Earlier this week I blogged about placing the locus of control for e-discovery decisions in the right hands to ensure that the decisions made pass muster in court. To illustrate the potential impact of moving the locus of control for certain decision to an outsource partner let’s compare the document review solutions offered by H5 and Inference Data.
Gold standard counsel or Linguist - who should decide?
Both H5 and Inference enable users to improve results and potentially save vast amounts of money by teaching sophisticated software how to do document review faster and more accurately than human reviewers can. And the more the review process can be reliably automated, the more money is saved down the road because the amount of manual review is reduced. This all assumes that the software is trained correctly, of course. Which frames a locus of control question: Who’s best at training the software?
Last month I attended a webinar presented by H5. One thing that struck me as distinctive about H5 is their standard deployment of a team of linguists to improve detection of responsive documents from among the thousands or millions of documents in a document review. During the webinar I submitted a question asking what it is their linguists do that attorneys can’t do themselves. One of their people was kind enough to answer, more or less saying “These guys are more expert at this query-building process than attorneys.” Ouch.
I’ve long prided myself on my search ability (ask me about the time I deployed a boolean double-negative in a Westlaw search for Puerto Rico “RICO” cases) and I’m sure many of my fellow attorneys are equally proud. However, I know people (or engineers, anyway) who are probably better at search than I am, and I know one or two otherwise blindingly brilliant attorneys who are seriously techno-lagged. More importantly, attorneys typically have a lot on their plates, and search expertise on a nitty-gritty “get the vocabulary exactly right” level is just one of a thousand equally important things on their minds, so it’s not realistically going to be a “core competency.” So I can see the wisdom in H5’s approach, although I wonder how many attorneys are willing to admit right out loud that they are better off outsourcing this competency.
I can see where, depending on a number of different factors, either solution might be better. I encourage anyone facing this choice to make an informed decision about which approach leads to the best results rather than relying on their knee-jerk reaction.
Because e-discovery is complex, and the penalties for screwing it up are significant, the following choice should be considered periodically by attorneys, clients and IT people involved in e-discovery: “Do we do this piece of the project with the people we have already, or do we add people to our payroll who do this, or do we bring in an outside partner to do this?” This is when the IT people reading this post will start muttering the cliché truism “Build or Buy?” which means choosing between “do it ourselves” and finding a pre-packaged solution.
In a generalized “leadership” or “management” frame of mind the basic choice is: “Do, Delegate, or Dump.” I am fond of characterizing this choice as the assignment of the locus of control for decision-making, where an important consideration is who will do the best job of making the decisions once given that responsibility.
“Do” = Must I make a particular set of decisions myself – are those decisions an essential part of my role in the organization, and am I the one with the right information and motivation to make these decisions?
“Delegate” = Can someone else do just as well, or perhaps a better job, with making this set of decisions, especially after making these decisions became an essential part of their role?
“Dump”: should we even be in the business of making these decisions at all, or can we just drop that issue off of our plates somehow?
For example, one can dump having a company picnic to save money. One can’t dump bookkeeping, however, even in a very small company. But even in a very small company a leader can usually delegate or outsource primary responsibility for bookkeeping and expect to get good results while focusing on core competencies of the business such as production, customer relationships, and motivating team members.
Ultimately the choice boils down to this: Do I want to possess and maintain expertise in making certain decisions, at a certain level of granularity, as a core competency? If yes, then I must make it a core competency, which means investing the time, attention, and education it takes to do it right. If no, then I should bring in someone else who has that core competency and who is invested in doing it right.
In e-discovery, answering the question of what can be outsourced — or where to place the locus of control for decision-making — gets even more interesting since courts hold attorneys personally responsible not only for delivering high-quality document production results but for understanding and directing the process by which results are achieved. So the question becomes: Will attorneys generate better document production results when they personally control more of the process (for example, by personally, hands on the keyboard, deriving and executing search methodology)? Or, will they generate better results by collaborating more with outsourced experts, directing and supervising but delegating more of the hands-on decisions?
More than a few attorneys reading this might find that the choice is not as cut and dried as they think. In my next post I’ll explore this choice by applying the core competency / locus of control standard to competing document review automation solutions from Inference Data and H5.
The legal system is very rules oriented, including many purely procedural rules. This is so partly because the legal system is an adversarial process, in which disputes between opposing parties are resolved by a neutral third party judge. The legal system attempts to create a fair process by giving everyone advance notice of the rules that will be observed, then sticking to those rules. Because the process is considered so important, a great deal of time and money may be spent during a lawsuit to resolve disputes over whether one party or the other has broken the procedural rules. Serious breaches of purely procedural rules by one party can lead a judge to award victory to their opponent for no other reason than failing to follow procedure. A judge may also find that party’s attorneys personally liable for their participation in the rule-breaking.
Legal procedural rules are established by legislatures, like the US Congress and state assemblies; by court administrative bodies, like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and (initially) the Federal Rules of Evidence; and by judges by way of decisions (also known as rulings or opinions) they write to explain how they resolved a dispute between parties to a lawsuit.
Recommendations concerning legal procedures may be made by expert committees, which for e-discovery typically means The Sedona Conference and TREC Legal Track. But although judges regularly mention legal experts’ recommendations in their opinions – such mentions are typically known as “dicta” – both the recommendations and dicta lack the authority of law.
In an ideal world clearly defined, efficient, and flexible rules would be developed and followed for identifying and disclosing electronic data – like a well developed API (Application Programming Interface) in the software realm, or a useful IEEE standard, which is akin to what TREC may ultimately develop. Unfortunately, as with many APIs and even internationally recognized standards, the reality in law is a quite a bit messier than the ideal.
Legislators and judges are not experts in the realm of electronically stored information. Nor do they wish to be; nor should their role be expanded to require such expertise. Furthermore, judges tend to be reactive rather than proactive. Not only do they have very full agendas already, but the fundamental character of their role is to wait until they are presented with a dispute that clearly and narrowly addresses a particular issue before they make a ruling that takes a position on that issue. This is known as “judicial restraint”.
Two new influences are incrementally changing the legal rules concerning e-discovery. The first influence is the ripple effect from recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence which clarify how electronically stored information is to be reviewed and disclosed. Attorneys and judges must attempt to follow these new rules, and judges are now deciding new e-discovery cases interpreting these rules for the first time in various situations. The second influence is the rising prominence of two prestigious but unofficial advisory committees, the aforementioned Sedona Conference and TREC Legal Track, which have researched and published detailed findings and recommendations concerning e-discovery best practices. These recommendations are increasingly being cited by judges in their rulings
Notwithstanding the commendable efforts of those who have been working skillfully and hard to improve e-discovery standards, those standards remain quite broad and subject to a wide range of interpretations. As a result, a wide range of technologies and processes are thriving in the e-discovery realm. And the standards that exist at present do not offer the means by which to compare most of the popular technologies and processes currently in use.
Two change agents are likely to sharpen e-discovery standards and narrow the field of e-discovery technologies and processes.
The first change agent is the quality control movement which is being promoted by vendors such as H5 and Inference and recommended by both TREC and Sedona (which I’ve written a little about here). Their thinking is that e-discovery, like any other mass-scale process – and here we’re talking about reviewing documents on the scale of tens-of-thousands to millions – must adhere to well-defined quality standards, just as manufacturers that produce thousands or more of consumer product components must adhere to well-defined quality standards.
The second and most important change agent will be ground breaking legal rulings by judges. When judges eventually rule that new standards must be observed, then lawyers and their clients will follow (for the most part). Until then lawyers are almost certain to stick to the status quo. In fact, when I discuss this topic with e-discovery solution vendors I always hear that their attorney customers aren’t interested in anything that the courts haven’t already accepted.
But therein lies the Catch-22: Judges are waiting for lawyers to present an issue while the lawyers are waiting for the judges to rule so they don’t have to present the issue. Because of judicial restraint, judges only rule on issues that have been unambiguously presented to them in the course of a lawsuit. But until the courts have ruled that certain technical standards are required, the lawyers won’t advise their clients to rely on those standards. And until a lawyers’ client relies on a standard in a situation which puts that standard at issue in a lawsuit, judges can’t rule that the standard is legally valid. So round and round it goes.
The log jam breakers will be 1) further amendments to the procedural rules, based no doubt on the recommendations of TREC and Sedona and the vendors and lawyers that participate in those efforts, and possibly 2) a “civil rights campaign” approach. The latter is a scenario like we saw in 1950’s Supreme Court school desegregation decisions in which clients stepped forward at some personal risk to offer their personal circumstances as “test cases.” By adopting and sticking to a certain principle, even though it created a controversy, they could bring about court rulings that effectively changed the law.
In a corporate setting the latter approach may only be possible with C-level and board support because of the risk involved. Opportunities would have to be identified and pursued in which it appeared that the company could save more in the long run by relying on e-discovery innovations, such as quality measures and automation, than it risked in the short run by going to court. In addition, the innovations would have to be fundamentally sound, albeit untested in court, while controversial enough that an opposing party was unwilling to accept them without a court challenge. (Ironically, whenever a client adopts an e-discovery innovation that doesn’t lead to controversy, it results in no judge’s ruling and thus no legal precedent for other clients’ attorneys to follow.)
Both of these log jam breakers are bound to move slowly. This means years of small, incremental change before definitive technology standards result. Of course, the complexity of information management continues to increase and the cost of e-discovery is bound to continue to rise along with it. For these reasons, whatever each of us does, in our individual and representative roles, to support standards that lead to increased efficiency and reduced cost, the better off we’ll all be.
As an enthusiastic user of SaaS (“Software as a Service”) applications, I’ve increased my own productivity via the cloud. But while wearing my Information Governance hat I see companies becoming sensitized to information control and risk management issues arising from SaaS use. In particular:
Company intellectual property (“IP”) frequently leaks out through employees’ SaaS use, often when subject matter experts within a company naively collaborate with “colleagues” outside the company; and
Company information may be preserved indefinitely rather than being deleted at the end of its useful life, thus remaining available for eDiscovery when it shouldn’t be.
Productivity versus control over IP and information lifecycle management
To illustrate these concepts, I’ll describe a bleeding edge cloud service I recently ran across that could cut both ways, producing both impressive productivity gains and control threats. It’s the as-yet-unreleased Pi Corp “Smart Desktop” project from EMC’s Decho unit, based here in Seattle. Decho is best known for its Mozy online backup solution, but it also provides a home for Pi Corp which ex-Microsoft executive Paul Maritz founded and lead for six years before it was purchased by EMC and added to Decho in 2008. (Maritz was since tapped to take over the CEO position at EMC’s VMware subsidiary.)
Pi Corp’s Smart Desktop project is described by EMC’s CTO Jeff Nick in this video taken at EMC World last year. In a nutshell, Smart Desktop is meant to:
provide a central portal for all of an individual’s information collected from all of the information sources they use;
index and classify that information so it can be used more productively, for example, when a user begins performing a particular task the user will be prompted with a “view” (dashboard) of all of the information the system expects they will want, based on the user’s past performance and the system’s predictive intelligence algorithms;
“untether” information so that it is available to the user from any of the user’s devices, including mobile devices, and interchangeable across different sources; and
enable secure sharing such that people can share just the information they wish to share with those they want to share it with.
Once I’ve had a chance to evaluate Smart Desktop I’ll take a harder look at its Information Governance implications. Problems could arise for employers — albeit through no fault of Decho — if Smart Desktop (or Mozy, or another file sharing service, for that matter) is used by employees to share their employers’ IP with people outside of the company, or people within their company who have not been properly trained and cautioned about maintaining IP security. Similarly, if Smart Desktop (or Mozy, or another SaaS) enables employees to preserve company documents beyond their deletion dates, or to access company documents after they are no longer employees, this could prove difficult in eDiscovery or IP secrecy scenarios, where such information could become a costly surprise late in the game.
But for now I’ll presume that because Decho’s parent EMC has a strong Information Governance focus, Decho will ultimately provide not only the access controls that they currently envision, which will enable secure sharing across devices and users, but also group administration features that make it possible for companies to retain control over IP and information lifecycle management. In particular, I predict Decho will provide dynamic global indexing of information which enters any user account within a company’s user group, thereby making company information easy to find, place holds on, and collect for eDiscovery. I also predict Decho will offer document lifecycle management functionality, including automatically enforced retention and deletion policies.
And while I’m making a Decho wish list, two more items:
In sum, companies concerned about information control and risk management issues arising from SaaS use should consider:
What cloud backup, synchronization and collaboration services are employees using, and how are they using them?
What obligations has the company clearly spelled out for employees, in employee manuals or individual employment contracts, regarding their use of these services?
What network management options does the company have, or could it obtain, for logging, monitoring, controlling, or blocking transfer of company information to such services?
If the way employees are using these services now poses an unacceptable risk, how can employees be moved to safer services?
I strongly recommend reading Ron’s post for the benefit of his insights, whether or not you are already familiar with TREC Legal Track. I’d also like to offer my own observations about TREC Legal Track’s finding of low consistency between document classification decisions made by subject matter experts, who are spoken of as “gold standard” reviewers, and ordinary legal document reviewers. (In TREC Legal Track’s study, ordinary reviewers were 2nd and 3rd year law students. In real life the subject matter expert role is played by in-house or outside counsel, while much of the actual review work is performed by contract or outsource attorneys.)
Generally speaking, quality control processes involve benchmarking against some standard. Mechanical processes can be meaningfully benchmarked by physically sampling output (this is the essence of Six Sigma, in particular). For example, as machine parts come off an assembly line, samples can be selected and measured and the variance between their actual size and target size monitored not only to detect defects but to flag the processes responsible for defects. Human processes can also be benchmarked in a variety of ways. (This is in part the province of ITIL, the “Information Technology Information Library,” and the basis for the idea of “service level agreements”.) For example, those responsible for a customer service center may track the number of issues handled per hour, the type of issues handled, the number of resolutions or escalations per issue, revenue gained or lost per issue, etc.
Unfortunately, “responsiveness” and “privilege” are not only somewhat subjective in document review, standards for responsiveness and privilege will vary from case to case. For this reason standards need to be developed “on the fly” for each case, and these standards will by necessity be arbitrary (aka subjective) to some degree even if consistently applied. The good news is that the latest generation of document clustering software applications incorporate tools for developing consistent document review standards on the fly. Through an iterative feedback loop, the humans educate the machines to look for documents with certain characteristics, while the machines force the humans to refine their conception of responsiveness and privilege to a degree that the machine can reliably model it. After enough iterations have passed and the machine has reached some measurable standard of consistency, the humans can step back and let the machine do the rest of the review work. The machine does it more consistently than human reviewers could themselves, and at a much lower cost.
With document review the very idea of defining a “gold standard” for classification is less useful than it sounds. For instance, even if a panel of leading legal scholars could be formed for each eDiscovery matter, the mere fact that someone legitimately may be called a leading scholar doesn’t mean that their views will be consistent with anyone else’s — just well reasoned. But a “gold standard” is not what’s important here. What’s important is that in each case the attorneys responsible for responding to a document request do everything they can to carefully define and consistently enforce reasonable document review standards. This is what the current crop of document clustering applications are intended to do. That is the current model, anyway. I don’t pretend to be able to name the vendors who can or cannot deliver on this promise, although I think this will be the number one question in eDiscovery technology before long.
UPDATE: I discuss TREC’s role in forumulating new legal procedural rules for e-discovery in a later blog post, Catch-22 for e-discovery standards?
After drafting a blog post about mass data sampling and classification in the “cloud,” I became curious about the potential for reusing categories developed in eDiscovery sampling and classification projects as “seeds” for later projects. For further insight I turned to Richard Turner, Vice President of Marketing at Content Analyst Company, LLC, a document clustering and review provider for eDiscovery.
Bruce: I wonder to what extent document categories that are created using document clustering software when reviewing documents for eDiscovery can be aggregated across multiple document requests and/or law suits within the same company. Can previously developed categories or tags be reused to seed and thus speed up document review in other cases?
Richard: Regarding the notion of aggregating document categories, etc., it’s something that’s technically very feasible. And it could greatly speed document review if categories could be used to “seed” new reviews, new cases, etc. Here’s the challenge: we have found that most of the “categories” developed by our clients start-out case specific, and are too granular to be valuable when the next case comes along. It also hasn’t seemed to matter whether categorization was being used by a corporate legal department or an outside counsel – they’re equally specific.
The idea itself had merit, so we tossed it around with our Product Solutions Architects, and they came up with several observations. First of all, the categories people develop are driven by their need to solve a specific eDiscovery challenge, i.e. documents that are responsive to the case at hand. Second, when the next issue or case comes along, they naturally start over again, first by identifying responsive documents and then by using those documents to create categories – any “overlap” is purely coincidental. Finally, to develop categories that were really useful across a variety of issues or cases, they would need to be fairly generic and probably not developed with any specific case in mind.
I think that’s very hard to do for a first or even second-level review – it’s not necessarily a natural progression, as people work backwards from the issues at hand. Privilege review, however, could be a different animal. There are some things in any case that invoke privilege because of the particulars of the case, for example, attorney-client conversations which are likely to involve different individuals in different litigation matters. There are other things that could logically be generic – company “trade secrets” for example would almost always be treated as privilege, as are certain normally-redacted items such as PII (personally-identifiable information). Privilege review is also a very expensive aspect for eDiscovery, since it involves physical “reads” using highly-paid attorneys (not something you can comfortably offshore). Could “cloud seeding” have value for this aspect of eDiscovery? It’s an interesting thought.
Panda Security recently released (in beta form) what it claims is the first cloud-based anti-virus / anti-malware solution for Windows PCs. Not only does it sound like a clever tool for data loss prevention, but it demonstrates another way in which information service providers can aggregate individual user data to develop classifications or benchmarks valuable to every user, a mechanism I’ve explored in previous blog posts.
In essence, every computer using Panda’s Cloud Antivirus is networked together through Panda’s server to form a “collective intelligence” for malware detection and prevention. Here’s how it works: users download and install Panda’s software – it’s a small application known as an “agent” because the heavy lifting is done on Panda’s server. These agents send reports back to the Panda server containing information about new files (and, I presume, related computer activity which might indicate the presence of malware). When the server receives reports about previously unknown files which resemble, according to the logic of the classification engine, files already known to be malware, these new files are classified as threats without waiting for manual review by human security experts.
Sampling at the right time and place allows proactive decision making.
For example, imagine a new virus is released onto the net by its creators. People surfing the net, opening emails, and inserting digital media start downloading this new file, which can’t be identified as a virus by traditional anti-virus software because it hasn’t been placed in any virus definitions list yet. Computers on which the Panda agent has been installed begin sending reports about the new file back to the Panda server. After some number of reports about the file are received by Panda’s server, the server is able to determine that the new file should be treated as a virus. At this point all computers in the Panda customer network are preemptively warned about the virus, even though it has only just appeared.
Utilizing Panda’s proprietary cloud computing technology called Collective Intelligence, Panda Cloud Antivirus harnesses the knowledge of Panda’s global community of millions of users to automatically identify and classify new malware strains in almost real-time. Each new file received by Collective Intelligence is automatically classified in under six minutes. Collective Intelligence servers automatically receive and classify over 50,000 new samples every day. In addition, Panda’s Collective Intelligence system correlates malware information data collected from each PC to continually improve protection for the community of users.
Because Panda’s solution is cloud-based and free to consumers, it will reside on a large number of different computers and networks worldwide. This is how Panda’s cloud solution is able to fill a dual role as both sampling and classification engine for virus activity. On the one hand Panda serves as manager of a communal knowledge pool that benefits all consumers participating in the free service. On the other hand, Panda can sell the malware detection knowledge it gains to corporate customers – wherein lies the revenue model that pays for the free service.
I have friends working in two unrelated startups, one concerning business financial data and the other Enterprise application deployment ROI, that both work along similar lines (although neither are free to consumers). Both startups offer a combination of analytics for each customer’s data plus access to benchmarks established by anonymously aggregating data across customers.
Panda’s cloud analytics, aggregation and classification mechanism is also analogous to the non-boolean document categorization software for eDiscovery discussed in previous posts in this blog, whereby unreviewed documents can be automatically (and thus inexpensively) classified for responsiveness and privilege:
Deeper, even more powerful extensions of this principle are also possible. I anticipate that we will soon see software which will automatically classify all of an organization’s documents as they are created or received, including documents residing on employees laptop and mobile devices. Using Panda-like classification logic, new documents will be classified accurately whether or not they are of an exact match with anything previously known to the classification system. This will substantially improve implementation speed and accuracy for search, access control and collaboration, document deletion and preservation, end point protection, storage tiering, and all other IT, legal and business information management policies.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Croce, President of Inference Data, a provider of innovative analytics and review software for eDiscovery, following the company’s recent webinar, De-Mystifying Analytics. During our conversation I discovered that Nick is double-qualified as a legal technology visionary. He not only founded Inference, but has been involved with legal technologies for more than 12 years. Particularly focused on the intersection of technology and the law, Nick was directly involved in setting the standards for technology in the courtroom through working personally with the Federal Judicial Center and the Administrative Office of the US Courts.
I asked to speak with Nick because I wanted to pin him down on what I imagined I heard him say (between the words he actually spoke) during the live webinar he presented in mid-March. The hour-long interview and conversation ranged in topic, but was very specific in terms of where Nick sees the eDiscovery market going.
Sure enough, during our conversation Nick confirmed and further explained that he and his team, which includes CEO Lou Andreozzi, the former LexisNexis NA (North American Legal Markets) Chief Executive Officer, have designed Inference with not one, but two models of advanced eDiscovery analytics and legal review in mind.
As total data volume explodes, choosing the right way to sift out responsive documents becomes urgent
In a nutshell, Inference is designed not only to deliver the current model of eDiscovery software analytics, which I have dubbed “Software Queued Review,” but the next generation analytics model as well, which I am currently calling “Statistically Validated Automated Review” (Nick calls it “auto-coding”).
Bruce: In a webinar you presented recently you explained statistical validation of eDiscovery analytics and offered predictions concerning the evolution of the EDRM (“Electronic Discovery Reference Model”).
I have a few specific questions to ask, but in general what I’d like to cover is:
1) where does Inference fit within the eDiscovery ecosystem,
2) how you think statistically validated discovery will ultimately be used, and
3) how you think the left side of the EDRM diagram (which is where document identification, collection, and preservation are situated) is going to evolve?
Nick: To first give some perspective on the genesis of Inference, it’s important to understand the environment in which it was developed. Prior to founding Inference I was President of DOAR Litigation Consulting. When I started at DOAR in 1997, the company was really more of a hardware company than anything else. I was privileged to be involved in the conversion of courtroom technology from wooden benches to the efficient digital displays of evidence we see today, Within a few years we became the predominant provider of courtroom technology, and it was amazing to see the legal system change and directly benefit from the introduction of technology. As people saw the dramatic benefits, and started saying “how do we use it?” we created a consulting arm around eDiscovery which provided the insight to see that this same type of evolution was needed within the discovery process.
This began around 2004-2005 when we started to see an avalanche of ESI (“Electronically Stored Information”) coming, and George Socha became a much needed voice in the field of eDiscovery. As a businessman I was reading about what was happening, and asking questions, and it seemed black and white to me – it had become impossible to review everything because of the tremendous volume of ESI with existing technology. As a result I started developing new technology for it, to not only manage the discovery of large data collections, but to improve and bring a new level of sophistication to the entire legal discovery process.
Inference was developed to help clients intelligently mine and review data, organize case workflow and strategy, and streamline and accelerate review. It’s the total process. But, today I still have to fight “the short term fix mentality” – lawyers who just care about “how do I get through this stuff faster”, which is the approach of some other providers, and which also relates to the transition I see in the EDRM model – I want to see the whole thing change.
Review is the highest dollar amount, the biggest pain, 70% of a corporation’s legal costs are within eDiscovery. People want to, and need to, speed up review. However, we also need to add intelligence back into the process.
Bruce: What differentiates Inference, where does it fit in?
Nick: I, and Inference, went further than just accelerating linear review and said: it has to be dynamic, not just coding documents as responsive / non-responsive. I know this is going to sound cheesy I guess, but – you have to put “discovery” back into Discovery. You need to be able to quickly find documents during a deposition when a deponent says something like “I never saw a document from Larry about our financial statements”, and not just search for “responsive: yes/no”, “privileged: yes/no.”
Inference was, and is, designed to be dynamic – providing suggestions to reviewers, opportunities to see relationships between documents and document sets not previously perceived, helping to guide attorneys – intuitively. Inference follows standard, accepted methodologies, including Boolean keyword search, field and parametric search, and incorporates all of the tools required for review – redaction, subjective coding, production, etc.
In addition to that overriding principle, we wanted the ability to get data in from anyone, anywhere and at any time. Regulators are requiring incredibly aggressive production timelines; serial litigants re-use the same data set over and over; CIOs are trying to get control over searching data more effectively, including video and audio. Inference is designed to take ownership of data once it leaves the corporation, whether it is structured, semi-structured or unstructured data.
Inside the firewall, the steps on the left side of the EDRM model are being combined. Autonomy, EMC, Clearwell, StoredIQ — the crawling technologies – these companies are within inches of extracting metadata during the crawling process, and may be there already. This is where Inference comes in since we can ingest this data directly. I call it the disintermediation of processing because at that point there is no more additional costs for processing.
In the past someone would use EnCase for preservation, then Applied Discovery for processing (using date ranges and Boolean search terms), and at some cost per custodian, and per drive, you’d then pay for processing. It used to be over $2,500 per gig, now it’s more like $600 to $1500 per gig, depending on multi-language use and such.
But once corporations automate the process with crawling and indexing solutions, all of the information goes right into Inference without the intermediary steps, which puts intelligence back in the process. You can ask the system to guide you whenever there’s a particular case, or an issue. If I know the issue is a conversation between Jeff and Michele during a certain date range, I can prime the system with that information, start finding stuff, and start looking at settlement of the dispute. But without automation it can take months to do, at much higher costs.
Inference also offers quality control aspects not previously available: after, say, one month, you can use the software to check review quality, find rogue reviewers, and fix the process. You can also ultimately do auto-coding.
Bruce: I think this is a good opening for segue to the next question: how will analytics ultimately be used in eDiscovery?
Nick: The two most basic components of review are “responsive” and “privileged.” I learned from the public testimony of Verizon’s director of eDiscovery, Patrick Oot, some very strong statistics from a major action they were involved in. The first level document review expense was astounding even before the issues were identified. The total cost of responsive and privileged review was something like $13.6 million.
The truth is that companies only do so many things. Pharma companies aren’t generally talking about real-estate transactions or baseball contracts.
Which brings us to auto-coding… sometimes I try to avoid calling it “auto-coding” versus “computer aided” or “computer recommended” coding. When someone says “the computer did it” attorneys tend to shut down, but if someone says “the computer recommended it” then they pay attention.
Basically auto-coding is applying issue tags to the population based on a sampling of documents. The way we do it is very accurate because it is iterative. It uses statistically sound sampling, recurrent models. It uses the same technology as concept clustering, but you cluster a much smaller percentage. Let’s say you create 10 clusters, tag those, then have the computer tag other documents consistently with the same concepts. Essentially, the computer makes recommendations which are then confirmed by attorney, and then repeated until the necessary accuracy level has been achieved. This enables you to only look at a small percentage of the total document population.
Bruce: I spoke with one of the statistical sampling gurus at Navigant Consulting last month, who suggests that software validated by statistical sampling can be more accurate than human reviewers, with fewer errors, for analyzing large quantities of documents.
Nick: It makes sense. Document review is very labor intensive and redundant. Think about the type of documents you’re tagging for issues – it doesn’t even need to be conscious: it is an extremely rote activity on many levels which just lends itself to human error.
Bruce: So let’s talk about what needs to happen before auto-coding becomes accepted, and becomes the rule rather than the exception. In your webinar presentation you danced around this a bit, saying, in effect, that we’re waiting for the right alignment of law firms, cases, and a judge’s decision. In my experience as an attorney, including some background in civil rights cases, the way to go about this is by deliberately seeking out best-case-scenario disputes that will become “test cases.” A party who has done its homework stands up and insists on using statistically validated auto-coding in an influential court, here we probably want the DC Circuit, the Second Circuit, or the Ninth Circuit, I suppose. When those disputes result in a ruling on statistical validity, the law will change and everything else will follow. Do you know of any companies in a position to do this, to set up test cases, and have you discussed it with anyone?
Nick: Test cases: who is going to commit to this — the general counsel? Who do they have to convince? Their outside counsel, who, ultimately, has to be comfortable with the potential outcome. But lawyers are trained to mitigate risk, and for now they see auto-coding or statistical sampling as a risk. I am working with a couple of counsel with scientific and/or mathematic backgrounds who “get” Bayesian methods- and the benefits of using them. Once the precedents are set, and determine the use of statistical analysis as reasonable, it will be a risk not to use these technologies. As with legal research, online research tools were initially considered a risk. Now, it can be considered malpractice not to use them.
It can be frustrating for technologists to wait, but that’s how it is. Sometimes when we are following up with new installs of Inference we find that 6 weeks later they’ve gone back to using simple search instead of the advanced analytics tools. But even for those people, after using the advanced features for a few months they finally discover they can no longer live without it.
Bruce: Would you care to offer a prediction as to when these precedents will be set?
Nick: I really believe it will happen, there’s no ambiguity. I just don’t know if it’s 6 months or a year. But general counsel are taking a more active role, because of the cost of litigation, because of the economy, and looking at expenses more closely. At some point there will be that GC and an outside counsel combination that will make it happen.
Bruce: After hearing my statistician friend from Navigant deliver a presentation on statistical sampling at LegalTech last month I found myself wondering why parties requesting documents wouldn’t want to insist that statistically validated coding be used by parties producing documents for the simple reason that this improves accuracy. What do you think?
Nick: Requesting parties are never going to say “I trust you.”
Bruce: But like they do now, the parties will still have to be able to discuss and will be expected to reach agreement about the search methods being used, right?
Nick: You can agree to the rules, but the producing party can choose a strategy that will be used to manage their own workflow – for example today they can do it linearly, offshore, or using analytics. The requesting party will leave the burden on the producing party.
Bruce: If they are only concerned with jointly defining responsiveness, in order to get a better-culled set of documents — that helps both sides?
Nick: That would be down the road… at that point my vision gets very cloudy, maybe opposing counsel gets access to concept searches – and they can negotiate over the concepts to be produced.
Bruce: There are many approaches to eDiscovery analytics. Will there have to be separate precedents set for each mathematical method used by analytics vendors, or even for each vendor-provided analytical solution?
Nick: I’d love to have Inference be the first case. But I don’t know how important the specific algorithm or methodology is going to be – that is a judicial issue. Right now we’re waiting for the perfect judge and the perfect case – so I’ll hope it’s Inference, rather then “generic” as to which analytics are used. I hope there’s a vendor shakeout – for example, ontology based analytics systems demo nicely, but “raptor” renders “birds” which is non-responsive, while “Raptor” is a critical responsive term in the Enron case.
Bruce: Perhaps vendors and other major stakeholders in the use of analytics in eDiscovery, for example, the National Archives, should be tracking ongoing discovery disputes and be prepared to file amicus briefs when possible to help support the development of good precedents.
This blog post is the first of two on the topic of advanced eDiscovery analytics models. My goal is to make the point that lawyers don’t trust or use analytics to the degree that they should, according to scientifically sound conventions commonly employed by other professions, and to speculate about how this is going to change.
In this first post I’ll explain why we arrived where we are today by describing the progression of analytics across three generations of Discovery technology.
The first generation, which I call “The Photocopier Era,” relies on labor intensive, pre-analytics processes. Some lawyers are still stuck in this era, which is extremely labor intensive.
The second generation is the current reigning model of analytics and review. I call it “software queued review.” Software queued review intelligently sorts and displays documents to enable attorneys to perform document review more efficiently. At the same time, software queued review allows – or should I say, requires? – attorneys to do more manual labor than is required to ensure review quality or to ensure that attorneys take personal responsibility for the discovery process.
The third, upcoming generation of analytics is only beginning to provoke widespread discussion in the legal community. I’ll call it “statistically validated automated review.” In it software is used to perform the majority of document review work, leaving attorneys to do the minimum amount of review work. In fact, certain advanced analytics and workflow software solutions can already be calibrated, by attorney reviewers, to be more accurate than human reviewers typically are capable of when reviewing vast quantities of documents.
Because it will radically reduce the amount of hands-on review, the third generation model is currently perceived by many lawyers as a risky break from legal tradition. But when this model is deployed outside of the legal profession it is not considered a giant step, technologically or conceptually. It is merely an application of scientifically grounded business processes.
In subsequent blog posts, including the second post in this series, I will look at what is being done to overcome the legal profession’s reluctance to adopt this more accurate, less expensive eDiscovery model.
The Pre-analytics Generation: Back to the Photocopier Era
Ka-chunk! What a way to spend a week or more.
Please return with me now to olden times of not-so-long-ago, the days before eDiscovery software. (Although even today, for smaller cases and cases that somehow don’t involve electronically stored information, the Photocopier Era is alive and well.)
In the beginning there were paper documents, usually stored within folders, file boxes, and file cabinets. Besides paper, staples, clips, folders, and boxes, photocopiers were the key document handling technology, with ever improving speed, sheet feeding, and collation options.
Gathering documents: When a lawsuit reached the discovery stage, clients following the instructions of their attorneys physically gathered their papers together. Photocopies were made. Some degree of effort was (usually) made to preserve “metadata” which in this era meant identifying where the pieces of paper had been stored, and how they had been labeled while stored.
Assessing documents: In this era every “document” was a physical sheet of paper, or multiple sheets clipped together in some manner. Each page was individually read by legal personnel (attorneys or paralegals supervised by attorneys) and sorted for responsiveness and privilege. Responsive, non-privileged documents were compiled into a complete set and then, individual page after individual page, each was numbered (more like impaled) with a hand-held, mechanical, auto-incrementing ink stamp (I can hear the “ka-chunk” of the Bates Stamp now… ah, those were the days).
Privileged documents were set to one side, and summarized in a typed list called a privilege log. Some documents containing privileged information were “redacted” using black markers (there was an art to doing this in a way so that the words couldn’t be read anyway – an art which even the FBI on one occasion in my experience failed to master).
Finally, the completed document set was photocopied, boxed, and delivered to opposing counsel, who in turn reviewed each sheet of paper, page by page.
The Present Generation of Analytics: Software Queued Review
Fast forward to today, the era of eDiscovery and software-queued review. In the present generation software is used to streamline, and thus reduce, the cost of reviewing documents for responsiveness and privilege.
Gathering documents: Nowadays, still relying on instructions from their attorneys, clients designate likely sources of responsive documents from a variety of electronic sources, including email, databases, document repositories, etc. Other media such as printed documents and audio recordings may also be designated when indicated.
After appropriate conversions are made (for example, laptop hard drives may need to be transferred, printed documents may need to be OCR scanned, audio recordings may need to be transcribed, adapters for certain types of data sources may need to be bought or built) all designated sources are ingested into a system which indexes the data, including all metadata, for review.
Some organizations already possess aggressive records management / email management solutions which provide the equivalent of real time ingestion and indexing of significant portions of their documents. Such systems are particularly valuable in a legal context because they enable more meaningful early case assessment (sometimes called “early data assessment”).
Assessing documents: In the current era attorneys can use tools such as Inference which use a variety of analytical methods and workflow schemas to streamline and thus speed up review. (Another such tool is Clustify, which I described in some detail in a previous blog entry.) Such advanced tools typically combine document analytics and summarization with document clustering, tagging, and support for human reviewer workflows. In other words, tools like Inference start with a jumble of all of the documents gathered from a client, documents which most likely contain a broad spectrum of pertinent and random, off-topic information, and sort them into neat, easy to handle, virtual piles of documents arranged by topic. The beauty of such systems is that all of the virtual piles can be displayed — and the documents within them browsed and marked — from one screen, and any number of people in any number of geographic locations can share the same documents organized the same way. Software can also help the people managing the discovery process to assign groups of documents to particular review attorneys, and help them track reviewer progress and accuracy in marking documents as responsive or not, and privileged or not.
The key benefit of this generation of analytics is speed and cost savings. Similar documents, including documents that contain similar ideas as well as exact duplicates and partial duplicates of documents, can be quickly identified and grouped together. When a group of documents contains similar documents, and all of the documents in that group are assigned to the same person or persons, they can work more quickly because they know more of what to expect as they see each new document. Studies have shown that review can be performed perhaps 70-80% faster, and thus at a fraction of the cost, using these mechanisms.
Once review is complete, documents can be automatically prepared for transfer to opposing counsel, and privilege logs can be automatically generated. Opposing counsel can be sent electronic copies of responsive, non-privileged documents, which they in turn can review using analytical tools. (Inference is among the tools that are sometimes used by attorneys receiving such document sets, Nick tells me.)
The Coming Generation of Analytics: Statistically Validated Automated Review
The next software analytics model will be a giant leap forward when it is adopted. In this model software analytics intelligence is calibrated by human intelligence to automatically and definitively categorize the majority of documents collected as responsive or not, and as privileged or not, without document-by-document review by humans. In actuality, some of the analytical engines already in existence – such as Inference — can be “trained” through a relatively brief iterative process to be more accurate in making content-based distinctions than human reviewers can.
To adopt this mechanism as standard, and preferred, in eDiscovery would be merely to apply the same best practices statistical sampling standards currently relied upon to safeguard quality in life-or-death situations such as product manufacturing (think cars and airplanes) and medicine (think pharmaceuticals). The higher level of efficiency and accuracy that this represents is well within the scope of existing software. But while statistically validated automated review has been widely alluded to in legal technology circles, so far as I know it has not been used as a default by anyone when responding to document requests. Not yet. Reasons for this will be discussed in subsequent posts, including the next one.
Gathering documents: The Statistically Validated Automated Review model relies on document designation, ingestion, and indexing in much the same manner as described above with respect to Software Queued Review.
Assessing documents: In this model, a statistically representative sample of documents is first extracted from the collected set. Human reviewers study the documents in this sample then agree upon how to code them as responsive / non-responsive, privileged / non-privileged. This coded sample becomes the “seed” for the analytics engine. Using pattern matching algorithms the analytics engine makes a first attempt to code more documents from the collected set in the same way the human coders did, to match the coding from the seed sample. But because the analytics engine won’t have learned enough from a single sample to become highly accurate, another sample is taken. The human coders correct miscoding by the analytics engine, and their corrections are re-seeded to the engine. The process repeats until the level of error generated by the analytics engine is extremely low from the standpoint of scientific and industrial standards, and more accurate than human reviewers are typically capable of sustaining when coding large volumes of documents.
By way of comparison this assessment process resembles the functioning of the current generation of email spam filters, which employ Bayesian mathematics and corrections by human readers (“spam” / “not spam”) that teach the filters to make better and better choices.
After the Next Generation: Real Time Automated Review
It’s not another generation of analytics, but another significant shift is gradually occurring that will have a significant impact on eDiscovery. The day is approaching when virtually all information that people touch while working will be available and indexed in real time. From the perspective of analytics engines it is “pre-ingested” information. This will largely negate the gathering phase still common in previous generations. Vendors such as Kazeon, Autonomy, CA, Symantec, and others are already on the verge – and in some cases, perhaps, past the verge – of making this a possibility for their customers.
(Full disclosure of possible personal bias: I’m working with a startup with a replication engine that can in real time securely duplicate documents’ full content, plus metadata information about documents, as they are created on out-of-network devices, like laptops, to document management engines….)
The era of Real Time Automated Review will be both exciting and alarming. It will be exciting because instant access to all relevant documents should mean that more lawsuits settle on the facts, in perhaps weeks, after a conflict erupts (see early case assessment, above), rather than waiting for the conclusion of a long, and sometimes murky, discovery process. It’s alarming because of the Orwellian “Big Brother” implications of systems that enable others to know every detail of the information you touch the moment you touch it, and at any time thereafter.
In my next post you’ll hear about my conversation with Nick Croce, including how Inference has prepared for the coming generation of automated discovery and where Nick thinks things are going next.
There are two high level approaches for imposing company-wide policies concerning information, although the two can overlap.
One approach is manual, which is to say, creating, announcing and distributing a written policy to the people handing information, where the policy tells them steps to take when handling different kinds of information. Such a policy can provide instructions about what types of information are covered by policy, who information may be shared with, where to store it, and even how to label it (where such labels become metadata concerning the information being labeled). There are systems which allow or require people to apply labels to their electronic documents as each document is created, but the labels are still created using the time and attention of a person.
The other approach is automated, which is to say, using software to examine document content and metadata. Such software can find, label, sort, and categorize information. Software can also trigger workflows according to pre-established policies, such as announcing an alert or blocking a user from opening an email if a virus is found within its metadata or content.
There are tradeoffs between manual and automated processes. Sophisticated software can be expensive to purchase and time-consuming to configure and re-configure as a company’s personnel and systems change. And even the most elaborate software still requires some manual effort. But manual processes can be expensive and sloppy compared to automated processes. People aren’t usually rewarded for putting extra time and effort to follow information handling policies, and they can become fatigued and make mistakes.
For companies with significant information handling needs hybrid processes involving both manual and automated elements are pretty standard at this point, although the technology side is advancing by leaps and bounds.
One of the major topics of this blog will be eDiscovery, an ideal sphere in which to examine the tradeoffs between manual and automated information handling. In eDiscovery pending legal action(s) force organizations to develop policies for handling large volumes of company information. The manual information handling elements of eDiscovery can be the most expensive information handling processes of all when they involve can document-by-document review of vast quantities of electronic document by attorneys, who typically work for high hourly fees. Because of the expense of attorneys reviewing large number of documents, in recent years there has been an explosion of impressive automated solutions for information handling. But there remain tradeoffs between manual and automated processes, and policies must be developed to govern both.
Photocredit: jeffisageek’s photostream
Bruce: I wonder to what extent document categories that are created using document clustering software when reviewing documents for eDiscovery can be aggregated across multiple document requests and/or law suits within the same company. Can previously developed categories or tags be reused to seed and thus speed up document review in other cases?
Assessing documents: In the current era attorneys can use tools such as Inference which use a variety of analytical methods and workflow schemas to streamline and thus speed up review. (Another such tool is Clustify, which I described in some detail 
One approach is manual, which is to say, creating, announcing and distributing a written policy to the people handing information, where the policy tells them steps to take when handling different kinds of information. Such a policy can provide instructions about what types of information are covered by policy, who information may be shared with, where to store it, and even how to label it (where such labels become metadata concerning the information being labeled). There are systems which allow or require people to apply labels to their electronic documents as each document is created, but the labels are still created using the time and attention of a person.
bruce2b 