practicehacker

This month’s installment from Cybercontrols is about the E-Discovery Pilot Program run by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The Pilot runs from Oct. 1 ’09 to May 1 ’10 and is intended to motivate informational exchanges between counsel relating to electronically stored information (ESI) through a proposed standing order that select district judges, magistrates, and bankruptcy judges in the Seventh Circuit have already agreed to use. The principals set out in the proposed order go beyond the 2006 ESI amendements to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to include subjects such as

Zealous Representation. Principle 1.02 specifically addresses the zealous representation excuse for obstructionist behavior – the principles state that “An attorney’s zealous representation of a client is NOT compromised by conducting discovery in a cooperative manner.” (Emphasis added)

Proportionality. Principle 1.03 calls attention to Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C), which permits objections to discovery requests where the burden or expense outweighs its likely benefit considering such things as the resources of the parties and the amount in controversy.

Meet and Confers. Principle 2.01 specifically references Fed. R. Evid. 502. If the pilot project can find a way to minimize the amount of attorney time spent in pre-production privilege reviews it would have made a huge contribution to achieving the overall goal of securing the “just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action.”

E-Discovery Liaison. Principle 2.02 contemplates the appointment of an e-discovery liaison for the purpose of meeting, conferring or attending court hearings on e-discovery issues. The liaison may be an attorney but can also be a third party consultant or an employee of the party. The liaison needs to know or have access to the people who are familiar with a party’s electronic systems and capabilities, as well as the technical aspects of e-discovery

Preservation. Principle 2.03 explicitly disfavors broad requests for preservation and encourages the exchange of specific information to help determine appropriately specific preservation agreements.

Scope of Preservation. Principle 2.04 covers the scope of preservation. 2.04(b) requires a party seeking information regarding the other party’s preservation and collection efforts to confer with the other party before initiating such discovery. 2.04(d) enumerates types of information that would NOT ordinarily be preserved, e.g. deleted, slack, fragmented or unallocated data.

Identification of ESI. Principle 2.05 encourages parties to discuss such things as treatment for duplicative ESI, filtering based on file type, date ranges, etc, and use of keyword searching, topic or concept clustering or other advanced culling technologies.

Production Format. Principle 2.06 states that ESI and other tangible or hard copy documents that are not text-searchable need not be made text searchable, meaning, evidently, that scanned paper documents would not need to be OCR’d.

Education. Principle 3.01 states a judicial expectation that counsel will be familiar with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing electronic discovery. Considering that the ESI rules have been in effect for three years as of December 1, 2009, and they were much publicized prior to their adoption, that hardly seems unreasonable or overreaching.

Seventh Circuit E-Discovery Pilot Program: 7th Circuit E-Discovery Program

CyberControls E-Discovery Request Considerations: E-Discovery Request Considerations

CyberControls specializes in electronic discovery and production, computer forensics, and integration of computer technology in civil litigation. Visit www.cybercontrols.net.

Prism Legal‘s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009.  Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:

Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.

Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7.  Deal with it.

Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the  a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.

E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.

Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.

Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual.  Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.

Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.

Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.

Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.

Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.

Thought I’d share some choice video from TechShow 2009 featuring all 4 of the Best of Show winners that I wrote up in TechnoLawyer, plus interviews with some of my heroes such as Bob Ambrogi, Jay Funeberg, and Kevin O’Keefe, as well as sightings of legal blogging all-stars like Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle. I’m still excited.

See related videos here and find me on YouTube as practicehacker.

We're the ABA Damnit! We own you!

This was my 10th year at ABA Technology Show in Chicago. This year was particularly cool.  Here’s why:

Meeting The Heavies: To me, seeing people like Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighelle, Bob Ambrogi, Jim Calloway, Kevin O’Keefe, Brett Burney, Andy Atkins, Jay Foonberg (!) and the rest of my pretend blog friends … I mean pretend LinkedIn friends … is like reconnecting with long lost relatives. Exciting and a little intimidating. But all of them were really great and down to earth. Except that Kennedy. Such a prima donna. I kid, I kid.

Meeting Canadians: Who can forget meeting the Great Librarian of Upper Canada! Beat that. Then there was Phil of the Future (my name for him), Steve Matthews (nice guy), Brett Burney (I think he’s Canadian), Dominic Jaar (vive la Quebec libre!), the boys from Clio (or as I called them, the Booth Babes), and a host of other talent from the Great White North. It was great to meet you all: now go back where the ice doesn’t melt until July.

Technology Becoming Accepted: This year for the first time in memory I noticed a preponderance of grey hairs and the careful gait of partners scoping out potential buys for their offices.  This was not the brash, flash-in-the-pan TechShow of the late-90′s in which the Internet was decried as a fad.

SaaS, Saas, and more Saas: Software as a service was all over the place, and by next year it will be pervasive. This year I was knocked out by the number and variety of kick-ass SaaS providers at the show including Clio, RocketMatter, and VLO Tech. Clio was my hands-down favorite for a number of reasons – I intend to use it in my own practice. Whatever your cup of tea, the idea of throwing away the IT department in favor of the Cloud is gaining traction fast.

Less is … Less: One lamentable fact about this  year’s show – there was less of it than I’ve seen in a long time. Another casualty of the economy I’d say, but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that many legal technology vendors have been slaves to profit instead of boosters for innovation and the slow economy is making it painfully apparent what a royal screw job they’ve been giving lawyers all these years. Many players couldn’t make it ? Good riddance to bad company.

Other than that however, it was a great experience as always and one that I heartily recommend to one and all. If you haven’t been to TechShow, go there. If you have, come back. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

For more coverage see my SmallLaw Column in TechnoLawyer.

Check out Twitter coverage of TechShow.

As always, I’d love your thoughts. E-mail me at mhedayat[at]mha-law.com or tweet me @practichacker.

ttyl

This weekend at LegalTech the makers of practice management suite Clio launched ClientConnect, a secure portal that will enable attorneys to share documents, collaborate, bill, and take payments in a secure evnironment on the web. And oh yes – it’s free to every Clio subscriber.

ClientConnect very nearly solves the universal problems that plague asynchronous multi-party communication. In other words, with ClientConnect there are no more e-mail roadblocks, mixed signals, or convoluted conversation-threads in the way of attorney-client communication. As a result lawyers can now make files of any kind, as well as time-sheets, notes, and case details available in seconds just by  recording them in Clio or uploading them to Clio’s super-fast collaboration-servers.

The highlights of ClientConnect include

• document exchange and collaboration
• clients can audit case activity anytime
• case notes are now instantly available
  
• clients can pay bills in seconds by PayPal
  

All told both clients and lawyers will benefit from the ability to collaborate in an open, secure, round-the-clock system that requires no software and has a virtual 0 learning curve. For those lawyers still on the fence, the advent of ClientConnect makes it hard to justify not trying Clio’s 30-day free trial.