litsupport summary for the week ending on 9/14/08

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Is it really that bad in Houston after hurricane Ike?
A. Yes, pretty bad. Most people do not have power, streets are still being cleared from debris and broken glass, Galveston had it the worst, and rescue teams are still at work. However, the good side is that there are very few casualties. I am writing from a wireless laptop connected to my car power outlet.

Q. A What are the requirements for the business case to bring ESI processing in-house?
A. In addition to investigating the list of vendors (LAW, IPRO's e-Capture, Discovery Cracker, Extractiva, eDiscovery Tools, ImageMAKER Discovery Assistant) and their capabilities, one should also consider

1. Data! If you have a data set and an audit of each file this will help tremendously in evaluating any tool;
2. It will help to do some basic tests of a few programs on the market this year with your .PST sample set;
3. One industry consultant reports that the best score for the programs that he tested with his .PST set was 84%;
4. Some programs are unable to go unlimited nesting of attachments, read attachments and embedded items in Adobe 8 files and read container files within container files.

Q. Can a law firm require unlimited liability in agreements with 3rd party ESI vendors?
A. A few national law firms (AmLaw 50) have been demanding and getting agreements of unlimited liability. Those vendors signing have predominantly been smaller players so it does not mean much to the law firms. However, there has been one upper tier vendor that signed on for unlimited liability.

Q. What are the pros and cons of using XML to store and retrieve EDD information.
A. A complete discussion is found on litsupport here, but in brief it would depend on which kinds of EDD information, as below,

The PROS:
- XML can incur less overhead than a database, and may fetch relational data quicker;
- file-based - easy to relocate and move around;
- can be understood by any platform and language;
- well-formed XML stores relational and hierarchical data logically and
efficiently;
- smaller XML files can fit entirely into memory, and once there, can be
queried nearly instantaneously.

The CONS:
- Write-once, read-many - not for rapidly or frequently changing data;
- No ACID compliance (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable);
- XML prefers to be read end-to-end;
- XML is a single-threaded;
- XML is file-based rather than server-based;
- XML has no business logic or constraints.

More pros and cons can be advanced depending on the file system, server, and implementation.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).