How to do Early Case Assessment with FreeEed

Sometimes, you have a lot of data to process for eDiscovery. So, you go to your favorite eDiscovery provider and ask them to process your data and then host it for your review. But there's the rub: processing costs X number of dollars per gigabyte, and usually, you don't want to host all the data. 

Here is how you can solve this problem with FreeEED and save oodles of money in the process. First, I will explain the harder way, using the review. Then I will show how to go straight to the results, once you are more trusting the results.

Way 1 - with the review

 Download and start FreeEED

Select your projects and add files to your project

Stage, Process, and Go to Review

In the review, find all responsive documents. 

Now, simply click on "Export as Natives"

Here, you got want you wanted! You know now what documents you will deal with. Read them, analyze them. 

Put them into your favorite review platform, like Relativity. From there, you will be able to do production and share the documents with others who need them. And by the way, we can set you up and help with Relativity as well. 

Way 2 - go straight to the results

Start as above, by downloading FreeEED. But, instead of going all the way with the review, simply use culling

Enter your search string (I entered 'matt' but it accepts complete Lucene syntax, with metadata names and ranges), and click on process. When done, send the production results. Or, be more formal and go to Relativity, as above.

Cheers!

FreeEed V1.0 Released!

Latest changes:

• All processing examples work;
• Testing is automated with JUnit;
• All tests run;
• PST coming very soon.

Cause for celebration!!!


eDiscovery open-source tool is available for all.

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software?

The article in the New York Times claims just that, software replacing lawyers. But, as many newspaper articles, it mixes a few things up.

Anyone who is reading this probably knows, the eDiscovery market is about 4B, and it is not shrinking. Of the usual costs of eDiscovery, lawyers get 75% and processing costs constitute only 25%. As this blog is frequent to point out, lawyers are creatures of habit more than others, and this habit is good law, so it is not going away any time soon, even in the presence of statistics that are pro-computer.

Then where are the authors of the article correct? In their praise of the new tools for analytical eDiscovery, even if not in their assessment of their impact. For internal use, these tools provide lawyers with definite advantages and help them find important leads. Whether the judge will accept document classification as privileged, if it is done by a computer review - this will require the change in attitude, the improvement in technology, and perhaps a review of applicable laws.

However, with the driving force coming from customers not willing to pay the high bills of what essentially is human search where automation would be welcome - all sides may eventually be forced to accept this. Why do we trust Google on search results? Because it is not humanly possible to read all relevant information by ourselves.

Art: Pierre Auguste Renoir - The Thinker Aka Seated Young Woman

View & Comment on Any Document

What does this sound like? - To me, sounds like legal review. And indeed, you can get a free account, upload your PDF or Word documents, and redact it to your heart's content.

You can also have some business license, with groups, security, and privileges, and, what's more, you can do your own application using their API - although this is still shaping. I think they have done the redacting part just right!

What is the history and popularity of the application?

Founded by three MIT graduates, and one MIT attendee who dropped out in order to help launch successful internet startups, Crocodoc's creators are the same people who brought WebNotes, a tool used by professionals and educators across the globe to manage research, to the web. Y Combinator, and other investors provide funding for Crocodoc. The company is based in Silicon Valley California, and also has offices in Boston... (from this review)

Art: Paul Cezanne - Uncle Dominique As A Lawyer

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/10/10

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. How to cull out junk mail?
A.

• Whatever solution you pick you should ensure it works as you expect/intend against your collection and your overall process is legally defensible. If your opponents question your process, pointing to a list you pulled off the internet or or software you used, but did not test, will not withstand much scrutiny;
• Taking the approach that a number of these e-mails are junk domains and if we can find the junk domains, maybe one can eliminate a large subset. There are about about 3,500 domain names, see here, here, and here;
• Other means of filtering email, also Bayesian spam filtering;
• Commercial tools include Nuix, Clearwell. 
• There are spam blocking lists you can obtain that has a list of verified domains considered spam. These lists although not fool proof, are typically used by email admins to filter out spam at the mail gateway. Here is one compiled list at no charge (they accept donation) but keep in mind no list is 100% accurate and up to date;
• Purchase more up to date lists directly from more recognized anti-spam organizations;
• Compile an inhouse list of domains by searching out the .com of junk folders for a subset of custodians if that's an option.

Q. Stand-alone software application that I can use to De-NIST?
A. 

• Commercial tools include PinPoint Labs, EnCase, MKS Toolkit;
• Linux utilities such as md5deep, md5sum;

Q.  Potential issues with native production (1) No way to bates stamp a native file; (2) No way to lock from editing; (3) Redaction; (4) More?
A.

• Research done while creating Symantec's Discovery Accelerator lead to choosing display in HTML, since performance is crucial, and nobody wants to pay for lawyers sitting waiting for page refresh;
• The three limitations are a myth: (1) Bates numbers can be replaced with file renaming and using the database and the load file to identify the files; (2) Hash fingerprints can be used to check that the files have not been modified; (3) Redactions are OK if the original and the redaction logs are kept;
• Redaction native files is not practical. Besides, native file are inconvenient to litigate - for example, printing individual files is a lot of work; paging may be different; it is hard to "hook" your work product to the native files;
• It all depends if you are the producing or the receiving side. On the receiving side, native files are easier and faster to review. On the producing side, you are getting into problems of page numbers differing between you and the other side;
• Potential of unseen text such as track changes, comments, hidden columns, etc that might escape notice from the reviewer. This issue and the increased complexity of native redaction are some of the only arguments against native review. Still, tiffing is dying a slow death for good reasons;
• Metadata! For many cases in which certain types of issues are present (e.g. questions of contract formation, to name but one), producing natively will lead to producing potentially important metadata which may never have been reviewed by the attorneys. If an attorney insists on producing native files, make sure to at least mention a clawback agreement.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

Work on litsupport Q&A site started

Here is what the front page will look like:

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. This site contains distilled summaries, in the form of questions and answers.

This site is work in progress, with new questions distilled and added as they appear in litsupport discussions, and old entries updated.

The site is based on the weekly summaries of the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group that have been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 12/13/09

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. How to break a collection of PDF files into separate bookmarks (each of these PDF files is a compilation of documents that have been bookmarked)?
A.

• PDF Splitter & Merge;
• NitroPDF;
• ARTS Split and Merge - Acrobat 9 pro will also do it but with fewer options than ARTS;
• PDF Splitter;
• Affordable PDF Tools;
• Valora.

Q. Sample harvesting plan?

A. Below are the main points that have to be addressed by the plan:

1. Document the custodians, locations (persons with account & name history, network shares, archives, servers), etc.
2. Document the time periods (by custodians), and identify backup/storage/archiving technology within the time period of relevance;
3. Document required level of data preservation versus potential cost, for each period defined above;
4. Distinguish preservation from harvesting, so that you can efficiently prioritize harvesting, without compromising preservation;
5. Create a dedicated (non generic) spreadsheet that case manager / data manager can understand and validate.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 08/23/09

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. Advice on dealing with passwords for Excel (and other) files?
A.

• Office Password Recovery Pro;
• Passware Kit Enterprise;
• (a) using known passwords that are used elsewhere, (b) dictionary attack derived from the PC of the user,(c) tools such as Passware for brute-force and hybrid attacks (d) rainbow tables are available for Windows, not sure for Excel;
• In early versions of Office the password was actually retrievable directly from the file if you knew where to look in a hex dump of the file, see more here;
• Ask the client up front what they would like to do with password protected files.
  

Q. Conversion Utility to create PST files from NSF files?
A.

• dtSearch provides a list of resources;
• Paraben's Network E-mail Examiner (NEMX);
• Beware of metadata loss;
• See prior discussion here.
  

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/26/09

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. How to select deduplication options for emails, such as for Outlook (PST) files? For those vendors who do not document it completely (using Clearwell as an example), what can be guessed?

A.

• Assume that they all (Trident Wave, Law, etc.) dedupe basically the same using MD5 or SHA-1 hash value http://www.secure-hash-algorithm-md5-sha-1.co.uk/ . Assume that Clearwell probably does the same thing. Basically the program looks at a number of fields, FROM, TO CC, SUBJECT and calculates a hash value (like a fingerprint) for the electronic message. Then it runs a comparison of the Hash value so that it can eliminate the duplicates;
• The problem is getting an exact list of which fields are used can be difficult. Some systems just list them in a selection page and leave it up to you which you want to use. Some problems to watch are: (a) identical header/subject/body content, but different contents of the attachments, (b) use of Microsoft MSGID which can have collisions in as few as as 10,000 email, the reverse issue - systems which are so picky that they only effectively dedupe on entire PST/MSGs, using the path and other delivery/usage MAPI fields so that you still end up with 20+ copies of the lunch notice from all of your custodians. Clearwell seems to be using a good hash of fields. Advice: always run a couple tests on your sample sets;
• The specific fields used for Law are located in the help file under the dedupe section;
• Clearwell has a 4-page document that outlines how de-duplication works in their product. A number of fields are used from the email data, these fields are different from those used by LAW or Trident. For loose file de-duplication Clearwell uses some meta fields and the hash of the content which is a different approach to just hashing the content. It can identify files that have the same content but have different filenames and meta fields. The feature is called File Analysis;
• Clearwell does deduplication differently in version 4.5 then in 4.0, due to foreign language changes;
• It would be nice to have a standard for deduplication of electronic evidence. However, it would be complicated: there is a legal standard for identifying 'identical evidence' or duplicates, by which a deduplication strategy can be crafted. It is called the 'rules of evidence' in whatever jurisdiction one finds their case. The definition varies by the evidence and nature of the case. Today, this necessitates various options in the processing software and the understanding of them;
• Can anyone identify a court that explicitly defines, dictates or publishes guidelines for ESI duplicate detection and handling? - Take a look at a well crafted Case Management Order where deduplication was discussed between educated lawyers in the Meet & Confer. The factual underpinnings of the case will define duplicates, and the regimine to be used to de-duplicate or re-populate. Which is why a "universal standard" is utopian.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/19/09

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. Retention policy regarding cases that "close," for example on a product such as TrialDirector?

A.

• One should never just delete the case from all drives when the trial is finished, unless specifically required to do so by a Non-Disclosure Agreement or Court Order. Requests to restore a (TrialDirector) case may come up even years after it was finished. Reasons may include appeals, presentations by attorneys who tried the case, and related matters. Thus general retention policy for larger cases can be "forever," stored on external hard drives. Each drive can hold several cases, and they don't take up very much room. Smaller cases which could be easily re-created can be backed up and stored on CD's or DVD's and included in the case files;
• Alternatively, based on longer life expectancy for tapes, one can rule out every other media and back everything up to tape, preserving them for a common term of 10 years;
• A reasonably large case can fit on a 16 Gig flash drive which costs $40.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/12/09

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. EDD Project Tracking Dashboard software?

A.

• e-discovery by Tracker Products;
• Doculogix;
• CaseLawg by Legal Science.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/05/09

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. TextPipe is a text transformation, conversion, cleansing and extraction tool. Are there any other applications like it?

A.

• General areas of open-source software are Perl, Sprog, Jitterbit;
• Learn about ETL and Munging;
• Linux utilities include grep, awk, gawk, sed;
• For Microsoft Windows, there are both free, open source versions (Cygwin) and commercial versions (MKS Toolkit).

Q. An Acrobat plug-in for applying a trial exhibit sticker to the first page of various documents in PDF format? More specifically, a stamp that is a replica of a "tabbie sticker" that can be edited with multiple lines of text? An example would be a stamp that contained something like the following:

Plaintiff's Trial Exhibit

PTX 0001

C.A. No. 00-000 (ABC)

A.

• Scan a sheet of blank Tabbies & then opened the file & select one sticker with the border. You can then copy that image to use as a stamp. Place the "stamp" on the page of the exhibit & resize. You can use the typewriter function to enter whatever text you want;
• Use Visionary, which is free. You can change the colors of the label - yellow for plaintiffs, and blue for defendants. There are 3 lines for the case number, exhibit number and title. The stamp can be moved on the page. You can then print the page with the color exhibit stamp;
• IntelliBates (Acrobat plug-in) is fine but time-consuming (and there is no option for a border of an exhibit sticker).

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/28/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/21/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/14/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/07/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/31/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/24/09

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. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/17/09

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. Sample interview questions for a litsupport person and practical advice?

A. There is more than one correct answer to the questions below. Tech-centered questions are important, but so are questions that probe a candidate's legal knowledge.

• What's the difference between an RFA and an RFP?
• How many days does a party have to respond to a document request in your jurisdiction? State court? Federal court?
• Are there any locally important issues, cases, or personalties with respect to e-discovery in your jurisdiction? What/who are they? (e.g. we appear> before J. Grimm);
• Name one case that's important for electronic discovery and/or review, and explain why it's important;
• What is the best evidence rule?
• What is a third party subpoena?
• What differences in approach to data collection, processing, and review, if  any, are there when responding to a third-party subpoena and a subpoena in an active matter of your client's?
• A partner calls you at 4:30 and says she has a floppy disc with half a dozen files to print before she leaves. You get to her office and find the "floppy" is a DVD and the files are 7 PSTs totalling 4 GB. What do you tell the partner?
• What is spoliation?
• How would you document the steps you took for a document production?
• A lawyer says he has an SEC securities fraud case. The "client's IT guy" has already removed and sent the hard drive from the computer of a trader who recently left the client's firm under questionable circumstances. The lawyer wants your help "to take a look at" what's on the drive. What do you do and what do you tell him?
• How would you explain slack space and unallocated space to an attorney who was techno-phobic?
• At an overarching level, look at your own specific needs. Talk to the people doing the job already. Look back at help tickets or problems you've faced in the last month or two;
• Don't denigrate an entire class of job applicants (e.g. "button pushers" and "load monkeys" [sic]) or go into an interview with a disdain for applicants who can't do X. The good applicants will pick up on that and won't want to work for you;
• Don't get hung up on whether an applicant knows terms that are reasonably open to synonyms or alternate uses. In one state it may be RFPs and in another - "doc requests";
• What to look for in a candidate? Willing and able to: adapt workflows to current context; learn just about anything quickly, preferably autodidactic; strong sense of personal accountability; handle stress well (ie: doesn't become a "crab in a basket").

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/10/09

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. Sample pst or nsf data that is public and can be used to prepare open presentations, for testing, etc.

A. Enron email dataset in various forms and from various sources:

• The latest and best can be downloaded from EDRM, other sources include:
  
• http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/enron_email.html
• http://www.enronemail.com/
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.