Are Law Firms Ready for Transparency?
Attorney and KM expert V. Mary Abraham provides details on how one law firm has found a way to create real transparency in its dealings with clients via an extranet, and whether this process may start a trend.
Attorney and KM expert V. Mary Abraham provides details on how one law firm has found a way to create real transparency in its dealings with clients via an extranet, and whether this process may start a trend.
Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on the new requirement that litigants must meet early in a dispute to discuss the scope of discovery work to reach agreement on how best to proceed with the discovery of potentially relevant electronically stored information (“ESI”). What happens, though, when fundamental assumptions used to reach agreement at that early stage in the case turn out to be incorrect?
Gretta Rusanow outlines her recommendations on why this year presents an excellent opportunity to work on those long-desired collections of models, best practice documents, sample clauses and know how files.
Heather Colman explains how wikis were an ideal KM solution for her law firm. Quick and easy to set up, requiring little IT support, wikis support central data repositories and provide features including search capabilities, email, RSS, and also allow users to create a taxonomy of subject tags to classify information.
Jim Calloway explains why every lawyer needs to understand a few basic things about metadata. He contends that the legal ethics implications of metadata “mining” are no longer just of interest to the lawyers processing electronic discovery, or the ethics mavens.
Conrad J. Jacoby’s holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information. With baseline procedures in place, both producing and requesting parties, as well as judges, will be able to make more informed decisions about the need for discovery and the way in which such discovery should be conducted.
Conrad J. Jacoby addresses how critical technology issues related to document authenticity and document-associated metadata have left fewer lawyers willing to accept e-mail messages and other electronic documents in print format. He argues that litigants choosing to produce electronically stored information in hardcopy format should be prepared to provide more complete electronic copies of their production, even when it isn’t initially requested by opposing counsel.
Conrad J. Jacoby examines the recent case of Southern New England Telephone Company (“SNET”) v. Global NAPS, Inc. as an example of how stonewalling and committing perjury, especially with respect to electronic discovery matters that can be independently validated, remains a poor litigation strategy.
Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on two recent cases that emphasize the credibility problems counsel can face in the context of e-discovery – and suggest that outside assistance may be the only way for some counsel to demonstrate that these materials are being managed in a competent and trustworthy way.
According to Conrad J. Jacoby e-mail conversion is done without a second thought in many e-discovery projects, and the results are often satisfactory to both producing and requesting parties. However, each major e-mail archive architecture uses a fundamentally different method for storing information about e-mail messages, and sometimes some collateral damage will occur.