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Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat (CVEDR) Announces Craig Ball as a 2012 Keynote Speaker

January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Mr. Ball, an Austin, Texas-based trial law technologist and computer forensics expert, is a world-renowned thought leader in eDiscovery. He will address one of the most critical issues facing today’s legal profession: Persuading attorneys to learn information technology skills to uphold standards of advocacy and better serve their clients.

“Effective, affordable eDiscovery is no harder than learning to try a lawsuit … and no easier,” said Mr. Ball. Attorneys know it takes years of effort to learn courtroom skills, yet many expect to master eDiscovery in a few hours. Mr. Ball hopes to encourage them to “get their hands dirty with data,” noting that events like the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat (CVEDR) are needed to allow the exchange of ideas amongst eDiscovery professionals. He adds, “I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones in a setting that is one of America’s loveliest places.”

Mr. Ball is one of the most sought-after presenters in the eDiscovery industry. He is a prolific writer and the recipient of numerous awards. Mr. Ball’s work has been featured in national media outlets such as The New York Times. His passion is educating legal professionals about the powerful tools they can use to offer cost-effective discovery solutions for their clients.

via Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat (CVEDR) Announces Craig Ball as a 2012 Keynote Speaker.

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Improving legal records management: harness the DNA of data | CPA Global

August 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Data discovery has played a key role in US litigation for two generations, during which time nearly all forms of information have migrated to the digital realm. Yet, according to Texas-based trial lawyer and e-discovery expert, Craig Ball, few legal departments are addressing this reality. He says that, despite the central role of electronic information in our lives, e-discovery efforts are either overlooked altogether or pursued in such epic proportions that discovery dethrones the merits as the focal point of the case.

Ball believes that, at each extreme, lawyers must bear some responsibility for the failure. ‘Few have devoted sufficient effort to understanding their clients’ information architecture or mastering tools and techniques to manage data,’ he argues. ‘We didn’t know how good we had it when discovery meant only paper. Paper is tangible. It has to be stored somewhere physically accessible, and systems have developed over time to store and retrieve it. Paper holds power of place, whereas electronic data accumulates invisibly.

‘Even if employees label electronic data accurately, they rarely file it consistently,’ continues Ball. ‘Thousands of emails sit ignored in inboxes; their subject lines offering no clue as to their contents. Documents are saved in cryptically named folders on desktops and portable storage media or replicated between work and home computers. There is still plenty of paper around, too, but filing systems, like filing clerks, have all but disappeared.’

Ball adds that there is a standard misconception that evidence can be retrieved simply by running a Googlelike search across a company’s electronic files. ‘That’s rarely feasible, even in high-tech enterprises,’ he emphasises. Similarly, he is frustrated by the attempts by many lawyers to try to convert e-data into paper form. ‘Such is the volume of electronic information that it would be impossible to convert it all to hard copy,’ he says, ‘and yet lawyers seem to overwhelmingly favour this expensive, inferior path over learning to deal with electronic data differently.’

via Improving legal records management: harness the DNA of data.

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Stop and Take a Look Under the EDD Hood | Law.com

April 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

There are more than 600 companies offering e-discovery software and services, according to the most recent Socha Gelbmann survey of the electronic discovery market. If you spend any time trying to differentiate the hundreds of products and services being offered, you will find a wide variety of marketing claims being made about every product. But one fact about the e-discovery industry that most vendors probably prefer you didn’t know is that many of the software products being offered are not very different once you start poking around inside.

Despite the proliferation of tools for reviewing large collections of electronic evidence, most vendors are simply licensing the same computer source code to build their products. These common components find, index, extract, and search digital documents, the core function of any e-discovery product. “What the industry doesn’t want you to know is that, like the desktop PC industry, the same guts are inside the box,” says Austin, Texas-based e-discovery consultant Craig Ball. “The rest is mostly branding and some bells and whistles. How much faster can one product really be over another when they use the same code?”

This does not necessarily mean that the e-discovery industry is populated with hundreds of identical products differentiated only by advertising. Some observers maintain that despite this common use and reuse of the same computer code, it is still possible to offer unique products. “Everyone needs to have building materials to work with. If I’m building a house, I need wood or bricks. If I’m building software, I need certain basic components,” says George Socha, an attorney and e-discovery consultant in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also helps conduct the Socha Gelbmann survey. “Just because you use the same components doesn’t mean they’re all the same. There are different settings and different ways to implement these tools.”

Licensing off-the-shelf software components is common practice in the software industry; there’s no sense in building from scratch when someone else has already invested the time and money in building a useful tool. There are a number of options software makers can use in acquiring components, either by paying another software company to use their code, or to use open source software. Open source software is created and maintained by a community of software developers, allowing software makers to use and adapt the source code to their products for free or for a minimal cost.

Adopting open source software allows programmers to enhance products to their specifications, but that route offers little in the way of service and support. Licensing proprietary software offers advantages, but vendors are reliant on the software owner to make major changes and updates. There are many free and licensed products e-discovery vendors use including open source tools like database PostgreSQL and indexing tool Lucene, — although in talking to e-discovery vendors and consultants, document review software tends to rely on a handful of licensed technologies. These tools allows vendors to quickly build software platforms that can take a large collection of documents and extract files, index the data and text inside, and search those files.

via Law.com – Stop and Take a Look Under the EDD Hood.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-22

November 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-11-22

November 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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