John Tredennick is the founder and CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems, which provides secure, web-based software to help corporations and their counsel manage electronic discovery and work together on complex legal and regulatory matters. Founded in 2000, the company has grown to over 100 people located in major cities across the U.S. and abroad.

Catalyst provides one of the leading multi-language document review systems, Catalyst CR (click here). It has gained significant market share in the past few years and is often requested by corporations and law firms due to its many options, easy scalability and multi-language capabilities. Catalyst was the first software in our “live” software certification program which we launched in D.C.  (click here).  Catalyst and The Posse List will be rolling out this live certification program in several cities, along with a parallel certification webinars for those that cannot attend the live certification programs. 

We caught up with John at Masters Conference:

TPL:     John, you are widely recognized as a legal technology pioneer.  You have  played a large role on the education side of this industry, something we wanted to focus on today.

JT:        Thank you for that. I am a frustrated teacher I guess.

TPL:     And some honors, as we recall.

JT:        A few perhaps. But they are merely a reflection of the great team I get to work with. The first thing you learn is business is that you are not a “solo” practitioner.

TPL:     Ok, enough said.  What did you do before you founded Catalyst?

JT:        I was a trial lawyer and litigation partner with Holland & Hart in Denver. It is the largest and best law firm in the Rocky Mountains in my humble opinion and I spent many great years there.

TPL:     You’ve actually taken this one-step further, bringing e-discovery to the law schools.

JT:        Well, not me. But a lot of other good people have taken the lead on this like the Sedona Conference, and visionary Magistrate Judges like John Facciola and Paul Grimm.  Lawyers don’t learn much—if anything—about electronic discovery in law school. The focus hasn’t changed from when I went to law school 30 years ago.  Professors focus on the “legal” issues and leave the practical topics to the students to learn on their own. I understand their thinking, but there is no reason that a great law school can’t cover both sides of the equation.

My friends Ralph Losey and Bill Hamilton have been teaching a great course at the University of Florida for years. I understand Georgetown Law School also has a great program as does the University of Richmond. They have a great journal as well. I don’t follow law school education that closely but I am sure there are a few, but only a few, others offering similar programs.

That needs to change. Electronic discovery has become one of the largest litigation expenses for law firms and companies.  Lawyers and litigation support professionals need to be prepared to handle the wide-rangy and often tricky issues associated with electronic discovery and that education should start as early as possible.  

I was excited to learn that the Sedona Conference has launched a student outreach program. The place to start teaching the art of electronic discovery is in the classroom.

TPL:     And you have done this by going back to your alma mater, the University of Virginia.  But your program is much more intense, much more comprehensive, yes?

JT:        I don’t know about that, but it is a lot of fun. The course is a “short course” and runs for two weeks. The students get an hour of credit and will have to earn every bit of it. Along with daily classes, they will have to form teams and work a TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) problem based on the Enron documents. Then they can choose between an exam or a paper.

The course explores how the current information explosion is transforming the civil litigation and regulatory process both in the United States and around the world. We examine developing case law and standards on electronic discovery and address the practical problems and issues which arise in the preservation, collection, searching, processing and production of electronic data. The course also provides an introduction to technologies, tools, and software currently used. 

We are covering such topics as data preservation and disclosure obligations under the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the data destruction safe harbor provisions, the preservation of attorney-client privilege, etc., etc.  [Note to readers:  you can find details of the entire program by clicking here]

And I try to make it fun.  Judge Facciola has come and shared his perspective on the kinds of issues he faces every day. We had two leading forensic experts, Sharon Nelson and John Simek talk about data collection and destruction. We have two leading trial lawyers, John Rosenthal and Chris Ohly, coming to talk about electronic discovery in multi-national cases.  We follow that with Amir Milo or Equivio and Professor Michael Berry of the University of Tennessee. Both will talk about and show powerful analytical tools used to organize large document collections.

We close with a presentation by Richard Kershaw of LECG. He flies in from Hong Kong to speak about data privacy and collection issues in Asia and the EU.  All in all, it was a lot of work to get organized but it has been a lot of fun and I have learned as much as the students from these great people. And for two weeks they even call me professor.

TPL:     John, thanks for your time. We regret it was so short.  I hope we can follow-up with you in the near future.

JT:        My pleasure.  Thank you for all you do to organize and support a vital part of our business—the independent reviewers.

Our “Posse List moment”

At the panel entitled “Document Review: Establishing the Team & Utilizing the Technology” Browning Marean, senior counsel in DLA Piper’s San Diego office and a member of the DLA Piper Litigation group and co-chair of the Electronic Discovery Readiness and Response Group (click here) gave us a nice shout out during the session when the panelists were discussing managing document reviews.  He called out “hey, Carl from The Posse List is here and Carl is a document reviewer so let’s hear the Posse List view.”  So we gave our perspective from a reviewer’s point of view and told the session that all reviews were different and so much depended on the associates or team leads who were running them.  We went on to say that the best orientation/training was when the reviewers were provided with more than just a briefing (from a partner or associate) and a binder, but also examples of documents that satisfied different coding tags.  A little later we interjected how important it was for reviewers to get feedback on their coding, and early QC was crucial for detecting if there was any confusion. 

Other members of the panel included Linda Sharp and Bernie Stea from Kroll Ontrack, Ron Best and Phil Nickels from the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen, and Joel Vogel from Paul Hasting’s DC Office.   

We had spoken to Browning at a previous break because in one session the panelists were discussing the pros and cons of doing everything in-house versus sending everything out to a vendor which is the Paul Hastings model.  We discussed the Howrey model which is at the other extreme because Howrey has one national center (Falls Church) where all of the document reviews are conducted for all of their offices.  And in between you have firms like Cleary Gottlieb which are somewhat in the middle with several centers in the U.S. and in Europe.

The Litigation Technology Workshops and E-discovery tracks

We fanned out and covered all of the sessions which had titles such as “An Ounce of ESI Preventionis Worth a Pound of ESI Cure” and “eDiscovery Issues and Trends”.  Some notes and observations from these sessions:

1.  One repeated theme from in-house counsel: “we get better e-discovery pricing on data and review from vendors than we do from our outside law firms because these vendors want the corporate client.”  This is a theme we have discussed in many previous Posse List posts and goes to the efforts made by corporate clients to cut costs by “going direct”, by bring initial case assessment and initial review in-house (both covered later today at several sessions), etc.  It is one reason that EDD vendors are “scooping” agencies in staffing projects.

2.  The “Craig Ball mantra” repeated endlessly:  it’s not “e-discovery” anymore. ESI is so prevalent let’s just call it “plain ole discovery”.

3.  Documenting the entire ESI collection process is most important responsibility of litigation support.  It prevents so many problems later on.

4.  Many panelists were in agreement: linear document review is often the safest and most efficient process for most projects and the role of well-trained contract attorneys is critical.  The technology that has developed has made the process shorter, with fewer contract attorneys necessary, but they are still critical.

5.  “Planning ahead” is simply not done but it must be done.  Technology used intelligently to store, archive, and dispose of data can result in 50% e-discovery cost savings downstream.

6.  Early case assessment: the technology keeps getting better and better.  The dominant players in the market: Clearwell, Case Central and Equivio (see separate posting by clicking here).

7.  Another recurring theme at all three sessions:  “best practices”.  We found that the Kroll Ontrack people were a little too idealistic and it was invaluable to have the experience of the practitioners to inject some reality into what happens at reviews.  They were very candid about the shortcoming of attorneys (their lack of education/knowledge in the area of e-discovery and their hesitance to change).   It seems that the most effective catalyst for change is showing the attorneys and clients how much things cost.  This really gets their attention, since the review of documents is one of the most expensive components of litigation, and they are receptive to how savings can be achieved through best practices in early case assessment, effective searching and filtering of the data, proper assembly and training of the review team, and ongoing quality control procedures.  The panels discussed several tools that can be helpful in these areas (ones that produce graphs and spreadsheets for tracking, for example); but they did not endorse any particular applications, maintaining that the needs of every project were different.

Our coverage continues and we’ll have much more during the day and later tonight.

For all our LegalTech West Coast coverage click here.

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As we have reported in several posts these last few months, early case assessment (ECA) is the key technology to reducing the cost of e-discovery.  There have been multiple vendors in this space with Clearwell Systems the leader (click here).

Most new ECA platforms have been standalone applications that required users to import and export data depending upon what other eDiscovery technologies that they were utilizing. 

But now we have CaseCentral (click here) stepping to the plate by integrating ECA into their offering and enabling users to now start with ECA and extend through analysis, review, production and post-production re-use, facilitating collaborative assessments of new case merits and liabilities, application of first pass review, and real-time transfer to active review if required, all at a price point that changes the current ECA pricing model.

And in the area of “document relevance” is Equivio which is the hands-down leader in near de-duping and email thread management technology. They have just launched Equivio Relevance^TM which provides:

• Early case assessment: facilitates rapid assessment of the key issues and concepts in a case.
• Culling: ahieves high levels of recall and precision, helping overcome the challenges of over and under-inclusion that characterize traditional keyword methods.
• Review prioritization: By organizing the review set according to relevance rankings, Equivio enables prioritization of document review. This allows attorneys to immediately focus on the most relevant documents.
• Review quality assurance: By identifying discrepancies in the responsiveness designations vis-à-vis the human review team, the application helps find responsive documents missed in the detail review. Similarly, the discrepancies can be used to locate documents incorrectly marked by the human review team as responsive.

We’ll have more on other technologies in another post during LegalTech West Coast.  For our full coverage of LegalTech West Coast click here.