For about two years, a group of legal professionals –judges, lawyers, e-discovery and litigation support professionals from across the US—who volunteer with the EDRM at Duke Law School have been working on guidelines designed to educate and inform the legal industry about technology assisted review (TAR). The Technology Assisted Review (TAR) Guidelines have now been released and are available on...
Few people in legal operations discuss project management in the same sentence with electronic discovery. When the subject does arise you hear people toss around phrases like “legal project management,” or you hear talk of organization-wide process improvement efforts. Mostly, it’s about finding ways to be more efficient. But organization-wide project management initiatives require high-level buy-in and lots of resources...
In case you have not noticed, a consistent theme throughout my writing is the preparation of organizations for those occasions when another entity takes legal action against them. You will see that in my writing on information governance, on managing successful projects, and on e-discovery in general. Planning is the first of the five Ps I know I’m beginning to...
Those who are unwilling or unable to adapt, like dinosaurs, will find it difficult to survive.
If there is one cause of consternation among law firms, consultants and service providers –those who mostly collect and process ESI—it is a project in which the client organization has poor information governance practices. I am reminded of this because a few weeks ago at The Master’s Conference in Washington, D.C., I told the audience that information governance practices are...
There’s been debate throughout the legal industry about which software product is the superior tool for conducting technology-assisted review (TAR). I’m no data scientist. In fact, I’m not a scientist at all. I’m not a programmer or a linguist. No PhD; no computer science degree; Heck, I’m not even a particularly highly qualified technical person. Nope. I’m just an operations...
I like oatmeal. It has been around forever and I eat it a lot. Project managers have also been around forever. When they built the pyramids in Egypt or the Great Wall in China there was likely someone there who planned, directed, monitored and controlled the work. Although clearly the workers back then were not anything like the organized labor...
Throughout all of recorded human history –indeed, even before we began to record it—communication has been an issue. Early humans carved cave walls to allow others to know things. I’m sure that some among them thought that such carvings were quite radical at the time. And today, many people find the current scriveners—those who incessantly post their thoughts, meals, pets,...
Corporate legal operations folks need to pay attention to this Court Decision One of the things that has always puzzled me is how some of the smartest people in the world could behave so irresponsibly when it comes to legal matters. I’m not a lawyer, and granted, I’ve worked around lawyers long enough that some of their tendencies if not...
Most CEOs and corporate leaders would say that a core mission of any company is to maximize shareholder value and/or protect the company’s assets. With nearly every “document” in the world being created on a computer today and a company’s information clearly being one if it’s assets, why wouldn’t information governance or, as they say in corporate legal circles, compliance,...