Notes on recent trends in e-discovery, data privacy, and the use of technology to enhance the practice of law
Published August 17, 2020 on the ACEDS Blog. Full lists are at Trends and Industry Events.
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Announcements
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/13/2020 | Thomson Reuters announced the acquisition of CaseLines, a cloud-based court document and evidence management platform, reported Zach Warren of Legaltech News. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/12/2020 | Exterro announced a call for sponsors for E-Discovery Day 2020, which this year will be December 3. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/12/2020 | ILTA announced the nine ILTA>ON 2020 Scholarship Recipients:
|
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/11/2020 | E-discovery platform provider Reveal announced the acquisition of NexLP, a provider of artificial intelligence software to the legal industry, reported Zach Warren of Legaltech News. |
| Announcements, Privacy | 08/11/2020 | The Sedona Conference and its Working Group 7 (“Sedona Canada”) announced publication of the final, post-public-comment version of The Sedona Canada Commentary on Privacy and Information Security for Legal Service Providers: Principles and Guidelines. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/11/2020 | ProSearch announced the addition of Enriched Active Learning, a TAR tool, to its menu of tools and technology solutions for discovery review. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/11/2020 | Cost recovery solutions provider nQueue and cloud-based client service automation platform Zebraworks announced they would merge, reported Victoria Hudgins of Legaltech News, and will form a new, independent, private company called nQueue Zebraworks, Inc. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/06/2020 | Ayfie announced it has listed its shared for public trading on the the Oslo Stock Exchange's Merkur Market, a marketplace for small and medium sized companies, reported Caroline Hill of Legal IT Insider. |
E-discovery
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| E-Discovery | 08/15/2020 | In a post about self-collection, Chris Dale of the eDisclosure Information Project pointed out some of the more subtle challenges with making self-collection work well, regardless of jurisdiction. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/12/2020 | Exterro announced a call for sponsors for E-Discovery Day 2020, which this year will be December 3. |
| E-Discovery | 08/12/2020 | Self-collection is not only discouraged but a possible ethical violation, reported David Horrigan of Relativity, examining a decision by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Matthewman in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. M1 5100 Corp., d/b/a Jumbo Supermarket, Inc., 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 117243 (S.D. Fla. July 2, 2020). |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/11/2020 | E-discovery platform provider Reveal announced the acquisition of NexLP, a provider of artificial intelligence software to the legal industry, reported Zach Warren of Legaltech News. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/11/2020 | ProSearch announced the addition of Enriched Active Learning, a TAR tool, to its menu of tools and technology solutions for discovery review. |
| E-Discovery | 08/10/2020 | Danny Chan of Ricoh shared his take on Relativity's new user interface, Aero UI, due to be released on August 29. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 08/06/2020 | Ayfie announced it has listed its shared for public trading on the the Oslo Stock Exchange's Merkur Market, a marketplace for small and medium sized companies, reported Caroline Hill of Legal IT Insider. |
Enhancing practice
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/13/2020 | Thomson Reuters announced the acquisition of CaseLines, a cloud-based court document and evidence management platform, reported Zach Warren of Legaltech News. |
| Enhancing Practice | 08/13/2020 | The Utah Supreme Court voted unanimously to authorize a two-year pilot program to test pioneering changes to the practice of law and changes designed to address the access-to-justice crisis in America, reported Bob Ambrogi of LawSites. The changes are meant to enable individuals and entities to explore creative ways to safely allow lawyers and non-lawyers to practice law and to reduce constraints on how lawyers market and promote their services. |
| Enhancing Practice | 08/12/2020 | ALSPs are delivering extensive and appreciated data metrics to corporate legal departments, but delivering those metrics has not yet provided ALSPs with a competitive advantage over law firms not put law firms under pressure to offer up similar metrics, reported Frank Ready of Legaltech News. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/12/2020 | ILTA announced the nine ILTA>ON 2020 Scholarship Recipients:
|
| Enhancing Practice | 08/12/2020 | Two types of AI tools - machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) - are becoming more commonly used by legal departments for contract review and negotiation, contract performance and analytics, litigation prediction and analytics, and legal research, and AI also is being used by companies more generally in recruiting and hiring, wrote David L. McCombs, Raghav Bajaj, Dina Blikshteyn, Jonathan Bowser, Eugene Goryunov, and Angela Oliver of Haynes and Boone. |
| Enhancing Practice | 08/12/2020 | While GPT-3 has intriguing potential, it also has inherent limitations, wrote Javid Lakha of Legatics. It cannot engage in logical reasoning or learn from its past interactions, he argued, restricting its potential application to the legal industry to tasks that require prediction and even then it faces challenges. Nonetheless, the author concluded that GPT-3 represents an important step on the path towards artificial expert intelligence in text-heavy domains such as the legal industry. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 08/11/2020 | Cost recovery solutions provider nQueue and cloud-based client service automation platform Zebraworks announced they would merge, reported Victoria Hudgins of Legaltech News, and will form a new, independent, private company called nQueue Zebraworks, Inc. |
Privacy
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | 08/14/2020 | The California Office of Administrative Law (“OAL”) approved the final regulations issued under the CCPA and filed them with the California Secretary of State, reported Hunton Andrews Kurth. The regulations went into effect immediately. |
| Announcements, Privacy | 08/11/2020 | The Sedona Conference and its Working Group 7 (“Sedona Canada”) announced publication of the final, post-public-comment version of The Sedona Canada Commentary on Privacy and Information Security for Legal Service Providers: Principles and Guidelines. |
| Privacy | 08/11/2020 | The U.S. Secretary of Commerce and the European Commissioner for Justice issued a joint statement on Privacy Shield III, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. According to the press statement, the two organizations have initiated discussions to evaluate the potential for an enhanced EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework to comply with the July 16 judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Schrems II case. |
| Privacy | 08/11/2020 | The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) has put together a CCPA Amendment Tracker, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. Last updated July 30, the tracker shows 20 amendments that are live/stalled in committee (5), signed by governor (7), or presumed dead or unrelated (8). |
| Privacy | 08/11/2020 | With A European strategy for data, published earlier this year, the European Commission is making radical shift from protecting individual privacy to promoting data sharing as a civic duty, in the process becoming an active player in facilitating the use and monetization of its citizens’ personal data, wrote Anna Artyushina in MIT Technology Review. |
E-discovery case law
| Date | Posture | Outcome | Entries |
|---|---|---|---|
| 07/24/2020 | Plaintiffs' second motion to compel discovery. | Motion to compel granted in part and denied in part. | McMaster v. Kohl’s Dep’t Stores, Inc., No. 18-13875 (E.D. Mich. July 24, 2020) After ruling that defendant would produce certain requested email and denying plaintiff's request to expand the scope of the searched date range, U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven R. Whalen, "hav[ing] no interest in going where angels fear to tread", drew a line at adjudicating whose competing lists of search terms would be better suited for searching ESI in this matter. Instead, the court ordered that "if the parties cannot agree on appropriately limited search terms, they will share the cost of retaining an expert to assist them. If they still cannot agree, then Plaintiff may renew his motion regarding the search terms, and will provide the Court with an expert report substantiating his position." Source: Court Grants Part of Plaintiff’s Motion, But Won’t Go “Where Angels Fear to Tread” on Search Terms: eDiscovery Case Week. |
| 07/13/2020 | Plaintiff's motion for spoliation sanctions. | Motion denied. | Bragg v. SW Health Sys., Inc., No. 18-cv-00763-MSK-NRN (D. Colo. July 13, 2020) Following an evidentiary hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter denied plaintiff's motion seeking imposition of spoliation sanctions on defendant for failing to preserve data in a folder on a defendant-designated computer used by plaintiff. Upon review of the evidence before it, the court concluded that plaintiff had not established that is was more likely than not that relevant evidence had been destroyed or lost. The court found there were no facts supporting plaintiff's contention that defendant acted improperly in preserving documents; there was no evidence that defendant destroyed any relevant evidence or that any relevant evidence was lost or deleted; plaintiff (who elected not to testify at the hearing) could not say with any specificity what information she believed was being kept from her; and the undisputed evidence showed that no user-created files were deleted or destroyed by defendant. The court ended by inviting defendant to bring a Rule 11 sanctions motion. Sources: Court Denies Plaintiff’s Sanctions Motion When Her Expert Found No Files Were Deleted: eDiscovery Case Week; Evaluate Your eDiscovery Sanctions Motion Carefully Before Bringing It. |
| 06/18/2020 | Defendant's motion to shift TAR costs. | Motion granted. | Lawson v. Spirit Aerosystems, Inc., No. 18-1100-EFM-ADM (D. Kan. Apr. 26, 2019) After performing a detailed analysis, U.S. Magistrate Judge Angel Mitchell found good cause to allocate TAR expenses to plaintiff in order to protect defendant from under burden and expense. Plaintiff had pursued a scattershot ESI approach, despite cautions from the court that it might begin shifting costs. Defendant already had borne its fair share of e-discovery expenses, accommodating plaintiff's requests, in a process that yielded low responsiveness rates. Unwilling to accept those results, plaintiff sought continued review via TAR that unnecessarily perpetuated and exacerbated ESI/TAR expenses, reached an 85% recall rate, and still yielded a responsiveness rate of only 3.3%. Given the path the parties took and the ultimate outcome, the court decided to split the overall ESI/TAR expenses roughly 20% defendant and 80% plaintiff. |
Additional articles
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/18/2020 | EDRM Headline News Source: EDRM |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/14/2020 | Three New E-discovery Case Law Developments So Far in 2020 Source: Legaltech News Author: Philip Favro (Driven) |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/13/2020 | Court Denies Plaintiff’s Sanctions Motion When Her Expert Found No Files Were Deleted: eDiscovery Case Week Source: eDiscovery Today Author: Doug Austin |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/12/2020 | Court Grants Part of Plaintiff’s Motion, But Won’t Go “Where Angels Fear to Tread” on Search Terms: eDiscovery Case Week Source: eDiscovery Today Author: Doug Austin |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/11/2020 | EDRM Headline News Source: EDRM |
| Additional Articles, Cybersecurity | 08/10/2020 | The Impact of Deep Learning on Anomaly Detection Source: Legaltech News Authors: Xuning (Mike) Tang and Yihua Astle (BRG) |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/10/2020 | Court Orders Cost-Shifting for 'Needlessly Overbroad' Discovery Source: Legaltech News Authors: H. Christopher Boehning and Daniel J. Toal (Paul Weiss) |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 08/04/2020 | EDRM Headline News Source: EDRM |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 07/17/2020 | Evaluate Your eDiscovery Sanctions Motion Carefully Before Bringing It Source: eDiscovery Assistant Author: Kelly Twigger |
Upcoming events
| Categories | Types | Dates | Times | Entries |
|---|---|---|---|---|