Anyone who has been involved in moderately complex patent litigation is aware of the immense time and expense devoted to electronic discovery (“e-discovery”). The laborious process of negotiating with adversaries over search terms, custodians and metadata and then culling, producing and reviewing the many gigabytes of electronic data, particularly electronic communications, often yield little probative information. To reduce and streamline e-discovery costs, Chief Judge Randall R. Rader of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”) introduced the Model Order on E-Discovery in Patent cases (“Model Order”) on September 27, 2011. This article describes the impetus for the Model Order, its key aspects and its implementation by district courts. It further discusses whether and how litigants and potential litigants should modify their strategy in complying with ediscovery including collecting, reviewing and producing documents for litigation, preparing discovery requests, negotiating with opposing counsel, drafting litigation holds and preserving electronically stored information (“ESI”). Finally, this article addresses whether the approach taken under the Model Order is conducive to non-patent complex civil litigations.
Should the Federal Circuit’s Model E-Discovery Order Change the Way You Conduct E-Discovery for Patent Litigation?, Contributed by Sapna Walter Palla, Kaye Scholer LLP « Bloomberg Law (Sapna Walter Palla)
Breaking Into E-Discovery | ABA Law Practice Today (Sally Kane)
The legal industry is slow to embrace change and adopt new practices. However, the past two decades have witnessed the dawn of the digital age and, with it, advancements in technology that have reshaped the legal landscape. This evolving technology and recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have spawned a new and lucrative law practice specialty: electronic discovery. The e-discovery niche, which combines the legal expertise of attorneys with the technical skills of IT professionals, is one of the fastest growing specialties in the legal industry.
Increasing volumes of electronically stored information (ESI), evolving e-discovery case law, the automation of legal processes, changing ESI protocols and harsher judicial sanctions have fueled the need for e-discovery specialists. In response to this trend, a growing number of firms are investing in consultative e-discovery talent by establishing dedicated e-discovery practice groups or, in smaller firms, creating the role of an e-discovery attorney. According to a 2011 survey by The Cowen Group, a legal technology staffing firm, 30% of firms are adding e-discovery attorneys, with an anticipated 150-250 openings at major law firms.
E-discovery attorneys operate under a variety of titles: electronic discovery advisor, e-discovery counsel, EDD partner, electronic discovery consultant, special counsel, e-discovery specialist, and e-discovery director are a few. Most e-discovery attorneys work in law firms serving corporate clients although a growing number of attorneys are developing niche e-discovery roles within corporations and government agencies. Responsibilities vary according to practice environment and firm size. Below are a few of the roles the e-discovery attorney may tackle.
How Siri Could Make Collaboration Mobile – Telecom – Unified Communications/messaging – Informationweek
What might a voice-activated collaboration client do? Siri’s current ability to make calendar entries, send text messages, and take dictation hint at the possibilities. For example, the standard way of sharing comments is Facebook’s wall metaphor–a comment stream threaded beneath an anchor topic. In the context of enterprise collaboration, the topic is likely to be a PowerPoint deck or meeting agenda. While it’s possible, although rarely pleasant, to read heavily formatted content like a slide deck on a smartphone, typing a comment is onerous, even with a client optimized for the smartphone’s small display. Wouldn’t it be nice to dictate your thoughts instead?
Of course, this text-to-speech example just hints at what innovative developers might do with a cloud-based speech-recognition engine. Siri already understands context, in that prior requests inform subsequent answers. Ask “Find me the nearest Mexican restaurant,” and Siri replies with a list based on your current location. Follow up with “No, make that pizza,” and Siri remembers both the context (restaurants) and location. Imagine if this same logical power could be applied to any application. Say you’re a sales rep and your manager has shared a spreadsheet with regional sales estimates. If you have updated figures for your territory, instead of hunting and pecking changes on the tiny touchscreen keyboard, wouldn’t it be nice to say, “Siri, change the sales estimate for the Northwest region from 750,000 to 900,000″ and have the update applied, along with a comment field indicating who made the change? Similarly, when reviewing a project manager’s task schedule on the road from your phone, wouldn’t it be nice to update it with a simple voice command? “Siri, change the completion date for software pilot testing to Feb. 9.”
Natural-language control of computer systems is not new; it’s been a staple of science fiction since Star Trek. But Siri, with its merging of client-side language processing and server-side meaning interpretation, has raised the bar on what’s possible. While talking to a laptop, with its expansive keyboard, never made much sense, talking to your phone couldn’t be more natural. Instead of having conversations with friends or colleagues, let’s just have a conversation with the device itself. Siri ushers in the era in which speech recognition doesn’t let devices just take dictation but actually engage in conversation–tell it what we want, react to the response, and modify our request–and use speech as a software UI.
The future of smartphone collaboration lies in vocal, not tactile, interaction. Siri blazes the trail.
Google plans big changes for Reader | BBC News
Google is planning to strip some features from its Reader to boost the Google+ social network.
In a blogpost, the company revealed that the sharing features on its RSS news reader would soon be removed.
Instead, anyone wanting to share or highlight posts on blogs and websites will have to do so via integrated Google+ tools.
Reader, like many other Google services, will also get a new look in the next few days.
The blogpost by Google software engineer Alan Green said that the changes would be coming to Reader “in the next week”.
The first change will be the re-design to change how it looks and then it and Google+ will be brought “closer together”.
Privacy alert: Verizon is now monitoring your mobile Web habits – Computerworld Blogs
Verizon Wireless users, listen up:
Verizon is making a significant change to its privacy policy for mobile users this week. By default, the company will now use a bunch of your info for “certain business and marketing reports” and for “making mobile ads you see more relevant.”
This info includes the URLs of websites you visit over Verizon’s network and also your device’s location data. Some of those details may be shared with outside companies as well. Verizon says none of it will personally identify you.
via Privacy alert: Verizon is now monitoring your mobile Web habits – Computerworld Blogs.
The megabillions litigation you’ve never heard of | Thomson Reuters
On Monday, Manhattan federal judge Naomi Reice Buchwald opened her courtroom doors to 18 class actions from around the country that allege international banks artificially depressed a critical lending rate in the teeth of the economic crisis. The judicial panel on multidistrict litigation ordered the cases consolidated before Judge Buchwald on Friday, agreeing with the bank defendants and one group of plaintiffs lawyers that the cases should be litigated in New York. The MDL panel’s decision rejected arguments by other plaintiffs lawyers who called for the litigation to be based in Chicago, New Jersey, and (improbably) Minnesota. It also sets up a fight for control of litigation that could be worth billions, although we’re a long, long way from there.
The class actions, which claim damages under federal antitrust laws and the Commodities Exchange Act, involve the London Interbank Offered Rate, which is often used as an alternative to the U.S. prime rate to peg adjustable interest rates. The U.S. dollar LIBOR is set by the private British Bankers Association, in a self-reporting process. Every workday, 16 international banks inform the BBA of the interest rate at which they can borrow U.S. dollars. The top four and bottom four reported rates are discarded and the other eight are averaged to produce the daily LIBOR. (The BBA recently increased the number of reporting banks from 16 to 20, but the allegations in the litigation predate that change.)
The relative value of LIBOR-indexed financial instruments-from simple loans to the most arcane Eurodollar futures contracts, derivates, and swaps-can change quite dramatically based on where the rate is pegged. Trillions of dollars in financial instruments are LIBOR-indexed, so the potential damages, if what the plaintiffs lawyers claim is true, could be eye-goggling indeed.
There are two different sorts of allegations in the class actions that have been filed so far. One is that as the world economy began to wobble in 2007, banks were afraid to admit that it was costing them more to borrow dollars in London. Banks were worried that they’d appear to be in trouble, this theory goes, so they lied to the BBA about the interest rates they were being charged. The more sinister (and less plausible) theory is that a group of banks conspired to depress the LIBOR in order to profit from trading in derivatives and swaps that were affected by the artificially low index rate.
Lost Data? Create An Emergency Response Plan | napset.com
Chances are this may have happened to you: A letter or e-mail arrives from a company with which you do business, informing you that their customer data files were “accessed by a third party.”
These messages generally include reassuring statements that they take your privacy very seriously, that steps have been taken to improve data security and you have no need to worry. Sometimes, they even apologize for the inconvenience.
What should you do next? Here are a few suggestions:
• Be Cautious: The company that lost your personally identifiable information may tell you they believe your important information is secure because it was encrypted, kept on a different server or not saved after your last transaction. This may be accurate but you should take necessary precautions.
• Change Your Password: Start with the online site that was compromised. If you use the same username and/or password to access other sites, change those passwords too.
• Use Strong Passwords/ Passphrases: Your phone number or pet’s name is too easy to guess. Skilled hackers can break most passwords in a matter of seconds. Use a random password generator, which lets you choose password length, case sensitivity and whether to use special characters. Then store them with a password manager or in a secure place of your own. Consider using a pass “phrase” instead of a password.
IBM’s Next-Gen Memory Is 100 Times Faster Than Flash | PCWorld
Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology–one of the new forms of faster, smaller, and denser memory chips destined to replace flash–has been on the table for a while now. Now IBM has come up with a breakthrough making PCM data transfer “instantaneous” and 100 times faster than flash memory.
IBM scientists in Zurich came to these new breakthroughs for their PCM chips while solving two major problems with the architecture. PCMs work by using a specialized alloy that can change its physical state, between a low-resistance crystalline to a high-resistance amorphous phase, by applying voltage.
When the resistance of the chip goes up the chip can store multiple bits of data over the one bit that flash can handle. Combine this with a write latency of 10 microseconds and PCM performs 100 times better than flash.
via IBM’s Next-Gen Memory Is 100 Times Faster Than Flash | PCWorld.
BBC News – Icann increases web domain suffixes
A global internet body has voted to allow the creation of new website domain suffixes, the biggest change for the online world in years.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) plans to dramatically increase the number of domain endings from the current 22.
Internet address names will end with almost any word and be in any language.
Icann will begin taking applications next year, with corporations and cities expected to be among the first.
“Icann has opened the internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer for Icann.
“No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.”
There will be several hundred new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs), which could include such addresses as .google, .coke, or even .BBC.
There are currently 22 gTLDs, as well as about 250 country-level domain names such as .uk or .de.
Costly process
Click to play
Icann’s senior vice-president, Kurt Pritz explains why the new gTLDs are being created
It will cost $185,000 (£114,000) to apply for the suffixes, and companies would need to show they have a legitimate claim to the name they are buying.
Analysts say it is a price that global giants might be willing to pay – in order to maximise their internet presence.
The money will be used to cover costs incurred by Icann in developing the new gTLDs and employing experts to scrutinise the many thousands of expected applications.
A portion will be set-aside to deal with potential legal actions, raised by parties who fail to get the domains they want.
The vote completes a six-year negotiation process and is the biggest change to the system since .com was first introduced 26 years ago.
Icann said it was beginning a global communications programme to raise awareness of the new domain names.
Continue reading the main story
Existing Generic TLDs
.com : companies, now broader
.edu : educational institutions
.gov : government institutions
.int : international organisations, e.g. Interpol
.mil : military organisations
.net : networking technologies, now broader
.org : non-profit organisations
.arpa : first ever domain, now technical use
.aero : air travel industry
.biz : business alternative to .com
.coop : co-operatives
.info : information, but open for general use
.museum : museums
.name : personal names – johnsmith.name
.pro : professionals, e.g. doctors
.asia: Asian websites
.cat : Catalan language
.jobs : employment websites
.mobi : mobile phones
.post : postal services
.tel : telecoms
.travel : travel
Source: Icann
Applications will start on 12 January.
