Techno Gumbo

This is the fourth installment of the Office 365 series with Rachi Messing, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Legal and Tom O’Connor of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center on the YouTube eDiscovery Channel. This week Rachi and Tom discuss the collection and processing features of O365 and how they can change the workflow you may have been using for several years now as well as related litigation hold issues. O365 has some unique ways to deal with these tasks and Rachi will show how you can use them to avoid the old process of broad data ingestion prior to indexing, culling and searching.

Here is the  third installment of the Office 365 series with Tom O’Connor of the Gulf Coast Legal Tech Center and Rachi Messing, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Legal. This week Rachi and Tom discuss the Litigation Hold features of O365 and how they impact the discovery process.

The duty to preserve is, of course, originally a common law duty, that is the part of the law that is derived from custom and judicial precedent. In the original  colonial states that flowed naturally from the English common law but as the country grew, the newer stated tended to rely on their own state constitutions and court decisions for this obligation.  In Federal courts, a long line of decisions emphasizes the common law duty to preserve.

Regardless of the forum and the source of the obligation, O365 has some unique ways to deal with preservation and holds, with a feature set that can simplify the manner in which a hold is performed and provide a true repeatable, defensible process.

This is the second installment of the Office 365 series with Tom O’Connor of the Gulf Coast Legal Tech Center and Rachi Messing, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Legal. This week Rachi and Tom discuss the Info Governance features of O365 and how they help start the eDiscovery workflow in that program.

Click here to watch the video.

If you think you’re hearing more and more about blockchain and bitcoin, you’re probably right. Blockchain is even being discussed as having potential application in legal technology and electronic discovery. But, what exactly is it? How does it work? And, how do you need to be prepared to address it as a legal professional?

OK, I’ll be the first to admit it.  Blockchain was something I didn’t really pay attention to for quite some time. But then Doug Austin asked me to do a webinar on it with him and I had to start doing my research,  I’m still doing it but I think I’ve absorbed enough to talk intelligently on the subject and tomorrow is your chance to see if I’m correct.

The latest CloudNine Educational Webcast Series program Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology is tomorrow March 27, 2019  at noon CST (2:00 PM EST | 11:00 AM PST). This CLE-approved* webcast session will discuss, define and describe blockchain and how it can apply to legal technology and eDiscovery today and in the future.

Topics include:

• History of Blockchain and Bitcoin
• Defining Key Terms
• How Blockchain Works
• Advantages and Challenges of Blockchain
• Smart Contracts and Other Use Cases for Blockchain
• Impacts of Blockchain on Legal Technology and eDiscovery
• Is Blockchain Really as Secure as People Think?
• Future of Blockchain
• Resources for More Info

As always, your speakers are:
Doug Austin, Vice President of Products and Services for CloudNine.
Doug has over 30 years of experience providing legal technology consulting, technical project management and software development services to numerous commercial and government clients. Doug is also the editor of the CloudNine sponsored eDiscovery Daily blog, which is a trusted resource for eDiscovery news and analysis, and has received a JD Supra Readers Choice Award as the Top eDiscovery Author for 2017 and 2018.

Tom O’Connor: eDiscovery Expert and Special Consultant to CloudNine.
Tom is a nationally known consultant, speaker, and writer in the field of computerized litigation support systems. Tom’s consulting experience is primarily in complex litigation matters.

Click here to register

I was sitting around the other day talking about eDiscovery with Craig Ball …. and I know what you’re thinking, “wait a minute, these two guys live in New Orleans. It’s 40 below zero and snowing all over the country and they’ve got sunshine, Mardi Gras, St. Patricks Day, Super Sunday with the Mardi Gras Indians, music, it’s crawfish season and Shaggy the Crawfish King is boiling all over town but these two guys are sitting around talking eDiscovery. What a couple of losers!

But no Constant Reader (sorry Big Steve. I’ve wanted to use that phrase for years now) it’s all about you. Craig and I are constantly thinking about what we can do to enrich your lives and enhance your professional experience. And we really didn’t want to fire up the USS Zydecoldsmobile and drive to Beaux Bridge for the Pirouge Festival.

So we got to talking about eDiscovery solutions for small firms and I brought up Office 365 and the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Microsoft wasn’t really thinking about all the solo attorneys and small firms out there when they bought Equivio and started fleshing out a robust set of eDiscovery ECA features in Office 365.  But if it’s in there for the big firms, well it’s in there for all the rest of us too.

And what better way to talk about it (and irritate all the grammar Puritans out there by starting a sentence with “AND”) then an extended discussion with Rachi Messing of Microsoft.  Many of you know Rachi as the Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Legal but other may recall him as the VP of Customer Solutions at Equivio before it was acquired by the Big M.  Probably know of you will recognize him from the picture on his LinkedIn profile unless you went to high school with him. Seriously, I think he was the third student from the left in the back booth in the first scene of Diner.

But Rachi knows his Office 365 and after a chance meeting with Judge Xavier Rodriguez at LegalTech New York in January, he graciously agreed to do a series of videos on the subject for His Honor to use in a course he teaches at St. Marys Law School. And despite the fact that I recently referred to him as judge from El Paso (showing how much I know about geography in general and Texas in particular)  Judge Rodriguez was equally gracious in saying we should share the videos with the rest of the world via the Interweb.  He didn’t actually say that of course, that’s me being a wiesenheimer becasue like my fictional counterpart Spenser (the detective not the poet) sometimes I just cant help myself.

This first video is the introduction to our series and gives a good overview of how we are going to proceed. We expect to do 7 or 8 recordings and release them every other week for the next few months. Which will give Judge Rodriguez plenty of time before the fall semester to totally disassociate himself from us and our ramblings if necessary. Take a look. I hope you like it.

And as always, my undying thanks to Gayle for maintaining the eDiscovery Channel library.

Oh yeah, since it is New Orleans where I’m writing this, I just couldn’t leave without one more from the man Eric Clapton called “the greatest guitarist you never heard of.”  Take it away Sonny. Bon temps roulez.

Joy Heath Rush, who has been serving as its interim chief executive officer of ILTA since October 2018, has been formally named as CEO effective immediately.

See a full report from Bob Ambrogi at https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/02/breaking-ilta-names-joy-heath-rush-ceo.html

In their recent webinar, What’s Wrong With eDiscovery, Jo Sherman and Tom O’Connor focused on several issues including the prevalent model in the eDiscovery process, pricing per GB. This webinar will follow up on that discussion in greater detail, including the history that led to per GB pricing, a focus on why people are not questioning this model and drill down into the emergence of low-cost cloud infrastructure that is increasingly challenging this outmoded pricing structure.

They will be joined in their discussion by Mike Quartararo, the Managing Director of eDPM Advisory Services. Mike is best known as the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Additionally, he also has 20 years’ experience at AmLaw 100 law firms delivering eDiscovery, project management, and legal technology services to organizations across the globe. Mike will use that experience to help drive the pricing discussion as well as offer thoughts for how we can move to ‘value’ based pricing in the future.

Register here to join in on this great conversation.  https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WxAt1h3oQZOCs9YW6DPSag

Are you increasingly perplexed by how to distinguish the differences among document types and whether they fit into labels such as “structured” or “unstructured” ? And is your confusion made even worse by increasingly massive amounts of data that have to be gathered and reviewed in increasingly shorter periods of time?

Well the folks at IDS  believe they have a solution.  Instead of focusing on documents and document structure, they focus instead on analyzing the actual contents of the documents, that is the context of that data.

Hunter McMahon is the Director of Data Analytics at IDS and in that role he assists clients in looking at data not documents. In this discussion, Hunter talks about how IDS does that and the remarkable increases in turn around time they accomplish with this approach.

Click here to watch the discussion.

Webinar this week ….  to register go here and to read my white paper on the topic, click here

Doug Austin and Tom O’Connor

Nov 28 2018

12:00 pm 

Attend