3 May 2013 – 451 Research, an analyst and data company focused on enterprise IT, has long been a partner of ours and we have been fortunate enough to attend many of their events each year on e-discovery/e-disclosure, cloud computing, Big Data Analytics, etc.

In March they released their report “E-Discovery and E-Disclosure 2013: The Ongoing Journey to Proactive Information Governance” which is based on 451 Research’s legal, e-discovery, and information governance practice along with the company’s ChangeWave research service. Together they surveyed small, midsize, and large companies in November and December 2012, inquiring how information is being accessed, managed, and retained. Specific coverage areas focused on enterprise IT and included relational and non-relational databases, data warehousing, text analytics, and business intelligence.

One of the big surprises was that although lawyers are bullish about the prospects of information governance to reduce litigation risks, executives, and staff of small and midsize businesses, are bearish and “may not be placing a high priority” on the legal and regulatory needs for litigation or government investigation.

The report is chock full of data and insights and covers a lot of material: information governance by enterprise size, industry, job function, and jurisdiction; legal technology trends including the impact of social media and bring-your-own-device programs on e-discovery; a breakdown of e-discovery costs; etc. The report also monitors the e-discovery market and provides a vendor directory, which includes small providers from Compiled Services and Data Assimilate Systems to large providers such as EMC Corp., Hewlett Packard Co., and IBM Corp. It makes an excellent read (you can buy it byclicking here).

Shortly before the report came out, Ron Friedmann (a consultant with Fireman & Company and author of the popular blog “Strategic Legal Technology”) had a chance to chat with David Horrigan (an attorney and analyst with 451 Research and principal architect of the report) and they discussed computer assisted review/predictive coding, the proliferation of data and its effect on e-discovery, how the C-level suite people may still not “get it” with regards to all this data, how to come to grips with information governance, the whole BYOD challenge and social media challenge, etc.

We Are All Cyborgs

12 December 2012 –  I can’t believe Le Web Paris 2012 is already over for 2012. My head is crammed with so many thoughts from the past three days. The two that keeping coming back to me are (1) we are all cyborgs and (2) you can learn life lessons from ultra marathon runners (a great presentation on the quantified self).  I distinguish “Paris” from “London” since LebWeb launched a London version last year, to be repeated next June.

LeWeb is Europe’s most established tech conference, the brainchild of French serial entrepreneur Loic Le Meur.  Le Web has been the primus inter pares, but the growing size and scale of the Dublin Web Summit poses an interesting challenger. LeWeb runs for three days and there were about 3,500 of us, most from across Europe but a good number from the U.S.  It is a brilliant range of speakers and presentations.  But the real reason people come:  to network.  And much like the Mobile World Congress which I attend every year, it is a networking bonanza.

This year Le Web’s focus is on the “Internet of things” (IoT), a topic I wrote about earlier this month .  The idea: in a few years time the number of devices connected to the internet will bloom from around two billion at the moment, to any number you can think of by some indeterminate point in the future; estimates range from 10 billion to 50 billion — which is a pretty wide margin of error, by some time around 2020, which is suitably vague. The details don’t actually matter. What is clear is that the internet of things is already coming.

And folks are making money on it!!   As the Wall Street Journal just reported, Telefonica Digital is generating very significant revenue from providing fleet management tracking and sees other vehicle programs, such as insurance that is based on where and how you drive via a vehicle-mounted black box.

It was a great first day, with some brilliant presentations including one by Ben Gomes on the past and future of search, a presentation of the Google Knowledge Graph, plus some side bits on the future of legal search.

But the coolest presentation , I think, was Amber Case of caseorganic who gave a showstopping presentation on the future of interface and the IoT.

And if you do not know Amber, well you should. If you follow her you know she is a cyborg anthropologist, examining the way humans and technology interact and evolve together. Like all anthropologists, Case watches people, but her fieldwork involves observing how they participate in digital networks, analyzing the various ways we project our personalities, communicate, work, play, share ideas and even form values. Case, who predicts that intensification of the human-technology interface will quickly reduce the distance between individual and community, believes that the convergence of technologies will bring about unprecedented rapid learning and communication. Dubbed a digital philosopher, Case applies her findings to such fields as information architecture, usability and online productivity.

She is the founder of Geoloqi, Inc. which is a company bringing the future of location to the world. She has been featured in numerous articles in Forbes, WIRED, etc. Her main focus is mobile software, non-visual augmented reality, the future of location, and reducing the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect.

Her presentation today was a delight. Far too much to detail right now but one brilliant piece was her explanation of the need to correlate multiple data sets and give meaning to data.  Simple, precise … and she showed how to do it.

Just some of the slides she used (for whole slide deck click here ; a link to the full video of her presentation is below):

For her full video presentation click here.

Every time I return from events like LeWeb I am left feeling that my time there was way too short. I didn’t get to see all the talks I wanted to see and I didn’t get to meet all the people I wanted to meet. So I cannot cover everything in this post.  So I have highlighted below some of the more popular presentations and who members of various social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, et al.) thought were the most active “influencers”:

Interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress
Interview with Tony Fadell, Founder & CEO, Nest Labs

How Dunkin’ Donuts Keeps Its Passionate Fans Running on Social Media

Facebook Panel about Mobile Growth

And for a nice social media analysis of the numbers behind LeWeb Salesforce has put together a nice slideshare.

14 November 2012 - As we have pointed out in previous posts, we are at the point of an “industrial revolution of data” with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed.  The rise of “big data” has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information.   We are always looking for great examples.

11 July 2011 — Over the last few years the Project Counsel team has been involved many aspects of war crimes trials and human rights abuse cases, from the e-discovery/staffing side (providing attorneys for special projects, managing the accumulation/organization of evidence, etc.) as well as coverage of the trials themselves through our media division Project Counsel Media.  But we have not seen such a cascade of events such as we have seen in the last two months.

Today marks the 15^th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica.    The biggest event in the last months was the capture at the end May of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic who engineered that massacre after 16 years on the run.  Extradition was quick:  he was handed to the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague on May 31st to stand trial.  His arrest is good news for the relatives of those killed at Srebrenica; for international justice, which may be slow but doesn’t forget.

Equally important were two court cases:

-  a Dutch court has held the Netherlands responsible for the deaths of three Muslim men executed by Bosnian Serb troops in the massacres at Srebrenica. The unexpected ruling , the man who commanded the Bosnian Serb troops during the massacre, could open the field for new suits against the Netherlands by relatives of other Srebrenica victims.

-  A U.S. federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit by Indonesian villagers that seeks to hold Exxon Mobil liable for alleged killings and torture committed by Indonesian soldiers guarding a natural-gas plant in the country’s Aceh province.  Among its holdings, the appeals court ruled that corporations can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 federal law that allows U.S. suits for violations of international law.

Shortly after the capture of Ratko Mladic we wrote a short piece on the political/legal issues surrounding “the G-word”: genocide.  But there is a fascinating e-discovery element to these war crimes proceedings, and how the United Nations faces the need to manage the accumulation, organization, and access to evidence relating to war crimes.  The UN team that is responsible for gathering and handling the information to be used in such trials faces the challenge of making millions of documents in many formats and many languages available to prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and other court stakeholders.  This war crimes evidence originates in multiple formats from disparate sources, for example — TV program tapes, radio broadcasts, news and military photographs, home movies, home photos, recorded telephone communications, and other rich media formats in addition to masses of paper documents and the standard electronic text of emails and other natively electronic documents.

For those of us involved in the commercial sector of e-discovery it can be a most banal experience, having an irredeemable dullness.  But the United Nations war crime tribunals work embody every extreme and special circumstance when it comes to eDiscovery challenges and requirements.  It is thrilling — and gruesome — stuff, with every trial having its own complexities involving data formats, scalability, language support, rules of procedure, and confidentiality.

The tribunals face the daunting task of ensuring full and equitable access to all of this diverse evidentiary information by all parties to the trial. Such access requires that all parties with legitimate “right to know” have to receive complete, accurate, and timely production of requested documents or for topics within documents. The process typically involves multiple professions, such as digital forensics specialists, lawyers, and IT professionals, all with slightly different objectives and requirements, which must ultimately ensure system operations protocols that can be certified by the governing authority, in this case, by the UN tribunal itself.

The e-discovery vendor they chose?  ZyLAB.  And the reasons were simple.  Quoting from a detailed report issued last week by International Data Corporation (IDC) titled ZyLAB: Enabling Prosecution of the Unspeakable: “ZyLAB’s software also offered a broad range of features and functionality critical to the eDiscovery process. Document capture and sophisticated OCR, for example, had been a foundation capability in developing the company’s business. The ability to recognize documents from different languages and to differentiate and process languages notated in multiple character sets was a system necessity (e.g., evidence in the Milošević trial incorporated over 13 languages, including some written in Cyrillic character sets). The multilanguage query parsing capability supported system users working in one native language to achieve the same results as users working in a different native language. Sophisticated indexing technology was required for the project, which enabled the UN team to use the ZyLAB system to classify documents; exhaustively identify people, features, and entities referenced in documents; and create a text and metadata repository that normalized millions of evidence items while supporting legal review operations that could be executed within the time frames stipulated in the UN tribunal’s procedural guidelines. The software also offered a portal-like interface that provided an intelligent discovery workspace for the set of varied professionals at work on the trial”.

I also note that the Office of the Prosecutor had already established a relationship with ZyLAB which has it’s major office located nearby, had done a number of smaller projects with the prosecutor’s office previously, and was willing to commit highly skilled professionals to onsite support. Such support is particularly important because of the complexity of the problems the UN team was facing and because of the foreshortened time frames within which the team needed to make the evidentiary information available to the prosecution and defense teams.

The report addresses key topics for CIO’s and CTO’s to consider in preparation for e-discovery, including connector architecture, disparate system data, recall and search, text analytics, taxonomy, multi-language operations, multimedia operations, etc.  (The link above takes you to the ZyLAB site where you can download a free copy of the report.  The IDC site will charge $500).

NOTE:  ZyLAB software also has a significant presence in Brussels in DG COMP, the European Commission division that monitors and enforces compliance with antitrust and competition laws.

To put it all in perspective ..  watch our video interview (link at top of page) with Gonzalo de Cesare (political advisor with the European Union Police Mission in Bosnia & Herzegovina) who discusses the UN’s process for managing some of the largest and most complex cases in the world (the Khmer Rouge trials, the criminal tribunals for Rwanda, the trial involving Slobadan Milošević, etc.) with information management and e-discovery management software from ZyLAB.

At his request we interviewed Mr. de Cesare in Spanish but you can watch the interview with subtitles in Arabic, Bosnian, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Serbian and Spanish.  Just choose from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the screen.

CREDITS: A project of this endeavor cannot be done without a team.  And this will sound a bit like an Academy Award acceptance speech but here goes:  my thanks to Paola Garcia, one of our New York-based consulting attorneys who conducted the interview after some intense research on the subject area and Mr. de Cesare; Juan Di Luca who is one of our London-based project managers who works for both Project Counsel and Project Counsel Media and who handled the Spanish-to-English translation and the text for the subtitles, and work at The Hague; the incomparable Sandi Bachom, award winning film producer and documentary filmmaker who handled all the camera work and post-interview editing; Jeff Meltzer and his crew at Meltzer Media who did all of the post-interview production work (coloring, sound edit, web set-up, etc.); and Ed Zad and his crew at  dotSUB who did the multi-language translations and subtitling.

And last (and certainly not least) my thanks to Marc McDermott of Hattrick Digital who designs and maintains all 5 of our web sites/blogs.  He is the master of juggling/programming all sorts of content on our sites.

Paul Smith, Managing Partner of Eversheds Consulting, talks about Eversheds model and how the law firm and the global corporate law department can work together effectively across multiple jurisdictions.

Mark Surguy, a partner in Eversheds Commercial Dispute Resolution group, talks about his specialty is multi-disciplinary, complex and commercially sensitive cases and how to face large volumes of lectronically-stored information.

Loretta Malintoppi, Of Counsel to Eversheds and resident in their Paris office, talks about alternative dispute resolution: arbitration, mediation, and conciliation … and the need for early case assessment.

5 May 2012 – The International Journalism Festival is held annually in Perugia, Italy which is about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) from Rome.   This is our third year attending and the event never disappoints. 

There were 220 festival events (all are free entry) plus some 50 festival workshops that required registration.  And not all were in Italian.  But if you speak Italian (ahem) you have more fun.  It is spread out over 12 venues but all are a short walking distance of each other.  The presentations are incredibly varied:  “War reporting” (how not to get killed), “Transnational investigative journalism” (cross-border investigations of corruption and crime, which included working with attorneys), “DataCamp 2012″ (which included working with Big Data analytics), “Are lawyers killing investigative journalism?” (the dangers of those men in suits), etc., etc.

The Festival attendees tend to be journalists, media scholars, media agencies and this year more lawyers than usual.   There were some riveting presentations/conversations on the media market and the concentration of power, wealth and resources and the need to bring regulation or antitrust legislation into play.  The ultimate irony:  you bring in regulation to maintain freedom. 

And there was a lot of discussion about “digital dualism”, i.e. the undue separation of the online and offline worlds and activities, how people feel that their lives are more real online than they are in reality, and they feel they have more freedom online than they do off-line.  

Plus some interesting chats were about the magazine industry:  have magazines been getting worse throughout the years?  Today, advertising takes precedence and priority over everything, because the majority of funding for most magazines comes from this source. I’m sure that many editors wouldn’t prefer it to be like this, but that’s just how most magazines have evolved.

But new digital magazines … and there are a crop of them … like PORT and Hypebeast can choose to print whatever they want, and retain complete creative control.  It is the “old” attitude from years gone by:  give a feature the space it needs. Nowadays, publishers don’t allow features to run longer than a certain amount of pages as money could be made selling to advertisers.  If you are an oldster like me you remember that profiles in the Esquires of the 1960s, essays in Playboy by Hunter S.Thompson, that ran to 40 pages.  People say that our attention spans have been reduced by digital media and the internet and that’s why we don’t have such long features anymore, but the truth is that publishers have lost focus on what they are producing.

And then there is the thrust of social media which has increasingly become the main source of news for anyone under the age of 30, coupled with the celebrity presence in all-things-political.  In the U.S., with the presidential race (which just seems to never stop … ever) looming, you have Republicans and Democrats courting Hollywood, not only to win endorsements, but also to glom crucial campaign dollars. 

At its heart?  Content.  Social media provides celebrities with a powerful new ability to reach out to their audience directly, without relying on intermediaries and they can potentially ignore journalists.  But the competitive pressure is great because celebrities – like journalists – must now produce fresh “content” to keep fans.

And there’s the rub.  Consumers … and voters … have been trained to have shorter and shorter attention spans, so there is more onus on journalists and media outlets to “entertain”. Reality television, drama, politics, celebrity and “news” are blending in new ways. Hence Sudan only becomes foreign-policy news when George Clooney stages a protest, and when President Obama gave his White House dinner speech last week, it was placed next to shots of Kardashian’s ball gown on the mainstream internet news sites.

On its final day, the Festival inaugurated a session dedicated to start-ups in digital journalism. The name was “Future12″ and each company had 12 minutes to present, followed by 15 minutes Q&A sessions after every 3 presentations.

Also, there was a panel organized by the European Commission and Associazioni Giornalisti Scuola di Perugia on the difficult relationship between sovra-national and national political bodies in Europe featuring the current Ministry of European Affairs, Enzo Moavero Milanesi.

One of the big elements this year was the “school of data journalism” which was organized in association with the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and comprised three panels and five workshops which took place during the whole Festival.  One panel had Pulitzer-winning journalists Steve Doig and Sarah Duke discussing how to use news and numbers and data to produce stories, with the Guardian’s Datablog editor Simon Rogers and The New York Times’s editor of interactive news Aaron Pilhofer. 

Here is a video presentation from another panel in the series:

Getting stories from data 

Enormous datasets can often prove extremely daunting to the unfamiliar. Mistakes and crimes have historically benefited from, and triumphs and good decisions been obscured by, a mask of bewildering numbers and statistics and gone unreported. Large datasets often hold a wealth of undiscovered stories for those willing to invest the time into exploring them. This workshop is a ‘spotters’-guide for things to look out for and where to look for datasets. 

Une entrevue avec Isabelle Hautot, Directeur juridique, France Telecom-Orange Group, Expertise Internationale et litiges groupe

An interview with Ed Nalbantian on risk management in the global financial services market.