Notes on recent trends in e-discovery, data privacy, and the use of technology to enhance the practice of law
Published August 3, 2020 on the ACEDS Blog. Full lists are at Trends and Industry Events.
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Announcements
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 07/31/2020 | Mitratech, a provider of legal and compliance software, announced the acquisition of Tracker Corp, a provider of SaaS I-9, E-Verify, and immigration management solutions. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/30/2020 | Epiq announced it won the FY20 Top Microsoft 365 Compliance Partner for this year’s Microsoft US Modern Work and Security Partner Awards. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 07/29/2020 | Ropes & Gray announced the launch of a new consulting service, R&G Insights Lab, focused on analytics and behavioral science. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/27/2020 | BDO announced the launch of Athenagy, its proprietary business intelligence platform for legal professionals. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/23/2020 | Andrew Haslam and Legal IT Insider announced publication of eDisclosure Systems – Buyers Guide, 2020 Edition, which covers 111 suppliers and 75 products. |
E-discovery
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| E-Discovery | 07/30/2020 | Registration for Relativity Fest 2020 has opened - this year all virtual and all free from September 21-23. |
| E-Discovery, Privacy | 07/30/2020 | In his 100th post for Relativity, David Horrigan highlighted memorable moment from his posts over the past five years, covering advice on social media, women and the law, the judges, and data privacy and protection. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/30/2020 | Epiq announced it won the FY20 Top Microsoft 365 Compliance Partner for this year’s Microsoft US Modern Work and Security Partner Awards. |
| E-Discovery | 07/30/2020 | Although clearly crafted to motivate readers to send work to Disco, Cat Casey's post on e-discovery pricing "misconceptions" sets forth a useful set of issues to consider when trying to establish what to pay (or be paid) for e-discovery work. |
| E-Discovery | 07/29/2020 | Valora Technologies added 10 new case studies to its list of ways auto classification can be used to address information governance, records management, legal, e-discovery, and regulatory challenges. |
| E-Discovery | 07/29/2020 | Addressing remote document review, Epiq enumerated five hurdles and three benefits and gave an overview of the results of a proprietary survey where clients and reviewers said remote document review met or exceeded their expectations and were open to using remote document review as a permanent solution. |
| E-Discovery | 07/29/2020 | Privilege logs are all about the description, wrote Kelly Twigger of eDiscovery Assistant. Noting that in the first 7 months of 2020 there already have been at least 88 decisions where parties disagreed over the whether documents on privilege logs should be there or were adequately represented or sought in camera review, Kelly examined a recent case where the judge denied an in camera review request. |
| E-Discovery | 07/29/2020 | New Jersey Rule of Evidence (N.J.R.E.) 530 (Waiver of Privilege by Contract or Previous Disclosure) has been amended effective July 1, 2020 to provide a "safe harbor" to clients and attorneys who inadvertently disclose information protected by the attorney-client privilege or work-product doctrine, reported Brett M. Anders and Michael J. Nesse of Jackson Lewis in a National Law Review article. |
| E-Discovery, Privacy | 07/28/2020 | Doug Austin of eDiscovery Today highlighted BONG!, a daily email blast from Jonathan Maas of The Maas Consulting Group that ranges across e-discovery (called e-disclosure in the UK), data privacy, and a variety of other topics. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/27/2020 | BDO announced the launch of Athenagy, its proprietary business intelligence platform for legal professionals. |
| E-Discovery | 07/27/2020 | In a Legaltech News article, Mike Horoho and Anthony Kelly of FTI Consulting discussed how to use exploratory data analysis to perform more effective data analytics. |
| E-Discovery, Enhancing Practice | 07/27/2020 | Doug Austin of eDiscovery Today pointed out that ABA Resolution 112, adopted in August 2019, urges courts and lawyers to address artificial intelligence: "RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges courts and lawyers to address the emerging ethical and legal issues related to the usage of artificial Intelligence ('AI') in the practice of law including: (1) bias, explainability, and transparency of automated decisions made by AI; (2) ethical and beneficial usage of AI; and (3) controls and oversight of AI and the vendors that provide AI." Doug also discussed the slow adoption rates of AI for e-discovery. |
| Announcements, E-Discovery | 07/23/2020 | Andrew Haslam and Legal IT Insider announced publication of eDisclosure Systems – Buyers Guide, 2020 Edition, which covers 111 suppliers and 75 products. |
Enhancing practice
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Enhancing Practice | 08/02/2020 | Analyzing the results of Altman Weil's Law Firms in Transition 2020 flash survey, which reports on large law firm trends, in the first of two posts Ron Friedmann concluded that firms see a new for change but acting on the recognition remains a big challenge but also noted that firms appear to change only as fast as clients actually want (versus what they say they want). |
| Enhancing Practice | 08/01/2020 | Not all litigation analytics products deliver accurate and comprehensive results on a variety of litigation-related matters, according to a recent study conducted by law librarians, wrote Sean La Roque-Doherty in the ABA Journal. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/31/2020 | View Bob Ambrogi's video interview of Kristen Sonday, cofounder and COO of Paladin, a platform that helps legal teams run more efficient pro bono platforms while increasing access to justice. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 07/31/2020 | Mitratech, a provider of legal and compliance software, announced the acquisition of Tracker Corp, a provider of SaaS I-9, E-Verify, and immigration management solutions. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/30/2020 | A new language model called GPT-3 from OpenAI holds not just promise but risks, reported Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer. The promise: Helping with applications that automatically read and produce text. The challenges: Privacy, computing costs, bias, and probably lack of sophistication. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/30/2020 | Every Friday at 3 pm ET, the Legaltech Week Friday roundtable of legaltech journalists convenes to hash out what they consider to be the week’s top stories and trends in legal technology and innovation, noted Bob Ambrogi of LawSites. You can register to attend as well as get past episodes as a podcast or on YouTube. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/30/2020 | In a Legaltech News article, James Drimmer of U.S. Legal Support discussed remote depositions pros, cons, and lessons learned. |
| Announcements, Enhancing Practice | 07/29/2020 | Ropes & Gray announced the launch of a new consulting service, R&G Insights Lab, focused on analytics and behavioral science. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/29/2020 | OpenAI recently unveiled GPT-3, a a new type of pretrained language model capable of generating natural language text and computer code with the most minimal of inputs, reported Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer, who added his take on GPT-3 and more generally the trend toward using language models to accomplish legal tasks. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/28/2020 | According to a study conducted by Casetext, its Compose brief drafting tool delivered major time savings, reported Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer, cutting the average time to draft a motion to dismiss from 6 hours and 55 minutes to 1 hour and 41 minutes. Richard cautioned that the study was conducted by Casetext on its own tool, but concluded that the general point is well made: the software helps lawyers do the same job faster. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/28/2020 | Law firms, once famously hesitant to adopt technology, have been forced by COVID-19 to transform themselves overnight and many may not be go back to old ways, reported Jason Brennan of Luminance in a Legaltech News article. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/28/2020 | Rob Robinson of Complex Discovery offered an overview of Gartner's recently published Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance Technologies, 2020 research. |
| E-Discovery, Enhancing Practice | 07/27/2020 | Doug Austin of eDiscovery Today pointed out that ABA Resolution 112, adopted in August 2019, urges courts and lawyers to address artificial intelligence: "RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges courts and lawyers to address the emerging ethical and legal issues related to the usage of artificial Intelligence ('AI') in the practice of law including: (1) bias, explainability, and transparency of automated decisions made by AI; (2) ethical and beneficial usage of AI; and (3) controls and oversight of AI and the vendors that provide AI." Doug also discussed the slow adoption rates of AI for e-discovery. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/27/2020 | Victoria Hudgins and Phillip Bantz of Corporate Counsel discussed common criteria corporate legal departments and law firms consider with selecting alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), in particular ability to meet client quality expectations, price, technology, and scalability. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/27/2020 | Ron Friedmann of Prism Legal offered his observations of and implications for the legal tech market, starting with a discussion about two early stage legal technology software companies. His bottom line: Software development remains risky for lawyers turned legal tech entrepreneurs, although easier and less expensive in the past; fortunately for those entrepreneurs, law firms have become more receptive to new software solutions; but eventual commercial success remains hard to predict. |
| Enhancing Practice, Privacy | 07/27/2020 | Clifford Chance Applied Solutions introduced Cross-Border Publisher: Data Protection, a subscription-based expert system that handles GDPR and local data privacy questions across 17 jurisdictions, reported Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer. |
| Enhancing Practice | 07/20/2020 | OpenAI's language generator GPT-3 looks shockingly good, reported Will Douglas Heaven of MIT Technology Review, who described it as the largest and most powerful language model ever created. |
Privacy
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | 07/31/2020 | The U.S. Department of Commerce has issued two new sets of FAQs in light of Schrems II, reported Hunton Andrews Kurth, FAQs – EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Program Update and FAQs – Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield. |
| E-Discovery, Privacy | 07/30/2020 | In his 100th post for Relativity, David Horrigan highlighted memorable moment from his posts over the past five years, covering advice on social media, women and the law, the judges, and data privacy and protection. |
| Privacy | 07/30/2020 | Norway's data processing authority, Datatilsynet, issued FAQs on Schrems II, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. |
| Privacy | 07/30/2020 | The Bailiwick of Guernsey’s Office of Data Protection Authority stated its position on Schrems II, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. |
| Privacy | 07/29/2020 | Germany's data protection authority, Datenschutzkonferenz (DSK), issued its guidance on Schrems II, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. Most notably, transfer of personal data to the US based on Privacy Shield is not permitted and must be discontinued immediately, and standard contractual clauses may continue to be used with potentially with limitations. |
| Cybersecurity, Privacy | 07/29/2020 | Chief legal officers, general counsel, and legal departments as a whole are getting much more involved in how companies address data privacy and cybersecurity, according to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2020 State of Cybersecurity Report, wrote Dan Clark of Corporate Counsel. |
| E-Discovery, Privacy | 07/28/2020 | Doug Austin of eDiscovery Today highlighted BONG!, a daily email blast from Jonathan Maas of The Maas Consulting Group that ranges across e-discovery (called e-disclosure in the UK), data privacy, and a variety of other topics. |
| Privacy | 07/28/2020 | The UK’s Information Commissioner Office’s issued a revised statement on the Schrems II decision, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. In the statement the ICO noted that with the CJEU's judgement, "[i]nternational data transfers, that are so vital for the global economy, suddenly became open to question" and cautioned that "this judgment has wider implications than just the invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield." |
| Privacy | 07/28/2020 | The New York State Senate approved a measure, S.8450C/A.10500C, that would protect the privacy of contact tracing data, keeping that information confidential and ensuring it be used only for tracing efforts, reported Odia Kagan of Fox Rothschild. |
| Enhancing Practice, Privacy | 07/27/2020 | Clifford Chance Applied Solutions introduced Cross-Border Publisher: Data Protection, a subscription-based expert system that handles GDPR and local data privacy questions across 17 jurisdictions, reported Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer. |
| Privacy | 07/27/2020 | The Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services announced final revisions to the Confidentiality of Substance Use Disorder Patient Records regulation codified at 42 CFR Part 2, reported Kate Heinzelman and Megan Svedman of Sidley. The final rule changed the regulations in numerous ways, including relaxing some of the restrictions imposed on holders of Part 2 information. |
| Privacy | 07/27/2020 | Germany's top court ruled that the public's right to information can supersede an individual's right to be forgotten, reported Eva von Schaper of Legaltech News. |
| Privacy | 07/24/2020 | Ian C. Ballon, Kate Black, and Tyler J. Laurence of Greenberg Traurig discussed how the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) regulates online services directed to children under 13 years of age, a heightened issue with changes brought on by COVID-19. |
| Privacy | 07/23/2020 | Japan amended its Data Privacy Act, reported Aki Tanaka of Littler. Effective within two years, the amendments expand data subject rights by relaxing requirements to make objections to data processing and to request data deletion and require data controllers to report data breaches to the government and data subject. |
| Privacy | 07/23/2020 | New Zealand's parliament approved a privacy bill that amends the Privacy Act 1993, reported Naomi Seddon of Littler. Effected on Dec. 1, 2020, the amendments expand breach reporting requirements, introduce restrictions on overseas disclosure of personal information, and apply to actions taken by overseas organizations carrying on business in New Zealand. |
| Privacy | 07/23/2020 | The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) published the first two reports from participants in the ICO's regulatory sandbox. The JISC and Heathrow Airport Ltd. reports mark the first steps towards achieving the aim of the sandbox, launched in Sep. 2019, which is to show that data protection can be combined with real world innovative solutions. |
Additional articles
| Categories | Date | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Enhancing Practice | 07/29/2020 | Artificial Lawyer TV – "Are US Law Firms Really Innovating?" Source: Artificial Lawyer Author: Richard Troman |
| Additional Articles, E-Discovery | 07/28/2020 | Work Smarter, Not Harder: How To Automate E-Discovery Processing Source: Above the Law Author: Mike Quartararo (ACEDS) |
Upcoming events
| Categories | Types | Dates | Times | Entries |
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