

We also attended the session “Advanced Discovery Analytics and Early Case Assessment” sponsored by Deloitte.

And we had an opportunity to chat with the StoredIQ team who are a bit of an expert in intelligent information management and e-discovery technologies and have (in their words) “revolutionized” ECA.   But they have very interesting technology and a unique approach and they were open to a long chat so we’ll start with them.

So here’s the skinny.  The vast majority of legal cases are settled before ever going to trial.  One of the one of the most valuable and indispensable techniques used by corporate counsel is early case assessment (ECA).  The only argument remaining:  how early it should occur – as early as the initial data gathering at identification and collection, or just before review but after processing?  Or maybe when it is still at the dispute stage?

As Ursula Talley (Vice President of Marketing for StoredIQ) explained “using ECA, legal counsel can assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy and make decisions concerning the matter before the costly process of taking the case to trial begins”.   But traditionally ECA occurs close to the review stage of the e-discovery process since it requires that data already be processed and loaded into a review system.  And if you are a contract attorney waiting to begin that review you know the galacial pace of e-discovery:  counsel first determines who is involved (custodians), then preserves and collects their data so that the initial analysis and review can begin.  Maybe.

Expensive, inefficient and prolonged.  Why?  Because collection and preservation involves manual, forensic copying of the custodian’s hard drive and a complete data dump of the custodian’s archived email and documents into a central repository.  Only then can processing and analysis be performed to ready the data set for a first pass review. 

StoredIQ refers to performing ECA “in the wild” meaning where the data natively resides, and the need to have the ability to perform incremental collections. This eliminates the need to repeatedly collect the same data from custodians that are frequently subject to e-discovery requests. 

They have a product (surprise!) to address all of these issues and the product is called  StoredIQ Analyze Anywhere.   In brief: it enables ECA prior to preservation and collection, without requiring the movement of data from where it natively resides. This powerful ability to perform early case analysis on data “in the wild” to give legal counsel the ability to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, etc., etc.  The goal is to make decisions concerning a legal matter significantly faster than traditional ECA.  What you are doing, in effect, is conducting ECA at the earliest stages of e-discovery without having to migrate ESI from various sources into a centralized repository. 

The interesting part is that StoredIQ has a data classification technology so that the business context of data in its native location is not only available to the ECA user, but is also captured and pushed downstream to traditional review tools enabling a more contextual review experience. 

This is important because as we learned at the Merrill Corporation session the ability to perform in-place ECA must be complemented by an e-discovery workflow that provides a simplified and efficient way to cull potentially matter-relevant data.  You need to process and analyze large initial data sets with user-friendly analysis features to help make sense of a mass of information.   

The Merrill panel was moderated by Daniel Pelc of Merrill and included Wendy Curtis, Esq. (Special Counsel, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe) and Paul Weiner (a shareholder with Littler Mendelson).

The panel started off with a definition of early case assessment as follows:

Early case assessment can be defined as the following: “the implementation of litigation analysis and management protocol that provides for the assembly and review of appropriate information on an expedited basis (30‐90 days) in order to provide a preliminary assessment of the case and the optimal method for proceeding.”

They also discussed that the technology behind ECA has changed drastically over the past years. The number of competitors has risen and partnerships between ECA vendors and providers within the ECA vertical has exploded.

This was the most interesting aspect (for me) because the panel went through the beginnings/sources of ECA and search and put it all into perspective, explaining its development being from two sources:

The Legal Concept:  FRCP 34 includes electronically stored information (ESI) in its definition of a document.  Counsel must “scope” or “assess” the size of their client’s relevant ESI that must be produced in any given case.  See, for example, PhoenixFour, Inc. v. Strategic Resources Corp., 2006 WL 1409413 (S.D.N.Y. May 23, 2006) (click here).  In order to determine what documents are relevant, counsel must cull and apply search terms to client’s data to produce rlevant documents. Large data sets were first processed, culled and then searched, which was very costly.

The Technological Concept:  Client’s data was (and is) unstructured.  Client and counsel had difficulty locating all relevant documents in a case.  Costs were high to comply with discovery obligations.  ECA tools, originally created as part of  records and information management (RIM) systems were used to structure and capture client’s data and/or locate, via culling and search terms, to find relevant data prior to processing.  Result: only relevant documents processed and reviewed = Large cost reduction.

So these early ECA methods left you with:

Processing side:  untargeted custodian interviews/untargeted data identification/untargeted preservation and processing/“brute force” review/no lasting value to case

Technology sde:   limited culling and searching capabilities over limited number of repositories/keyword searching only (no concept searching tools)/limited or incomplete data clustering

So that brought a new “proactive” approach to ECA resulting in:

Process Driven (Strategic): RIM/Document Retention Plan (DRP)/e-discovery Response Plan (EDRP) including litigation hold policies and procedures/leverage existing DRP and EDRP to prepare for and conduct ECA

Technology Driven (RIM and Analysis):  leverage existing technologies (RIM technologies, dynamic Data Mapping, and embedded or overlaid ECA tools) to prepare for and conduct ECA/targeted preservation and review thru data sampling, analytics and metrics/preserve, hash and collect relevant data/establish defensible audit trails and logs

And the big thing was search methodologies of which there are now a gazillion.  Ok, they told us about 15:

Boolean searches (and, or, not)

Wildcard searches (*auto*, *tion)

Proximity searches

Thesaurus/Synonym search

Fuzzy searching

Stemming

Statistical searching

Conceptual searching

Content-based searching

Topical searching

Weighted relevance searching

Adaptive pattern recognition

Associative retrieval

Natural language or non-boolean retrieval

Clusters of related phrases

The problem with searches, though, as the panel warned was the result.  Quoting Sedona:  “Sedona: “The use of search and information retrieval tools does not guarantee that all responsive documents will be identified in large data collections, due to characteristics of human language. Moreover, differing search methods may produce differing results, subject to a measure of statistical variation inherent in the science of information retrieval.”

The panel moderator (Daniel Pelc of Merrill) gave us the entire Powerpoint presentation which includes all the notes and slides and it is a treasure trove of information on ECA, search, and more.  You can access it by clicking here.

Postscript:

The StoredIQ software was extremely interesting to us because while the company was flagging it as early case assessment software the reality is that the ”in the wild” approach actually means you can analyze your situation well before preservation and collection, without requiring the movement of data, from where it natively resides.   And this means, says Ursula, you have the ability to assess the merits of a dispute before it event becomes “a case”.   StoredIQ is in the vanguard of companies like CaseCentral and eTERA Consulting who are moving beyond (off?) the left side of the EDRM into early information assessment.

We’ll have an in-depth interview with Ursula later this month and you’ll learn more about  the ”in the wild” approach.

Ron Friedmann is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Integreon.  He is a leading authority on practice support for lawyers.   Ron managed practice support at then Wilmer Cutler (now WilmerHale), was CIO at Mintz, worked for two legal software companies, and ran Prism Legal Consulting.  He is a Trustee of the College of Law Practice Management and on the Board of Governors of the Organization of Legal Professionals.  Ron has a JD from NYU and BA from Oberlin College.  

Integreon is well known for its e-discovery, managed document review, legal process outsourcing (LPO), research and knowledge support, and middle office business services for law firms, corporations, and financial institutions.  Beyond marketing, Ron helps law firms and law departments improve efficiency and effectiveness using Integreon services. 

But it is through his blog, Strategic Legal Technology, that Ron is best known.  Ron has blogged since 2003; in 2009, the ABA Journal selected his blog for its Blawg 100, the ABA’s annual list of the best of the blawgosphere.  The choice was a good one: Ron is as insightful as he is prolific.  His blog is widely read because Ron writes with two decades of experience at the intersection of law practice, law business, outsourcing, e-discovery, knowledge management, and technology.  

We caught up with Ron at The Masters Conference and then at his D.C. area office.  

TPL:   Ron, you have written extensively on the consequences of the paradigm shift in the legal industry.  In a recent blog post you said, “what is bad news for law firms could be good news for legal technology managers.”  Can you elaborate? 

RF:     Law departments must act to reduce legal spend.  If GCs don’t, we may see CFOs and CEOs step in.   So the new normal for law firms won’t be the same as the old; the time for minor adjustments has passed.  The legal market will likely stay flat and see downward price pressure.  Consequently, firms have lost pricing power and face a battle for market share.  Winning that battle will require that firms offer clients more value.  To do so, firms will get serious about process improvement, project management, outsourcing, and alternative fees.  This in turn means that firms must deploy new technology and use old technology more effectively.  This will open in a new chapter — maybe even new volume — in legal technology. Getting there will require more business and technology professionals.  

TPL:   A recent Hildebrandt article discussed the fact that we need to be wary about how we measure all of this stuff.  For instance, the “demand” for legal services — as currently measured in the legal industry — is usually discussed in terms of either lawyer hours, or legal fees, both of which can be relatively easily measured and captured.  But clients don’t “demand” lawyer hours — they demand solutions to legal problems (just as consumers don’t “demand” auto worker hours — they buy a car).  

RF:     Exactly.  The market finally recognizes that “inputs” – hours billed – don’t equate to “outputs”, that is results.  Good legal outcomes depend on smarts and repeatable processes more than on sheer number of hours.  Where bulk work is necessary, clients want more cost-effective ways to do it. As a result, legal process outsourcers (both domestic and offshore) now handle growing volumes of routine work formerly done in-firm by lawyers and legal staff.  Firms themselves are reengineering work processes to reduce inefficiency and cost.  This trend will accelerate as fixed fees and other risk sharing alternative fee arrangements spread.  

TPL:   So you see this pretty much as a golden opportunity for vendors? 

RF:     Yes.  And it especially creates opportunity for Integreon’s legal process outsourcing (LPO) service.  A recent article in The Economist noted that LPO is booming.  Law firms can now parcel out more of their basic work so they can focus on their core strength of legal advice and strategy.  

TPL:   We are going to post a lengthy piece on legal process outsourcing during LegalTech and we’ll cover Integreon’s services then, so we’ll hold off on those questions right now.  This is an area that most affects our contract attorney membership. 

RF:     Ok, but let me just make a short comment now.  Legal process outsourcing may very well see a watershed year in 2010.  Since the Rio Tinto law department announced its LPO initiative in June 2009, the U.K. legal press has seen a flurry of LPO announcements.  There is less PR in the US, but many private conversations are taking place. 

TPL:   Fair enough. I do want to discuss LPO with you in more detail at LegalTech.  But one other relatively new development has an even more direct affect on the contract attorney market and we have discussed it many times: the rapid move toward predictive coding technology and machine review.  In 2009 saw two “first pass” document reviews that actually skipped human review and were done by machine.  What are your thoughts on predictive coding? 

RF:     I have been passionate about improving the document review process for two decades.  That’s a big reason I joined Integreon – it shares that passion.  Automation is the key to improvement, so I’ve thought about the role of computers a lot and my thinking has evolved.  

We will see computers play a bigger and bigger role in first-pass document review, at least for responsiveness.   This role can range from culling documents, to prioritizing them, to automatically (or predictively) coding them.  What’s driving this? 

As a society, we simply cannot afford to pay people to look at every document.  As a profession, we must recognize that human review as the “gold standard” makes no sense.  Both anecdotes and studies suggest that human review is not nearly as consistent or reliable as lawyers typically assume it is.  

Computers turn out to be more reliable and consistent than people – no surprise.  But it is not so much the particular software that drives this conclusion as it is the combination of technology, process, and training. 

My blog posts on e-discovery and litigation support show the evolution in my thinking.  In July 2003, I started with Thoughts on Full Text Retrieval, where I questioned the value of concept search versus Boolean search but concluded that the choice is an empirical, not theoretical question.  As volumes grew, technology improved, and we gained experience, my views shifted.  By November 2009, I concluded that the Choice of Concept Search Tool in e-Discovery May Matter Less Than You Think (November 2009).  In that post, based on dialog with two leading EDD experts, Tom O’Connor and Herb Roitblatt, I posited that the semantic engine is less important than the overall process, which includes training and how the tool is used. 

In sum, three trends – (1) pressure to spend less, (2) improvements in process and technology, and (3) growing recognition of the limits of human accuracy – will converge and lead to more “predictive coding”. 

TPL:   OK, I see you’ve really thought about this.  So where do you come out on early case assessment (ECA) — winnowing relevant data down to reduce the number of documents to review — versus predictive coding?  Was ECA the mantra in 2009 and predictive coding the “new new thing” for 2010? 

RF:     I don’t draw that big a distinction between ECA and predictive coding.  The goal of both is to reduce the volume of documents that humans must review.  

ECA uses computers to winnow the number of documents lawyers must review.   It uses several techniques, for example, selecting custodians, narrowing data ranges, applying keywords, and categorizing and prioritizing documents.  ECA allows for strategic decisions, such as settle or litigate, before incurring the significant cost of substantial discovery.   

The goal of predictive coding is to use computers to substitute software judgment for human judgment.  That sounds quite different from ECA but I think both are points on a continuum.  Most predictive coding systems require human reviewers to train and tune them.  And most lawyers will still want to vet predictive coding with humans, at least on a sampling basis.  So I focus on the number of documents ‘humans must touch’ rather than ECA versus predictive coding. 

The two share other similarities.  Both can be used to prioritize documents for review.  Both require maintaining “defensibility” – can you show in court that you have taken all the appropriate and reasonable and steps and documented them carefully.  

TPL:   And what’s your view of the computer assisted review study by Patrick Oot, Herb Roitblat, and Anne Kershaw — “Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery: Computer Classification vs. Manual Review “?  Do you think the technology is accurate enough to take the place of contract reviewers and — more importantly — do you think the technology is fully defensible and do you think judges have demonstrated that they consider automated review acceptable? 

RF:     I read the study and blog posts about it and am still mulling the implications.  At minimum, it advances the discussion about humans versus computer review and shows the value of a controlled, statistical approach.  

It should alert lawyers to the notion that humans are not all that accurate and computers are typically more consistent.  My hope is that it fosters a dialog on the issue and perhaps even helps shift the burden of proof.  Imagine going into court and having to explain why you used an army of lawyers instead of software! 

But I don’t think the study sets up a replay of John Henry versus the steam engine.  That is, it’s not man versus machine; rather, it’s how do we integrate the two in a cost-effective process that holds up both to judicial and statistical scrutiny.  And by the way, I don’t think lawyers or judges give statistics sufficient consideration.  

So, picking up on the ECA and predictive coding themes, I don’t think technology will eliminate review lawyers.  I do think that over time, as processes improve and as courts gain experience, computers will substitute for increasing amounts of contract lawyer review time.  I see a future where armies of contract lawyers as the norm will be replaced by much smaller teams of specialized review attorneys.  Whether that specialized role is contract or full-time is hard to say. 

Though I think automation is defensible, we are at risk for bad rulings, either because a party automates poorly or because, in spite of doing it well, a judge just does not understand the process. 

TPL:   So we are headed down the path to where machines can be statistically proven to be as accurate as human reviewer?  Is the technology getting to the point where we can also winnow out the eyeballs — contract attorney reviewers?  No room for a human element and perspective? 

RF:     I’ll repeat what I said above: it’s man and machine, not man versus machine.  I expect that computers do assume a larger and larger role in doc review.  Society and litigants will suffer if that’s not true. 

For the foreseeable future, however, it’s hard to imagine eliminating all human review.  As technology and process improve, I do think it is likely that the ratio of reviewers to gigabytes will decline.  That is, over time, the human effort will be less focused on what I call “bulk review.”  Instead, humans will likely focus on upfront work (ECA and “system training”), on vetting and tuning computer processes, and on reviewing results to refine systems. That’s why we’ll likely see the rise of specialized review attorneys, lawyers who understand law, technology, process, and statistics. 

TPL:   We recently attended an all-day conference in Washington, DC sponsored by Apple and saw some of the work being done by Google on auto-categorization and auto-coding.  Developers told us that Microsoft is also in the race.  Do you think it is just a matter of time before goliaths like Google and Microsoft — with multi-billion dollar budgets — jump into auto-categorization and auto-coding and wipe out the majority of vendors? 

RF:   As I mentioned above, I think the choice of tool matters less than the overall process.   Unless Google or Microsoft come up with a break-through in computational linguistics (the math behind conceptual search), it’s hard for me to imagine a new search tool vastly superior to what’s available today.  I’m not aware of any algorithmic breakthroughs in the last two decades so I don’t expect any soon.  The breakthrough Google made was using web links as “voting engine” – an approach that does not work for corporate document collections, which are not linked. 

Of course, either company could likely spend its way to a big EDD market share, even with “me too” technology.  That does not appear to be their strategy and EDD is small beans compared to web searching or software, so it seems unlikely to me. 

TPL:   And what do you think is at the forefront of the discovery process, the most important thing, the biggest challenge? 

RF:     I think the biggest challenge and opportunity is creating a consistent, reproducible, documented, and defensible approach that integrates the best of technology and standard processes.  The challenge is not who has the best algorithm, the best software, or the best reviewers.  Rather, the challenge is putting algorithm, software, and reviewer together into an economically affordable, statistically sound, and judicially defensible process.  And that must be done in a consistent, repeatable, industrially controlled process.  Think workflows, documentation, training, metrics, formal quality control, feedback loops, sampling, etc. 

Oh, and let’s not forget that the end-game is not doc review and defensibility.  The end game is telling the best story in litigation, or avoiding needless litigation when a settlement might make more sense.  So the challenge for the legal market is to re-focus from discovery to fact-finding and story telling.  With the right process, lawyers will be able to stop worrying about doc review and possible sanctions and instead focus on figuring out who said what and when and interpreting the facts as favorably as possible.    

Discovery used to be a side show and moved into the main ring in the last decade.  I don’t think that will last. 

TPL:   Ron, we greatly appreciate your time.  We’ll chat more at LegalTech. 

RF:     I appreciate the opportunity to share my views.  And more importantly, I think it’s great that the Posse List has become a key voice in the discussion around e-discovery, bringing together interviews, news summaries, and resources that advance the field and help contract lawyers find work. 

Note to readers and attendees of LegalTech in New York:  On February 1, 2, and 3, in New York, as part of the Legal Tech show, Integreon is exhibiting at booth 324 (first level of exhibits).  Also, many senior Integreon EDD and middle office outsourcing professionals will be at Legal Tech.  If you would like to connect with Ron or anyone else from Integreon, during LegalTech, contact Ron at marketing@integreon.com.

15 November 2009

The presentation on Advanced Search and Retrieval Technology was made by Jason R. Baron, Maura Grossman and Ralph Losey, all powerhouses in the e-discovery world.

Baron and Losey started off with their multimedia PowerPoint presentation (to the tune of Darude’s Sandstorm which we had just seen at the Capital One Future of Search conference  and it blew away the crowd – and us, too, again.  In a nutshell, ediscovery is expanding exponentially and Ralph Losey talked petabytes, and exabytes — not terabytes. This was the “beta version” of a presentation that Losey and Baron will give at LegalTech in New York City this coming February.  

As an introduction (not necessary for this audience but a great set-up nonetheless) Jason said there are technologies available to help the litigator reduce the costs of reviewing and producing ESI while at the same time accomplish the objective of responding to a request for production.  Most commonly used by litigators today are review tools that enable reviewers to review the ESI in an online repository.  Vendors that provide these review tools also typically offer filtering and processing services, where they take ESI that has been collected, and, behind the scenes, apply filters to the ESI to narrow the volume to the ESI that is likely to be relevant to the request for production.

A popular filter is the application of keywords, developed by the litigator, to the collected ESI. After applying the keywords, the vendor provides a “frequency report” or “hit list” of the number or percentage of documents that hit on a particular keyword so that the litigator can evaluate the efficacy of the selected keywords.  

There may be various iterations of this process until the litigator approves the results in the frequency report.  The vendor then processes the filtered ESI and uploads it to a web-based review tool for the review to begin.

There is also new automated technology called “early case assessment” technology that has entered the marketplace, and which review tool vendors are rushing to add to their current products. This technology allows for a thorough front-end look at the volume of ESI collected in response to the request for production, instead of just the ESI that is filtered, processed and uploaded to the review tool. Thus, by using this new technology, the litigator can find the “significant documents” very early on in the case instead of waiting until the end of the review process after the reviewers have reviewed and “tagged” the significant documents.

Moreover, this technology enables the administrator and/or the litigator to perform keyword searching and other filtering on their own without incurring any additional charges and without having to rely on the vendor for these services. This technology also provides automated analytics so that the litigator can obtain a high level understanding of the ESI, which can identify key players, lines of communications between custodians and types of significant documents. This knowledge will help shape the review and the litigator’s investigation of the facts of the case.

Maura Grossman then followed with what we thought was a brilliant presentation on the challenges of search.  Our review cannot do it justice (we have links below to background material provided by Maura and Jason) so just some high points from her presentation:

1.  There is no way to review everything manually, in large matters, in the time frames dictated by the typical litigation or investigation.

2.  Manual review does not scale well, and how the cost of responsiveness and privilege review can quickly dwarf the costs of all of the other stages of the e-discovery process.

3.  Lawyers are not nearly as talented at search as they think they are.  The Blair and Maron study (in 1985) was the first study to demonstrate the significant gap or disconnect between lawyers’ perceptions of their ability to ferret out relevant documents, and their actual ability to do so.   In a 40,000 document case — consisting of 350,000 pages — the lawyers estimated that their searches had identified 75% of the relevant documents,  when, in fact, they had only identified about 20% of them.

4.  The use of keywords, alone, is unlikely to reliably produce all relevant documents from a large, heterogeneous document collection, for a whole host of reasons, including:

     a.  That information retrieval is already a very difficult problem when it involves plain vanilla, English-language, text documents. That problem is magnified when you address a multi-lingual set of documents, with nontextual forms of ESI, such as photographs or audio and video files, which are typically not searchable.

      b.  The inherent ambiguity of language, in particular:

            Synonymy = there can be considerable variation in describing the same person or thing, i.e., diplomat, ambassador, consul, official, etc.

           Polysemy = the same term can have multiple meanings, i.e., Bush (referring to two presidents; a shrub; a place in Africa; a thick furry tail; “bush league,” among other slang usages). Strike (referring to a labor activity; the act of hitting; the baseball kind; finding oil or gold and “striking it rich;” and so on).

       c.  The ubiquity of human error, i.e., misspellings and typos (there were 250 different spellings for the word “tobacco” in the MSA database; “management” will miss managment” and “mangement”).

       d.  Abbreviations (i.e., “P&C/ACC”); colloquialisms (i.e., Haynes & Boone / H&B / HayBoo); slang; code words; and new short-forms used in text messaging and IM (i.e., “FWIW”, “LMAO”).

      e.   The problem is compounded by optical character recognition (“OCR”).

      f.  Poor records management, including lack of organization and/or proper labeling, the reflexive use of “Reply” even when the subject matter of an email has changed, and so on.

      g.  Deadlines and resource constraints that place practical limits on what can be achieved.

       h.  And finally, there is a widespread failure to employ “best practices” in the area of search and retrieval. Lawyers believe that because they know how to use Westlaw, Lexis, and Google, they know how to do search, but finding a few good examples of something is a very different task than finding as close to all of that thing as possible, without also including a lot of junk.

So, what are the “best practices” for keyword searching?

1.  You start with the complaint, the subpoena, or the request for production. First  you determine: who are the relevant custodians?  what is the applicable time frame?  what terms-of-art are employed?  

2.  Then, you translate what the request is seeking into plain, everyday English to get as close as possible to the terms that people are most likely to use in their daily communications.

3. Try to have a couple of different people do this to ensure that you are getting the benefit of multiple interpretations of the requests and potential keywords from different vantage points.

4.  This is the basic starting point for your search-term list.

5.  Next—and this is the step that is most often overlooked by lawyers—you must seek input from the people who actually created, sent, or received the documents.  These are your best subject-matter experts.

6.  Ask them questions like:  “Who would be most likely to have created, sent, or received emails or documents on these subjects?”  “What distribution lists would have been used?”  “What time frame would these emails or documents cover?”   “What events would these emails or documents discuss?”   “What names, words, or terms would be likely to appear in these emails or documents?”  “What abbreviations, acronyms, slang, or code words might have been used?”   “If you were looking for emails or documents responsive to these requests,  how would you go about finding them?”  “What kinds of attachments would these emails have?”

7. If warranted by the stakes of your matter, consider whether an hour or two of a linguist’s or substantive expert’s time would help you to significantly improve the quality of your search term list.

8. Next, look at a bunch of documents that you already know to be responsive (for example, some that you obtain from a key custodian).  Ask yourself, what unique words or phrases distinguish these documents? In what context do the documents appear? (If you are using a search tool that employs machine learning, these documents can be the start of your “seed” or training set.)

9. If possible, have your vendor index the documents in the set and provide you with a list of the words that appear in the documents, ranked from most to least frequently appearing. Use that list to identify documents that are likely to be unresponsive (“birthday,” “baby shower”) or privileged, and to identify search terms you may have missed.

Ok, there was a lot more.  To help, here is a link to Jason and Maura’s slides (click here).

Some  suggested references:

* Craig Ball has a paper on his website summarizing search steps.   It is entitled “Surefire Steps to Splendid Search” (June/July 2009) (Click here).

* The Sedona Conference® Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery (Aug. 2007 Public Comment Version) (click here)

*  The Sedona Conference® Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process (May 2009 Public Comment Version) (click here)

* The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) 2009 Legal Track (click here)  

Take-Away Messages from the panel

1.  Success in search requires a well thought-out process with substantial input at the front-end and some degree of testing, sampling, feedback and/or iteration.

2.  The amount of testing, sampling, feedback and/or iteration should reflect the same proportionality considerations inherent in all discovery, i.e., the amount in controversy, the time and resources available, the importance of the evidence to the determination of the dispute, etc.

3.  Different search approaches are best for different tasks. For example, some things are simply easier to search for than others, i.e., patent or pharmaceutical litigation versus evidence regarding off-shore accounts or document destruction/shredding.  Do you need a few good examples, or are you trying to find “all”?

4.  There is no guarantee that any search method will identify all responsive documents in a large, homogeneous data set, and different search methods can produce different result sets. Hybrid or fusion approaches tend to be more successful, but are also more costly and time-consuming.

5.  Automated technology can help, but its not the “end-all-be-all.” Due diligence is absolutely necessary in this current “Wild West” marketplace.

6.  At least some degree of transparency and collaboration is necessary. Obviously, an agreed-upon search methodology (or search-term list) is preferable to a unilateral approach that is subject to second-guessing and “do-overs.”  Parties must be able to explain what they have done and why it is reasonable under the circumstances. 

7.  It is important for practitioners to keep up with the case law, research, and literature in this area because it is quickly evolving. There are consultants (including linguists and statisticians) who have expertise in this area and can help devise or mediate a reasonable search protocol if the parties cannot agree on one.

A  (very) brief note on Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)

TREC was mentioned several times at the panel (and all during the conference) especially the opportunity of  participating in the 2010 TREC Legal Track.  We will have a detailed post on TREC before the year out but just a short “bio” on TREC from Ellen M. Voorhees of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who was scheduled to appear but could not:

Evaluation is a fundamental component of the scientific method: researchers form a hypothesis, construct an experiment that tests the hypothesis, and then assess the extent to which the experimental results support the hypothesis.  A very common type of experiment is a comparative experiment in which the hypothesis asserts that Method 1 is a more effective solution than Method 2, and the experiment compares the performance of the two methods on a common set of problems.

The set of sample problems together with the evaluation measures used to assess the quality of the methods’ output form a benchmark task.  Information retrieval researchers have used test collections, a form of benchmark task, ever since Cyril Cleverdon and his colleagues created the first test collection for the Cranfield tests in the 1960’s. Many experiments followed in the subsequent two decades and several other test collections were built.

Yet by 1990 there was growing dissatisfaction with the methodology. While some research groups did use the same test collections, there was no concerted effort to work with the same data, to use the same evaluation measures, or to compare results across systems to consolidate findings. The available test collections were so small—the largest of the generally available collections contained about 12,000 documents and fewer than 100 queries—that operators of commercial retrieval systems were unconvinced that the techniques developed using test collections would scale to their much larger document sets. Even some experimenters were questioning whether test collections had out-lived their usefulness.

At this time, NIST was asked to build a large test collection for use in evaluating test retrieval technology developed as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s TIPSTER project. NIST proposed that instead of simply building a single large test collection, it organize a workshop that would both build a collection and investigate the larger issues surrounding test collection use. This was the genesis of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). The first TREC workshop was held in November 1992, and there has been a workshop held annually since then.

We will have a detailed post on TREC before the year out.

The Masters Conference (click here) will be held on October 13th and 14th in Washington, DC.  The Masters conference brings together leading experts and professionals from law firms, corporations and the bench to develop strategies, practices and resources for managing the information life cycle.

The theme for this year’s conference, “Global Corporate Change – Navigating through Discovery, Risk and Security,” focuses on how corporations can protect themselves against the risks associated with high-profile scandals, security breaches, IP threats, increased litigation, audits and regulatory investigations.

The Conference was created in 2006 to provide an opportunity for advanced practical education for corporate counsel and law firms.  Its mission is to have speakers, product and service providers, and attendees work together:

*  The speakers, leaders in their fields, provide education on the issues and how they translate into practice.

*  The providers develop solutions to fit the needs arising from corporate records management and litigation.

*   The attendees contribute real-world experience.

To make this work, the conference is smaller and more intimate than many of the other conferences in the industry. The organizers strive to create interactive sessions where the speakers interact with the attendees.   There is also a easier opportunity to speak with providers that offer clients their products and services that meet their needs, and for providers to have an opportunity to interact with the educators, speakers, and attendees. 

We have expanded our coverage of these conferences (LegalTech, ILTA, the ILSL, the IQPC series, etc.) to provide information for our diverse membership: contract attorneys, law firms, corporations, e-discovery vendors, bar associations, legal media, etc.

But our focus is on the growing opportunities for our core membership (contract attorneys and temporary attorneys) so they know the ins-and-outs of electronically stored information (ESI) because:

1.  e-discovery vendors continue to move into the “right-side” of the EDRM, picking up document review and production; and

2.  corporations continue their trend to by-pass law firms and go directly to these e-discovery vendors to manage their ESI needs as companies, desperate to save a buck or two, secure more ownership over the e-discovery process to enhance control and reduce costs.  Leveraging in-house technologies and deploying early case assessment methodologies results in data reduction strategies.

It  means opportunities for Posse List members beyond the “click click click” of document review as demonstrated by a growing number of e-discovery vendors, in-house legal departments, and other entities who have posted projects and positions on our job lists that seek a well-founded e-discovery background.  It is a trend we have cited with by such reports as those from the Sapire Search Group and Rees Morrison.

So we cover these conferences, and we continue to expand our Electronic Discovery Reading Room (click here) to provide as many “primers” and background briefs as we can on ESI management and e-discovery.

And all of this segues into the area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC).  This is not a “new new thing” and has been chronicled for well over the last year and half.  This convergence of e-discovery and GRC technology and management is reshaping the industry.  It the major focus at this year’s Masters Conference.

A special thank you note:  It is a daunting task for any organization to organize and launch a program of this magnitude.  Luckily they have Sasha Hefler, President of the Masters Conference (click here) who is responsible for a million things including: the list of speakers and subjects; press releases; event sponsorships; public relations; webinars; testimonials; interviews; white papers, etc., etc.   

And despite this awesome “to do” list she has gone beyond the call of duty to help The Posse List.  We are fielding 3 staff members and several bloggers at the conference and she has found time to process our registrations and provide all the back-up material we requested on speakers and vendors, etc.

We’ll have a chance to interview Sasha during the conference.  For now, some of the sessions we expect to cover to give you a flavor of the conference:

When Good Faith is not Good Enough

The global economic crisis is making its mark: a rising tide of corporate litigation, consolidations and mergers, and some of the century’s most sweeping changes to corporate governance. Regulators are promising hard hitting new rules and hefty sanctions impacting all sectors. Boards of directors, customers, courts and regulators are taking notice and demanding action.   As legal departments and their IT brethren are struggling to bring information governance and eDiscovery in line with tightening rules and regulations, the exponential growth of geographically dispersed information from a raft of data sources presents them with a daunting challenge. Traditional policies and methods for governance and discovery of electronically stored information are falling short, yet organizations must comply or risk fines and sanctions that put shareholder value, public confidence and brand integrity at risk.  The legal and regulatory environment surrounding information governance is evolving in three phases. This panel will discuss the opportunities and risks affecting legal and compliance officers, trends in case law and rules, and best practices for managing the disciplines of information governance and discovery through the evolution.

E-Discovery: Why Most Enterprise Implementations Fail to Make the Grade

It takes just 10,000 employees to generate more electronic documents in a year than is contained in the entire Library of Congress. It is easy to see how archiving e-mail and files for large enterprises can be a daunting challenge. This session cuts through the vendors’ marketing brochures to identify the real problems, formulate the hard questions to ask vendors and outline ways to evaluate and compare solutions to fit your needs. Armed with this knowledge, your chances of implementation success can be significantly improved.

Early Case Assessment: Looking to the Future – From Early Assessment to Early Awareness

ECA technology is poised to radically change how companies approach e-Discovery.  However, those who view ECA as only a cost-saving solution for eDiscovery have taken too narrow a view of its application. The distinguishing capability of ECA — rapid search & intelligent classification of vast information stores — when combined with effective processes, will enable corporations to adopt innovative strategies focused on discovery, data privacy, data loss, general records & information management as well as cost reduction.

Enabling Transformative Technologies – The Science &Engineering and the Law

The law has not caught up with emerging technology development modalities, with costly consequences.  Changing this state of affairs requires better understanding of how transformational technology advancements will be enabled,  to anticipate such trends and create the appropriate legal infrastructure.  This lecture will focus on better understanding how the two major recent trends of globalization and the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of technological innovation require for more synergistic partnerships between industry and academe.  The efforts to solve the most challenging problems facing us –whether related to energy (oil, nuclear, solar, wind), critical infrastructure systems (electrical power grids, transportation systems), homeland security, global communication systems, etc — would benefit from such interactions.  Topics covered will include emerging scientific, technological and policy directions; guiding principles; types of interaction and collaboration; opportunities, constraints and expected outcomes.  There will also be an assessment of new processes and frameworks catalyzed through government involvement.  All lawyers can better counsel their clients, particularly in industry, when they have a good understanding of where technology and technology development modalities are heading, and how such trends can be advantageously leveraged.

E-discovery Evolution and Revolution: an Early Case Assessment Movement

The high cost of traditional e-discovery methods and the economic downturn have made it difficult on the corporate counsel and IT staff of enterprise organizations when they respond to legal discovery requests. The costs associated with gathering and processing electronically stored information and ensuring that the complete set of evidence is included in the response to a discovery request have become significant  problems for many organizations.  This has led many in these organizations to question the validity of the historical approach of collecting everything associated with a presumed set of custodians and sending all that data out for processing. The IT manager and the corporate legal department are both being asked if there is a better way to identify the relevant ESI for given matters and to produce it locally (inside the corporate security perimeter), sending smaller more relevant sets out for eventual attorney review. This panel discussion will focus on new Early Case Assessment (ECA) approaches that can be taken within the corporate security perimeter to produce the relevant material for litigation matters without incurring high discovery and review costs associated with the “over-collection and processing” problem encountered when only outside vendors are used. Proactive methods for discovering content rapidly and identifying irrelevant content that need not be produced will be discussed.

Beyond E-mail:  Legal and Practical Implications of 21st Century ESI

Just when lawyers have become comfortable advising clients about how to handle traditional forms of ESI under the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, new media has emerged that present increasingly complicated and far-reaching strategic and practical challenges.  E-discovery is no longer just about email, electronic documents and databases located on company servers.  Instead, law and technology intersect over dynamic ESI, often times stored beyond the direct control of the user.  Applications that foster social communication (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the various software supporting blog publications) and multimedia sharing portals (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa) qualify as ESI under Rule 34.  And it’s not just tech-savvy individuals making use of new media.  Businesses are using web-based project management tools (Basecamp, EtherPad), social enterprise software (Jive, Socialtext), and cloud computing (GoogleApps) along with digital voicemail, IM and off-site data archiving to facilitate productivity and reduce corporate expenditures. On top of all that, we are on the verge a revolution in e-mail technology that will change the game completely… again!   In litigation, how should lawyers approach collection, preservation, processing, review and production of 21st century media?  What sources must parties disclose in discovery?  Is new media the next treasure-trove of discoverable potentially relevant information in terms of both tangible data and facts?

Litigation Readiness and the Left Side of the EDRM Model – Decreasing Discovery Cost and Risk

Document review can account for more than 70% of the total cost of e-discovery.  This panel will discuss reducing the cost of e-discovery and document review by focusing on litigation readiness and the strategic application of technology early in the process in order to reduce the size of the electronic evidence corpus.

Driving Down Electronic Discovery Costs:  The Challenge of Bringing Electronic Discovery Inside the Corporation

Corporations are striving to reduce overall litigation costs by assuming control over not only the decision making, but the harvesting and processing of electronic data.  Decision makers must take into account not only technology purchases, but process protocols and talent to function successfully as the environment changes.  Attendees will engage in a frank discussion among industry peers, learning the pitfalls and opportunities of bringing more and more inside the corporate infrastructure.  Attend this session to hear the panelists discuss which comes first, technology, process or people? 

US-UK Judicial Panel on E-Discovery

Although the US leads the world in both the legal and technical aspects of electronic discovery, there is a general acceptance that there is much to do to make this aspect of litigation an efficient and cost-effective component of case management. Although the essential difficulties are the same in England and Wales, the approach taken is a slightly different one, and there is growing recognition that the two jurisdictions have something to learn from each other.
 
Chief US Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm and US Magistrate Judge John Facciola are the undisputed leaders of judicial thought in this area in the US. Their counterparts in the UK are Senior Master Whitaker and His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC. These four were brought together, with Chris Dale of the UK based e-Disclosure Information Project, at a successful panel in London in May 2009, moderated by Patrick Burke, Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software. The Masters Conference is reconstituting the panel and you will have the opportunity to hear the best thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic talking about the differences, the commonality, and what each can learn from the other in this changing area.

We will have full coverage including posts and interviews.  Please bookmark this page.

Two of the main topics at the IQPC Conference in Brussels last week on e-discloure (with much written of late in the e-discovery blogs) has been concept searching and “predictive tagging”.  But one vendor appears to be way ahead of the curve: Recommind.   We had the opportunity to interview Hartwig Laute, Director European Operations and Jason Robman, Corporate Counsel for the company.

What is concept searching?  It is a method of searching files not based on keywords, but on the subject matter of the email, document, paragraph, or sentence.  It is promoted by a number of vendors each having its own name.  For some overviews on concept searching click here, here, here and here.

Recommind is a 10-year old company based in San Francisco, California with offices throughout the United States, in Germany and London.  Recommind’s pioneering document review, analysis and production product, Axcelerate eDiscovery, is 2 years old.  But Axcelerate eDiscovery is different than other document review software.  Unlike other systems, which can only place documents found by basic keyword search into reviewer-created categories, Axcelerate eDiscovery automatically categorizes documents into computer-generated “buckets” (discussed above in the links on concept searching) based not just on keyword frequency but on conceptual meaning as well – irrespective of individual keywords. And the software doesn’t just dump documents into buckets, it actually prioritizes them within each bucket – such that each document is neatly ordered and prioritized based on its content, irrespective of individual keywords. The system also automatically identifies key documents, people, phrases and concepts of interest.

Hartwig put the software through its paces in a demonstration for conference participants which kept the crowd riveted.  Using a data set from the Enron investigation review, Hartwig showed how the software could take a concept search on the term “brownout” (as you will recall a major count against Enron was its manipulation of energy markets to earn subsidies; for more click here).

Hartwig showed how the system could “learn” the context of the topic “brownouts” by taking some example documents containing the term and letting the system in a short training phase “understand” what the underlying meaning was. In the live presentation, the system returned a number of documents which matched the topic of the initial documents perfectly. With the trained topic (which took Hartwig less than 5 minutes to train) the system can now – for each document to be reviewed – tell the reviewer whether it belongs in a specific category, and to what extent (i.e. its priority within the category). This suggestion is what Recommind calls predictive tagging and it really makes a difference.

The system not only suggests buckets but also highlights what was relevant to the search by color coding words (for instance yellow for the culling terms and brown for a word relevant to the topic).  It literally “suggested” topics and categories to each document and puts them in boxes where they belong.  Entire document sets can also be filtered down by document type, language, content, party, timeframe, individual, and many other elements to quickly find relevant documents.

And while Axcelerate eDiscovery is an impressive end-to-end review platform, with built-in processing, deduplication, filtering, review, analysis, predictive tagging and production capabilities, it is Recommind’s new product, Insite Legal Hold, that is the real star for enterprises to be proactively or reactively eDiscovery ready.  It is a remarkable early case assessment (ECA) product providing processing, culling, collection and hold.

 As explained by Jason Robman, Insite Legal Hold indentifies, “crawls” and indexes information from the many data sources a company has. From these indices, a company can conduct “live” and in-place exploration of data before applying a legal hold to quickly and efficiently locate and preserve potentially relevant data.

Recommind clients range the whole gamut from law firms to corporations to government entities. In his presentation, Hartwig showed us the Bundeskartellamt use case and explained how and why the German Cartel Authorities rely on Recommind technology.

We will have more about Recommind and its break-through technology in a few weeks.  It is part of our new series of  profiles on major players in the e-discovery/e-disclosure market. In the meantime, those interested in learning more about Recommind, their technology and their thought leadership via their risk monitoring center and resource library center can visit:  www.recommind.com

The industry buzz about the EMC/Kazeon link-up was chatted about and rumored for some weeks (and the hot topic at the bars at ILTA last week).   Here are a few articles examining the whys’n and whatfors:

The press release from EMC and Kazeon  http://snipurl.com/rkh3n

The EMC blog: their view on the deal  http://snipurl.com/rllx6

Why EMC bought Kazeon http://snipurl.com/rkguv

Update: EMC Paying $150 Million For Kazeon Systems http://snipurl.com/rkgm4

EMC ‘Stitching’ Its Stack With Kazeon  http://snipurl.com/rkh2e

Marrying ECM and E-Discovery: EMC and Kazeon http://bit.ly/p1IuM

The analysis is just beginning so we’ll add more articles as they appear.