eDiscovery in litigation cases means data, data and more data. The end of days of delivering data on CDs and DVDs are fast approaching.  For the past 2 years, we have been using portable hard drives to transfer data from one entity to another.

• The clients provide their data to the law firm.
• The litigation support team sends data to the vendors for processing.
• The vendors deliver the processed data to the litigation support team.
• The law firm produces their data to the government agency or opposing counsel.

In late 2005, our Director of Litigation Support Services worked on a Second Request litigation case where she ended up with 70 portable hard drives in her office containing data received from the vendor on a rolling basis. The data on them was then copied onto the server and loaded into Concordance for attorney review in house, at the insistence of the attorneys.

Your litigation support team should have a stock of portable hard drives in their possession. There is nothing worse than having to run out to a store at the last minute to purchase a drive. Lost is the opportunity to get volume discounts or good Internet sales, and what if the store is sold out?

The smaller 3.5 inch portable hard drives are very functional and easy to transport. They are small, lightweight and range in size from 60 to 320 gigabytes.  They also have nifty carrying cases available in different colors.  At the very least, you should try to stick with the same brand and purchase a variety of disk sizes.  The well known brands like Western Digital, Seagate and Lacie are usually a safe bet, although we have all heard stories about “smoking hard drives” and “bad disk drives”.

If the hard drive is used for production, the client can be charged for the hard drive and a new replacement hard drive can be purchased for in-house stock.  The hard drives can be recycled over and over again for different sets of data in one case.  If the hard drives are used for different cases, a disk wiping software like BC Wipe should be used.

If you have any other tips on using portable hard drives in litigation support, please share with everyone in the comments.

The leading article in the February 2008 issue of Wired contends that technology and personal interaction are complementary like peanut butter and chocolate, usurping the conventional wisdom that technology destroys distance. While the hope still remains that cells phones and broadband will allow introverts and traffic planners to telecommute, author Tim Harford makes a compelling case that technology makes "face-time" easier and creates more of it.

Just like how indoor plumbing and urban sanitation allowed greater density in cities, so do Google Maps, cell phones, and Facebook allow people to find other people and things in a vastly larger population. That population can be a large city, organization, or community of clients, vendors, and colleagues. Email allows someone to maintain greater communication with more people in less time, freeing up time for more meetings in person.

And face-time seems more critical than ever. If indeed the workplace is shifting to value ideas because problems and processes are becoming more complex as the author contends, then meeting face-to-face is the best way to communicate those ideas. The upshot for your business or firm, studies have found that the most productive companies have the most intra-company e-mail, which actually encourages more personal contact, not less.

Here is an idea to think about and discuss. This isn’t an endorsement. Hopefully, it is the start of a conversation.

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine and the main who coined the them “the Long Tail” has an interesting post about dual IT networks—one official, the other not—at Wired’s offices. One is the corporate network that is locked down and heavily managed to protect its core functions like accounting/finance, file storage, backup and Exchange. The second is an “open” Internet connection, providing full access to Skype, instant messaging clients, and Facebook.

Now Wired magazine is about living on the digital edge, and law firms and professional services firms are not. Law firms especially need to protect data because the professional and financial ramifications of not doing so are devastating. But innovation is required in any industry, and we have touted the many advantages of new Web applications and services like RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, and more. Giving employees a playground to experiment could lead to a better way to provide client service or an innovative approach to services via these new Internet technologies.

As Anderson mentions in his blog, many corporate CIOs are implementing or seriously considering this dual networking strategy, either with physically separate networks or virtual networks. Time will tell, however, what problems could arise from this intriguing approach. At the person and workstation level those networks converge, causing potential headaches like lost productivity to fantasy sports leagues; malware pickup up from risky web sites and apps, and random questions about obscure web applications into the help desk.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Sure, the Annual ILTA Conference is the premier legal tech event on the calendar, but we don't blame you for avoiding the August heat in Central Florida (not near a beach). We sent our rep to seek out knowledge and air conditioning, but with blogging, you don't have to.

Inside Legal Opinions and LexBlog have the rundown of people blogging from the conference. Thanks to these intrepid folks, you can get the latest news and ideas from the conference while sipping your coffee while wearing that comfy, ratty t-shirt in your home office after the kids are in bed.

This great blog essay over at Digging My Own Ditch [via Found|Read] provides a primer on the value of Web 2.0 for people (or “users” if you want). Rather than being caught up in descriptions of RSS, AJAX and other technical aspects, the essay is about what “Web 2.0” dynamics mean for people, and then applies those dynamics to the archetypal IT tool: corporate email.

Here are the three dynamics that define the Web 2.0 experience for people:

• Personal expression – Web 2.0 provides people a greater ability to express their personalities to others
• Efficient connections – Web 2.0 services make meeting new like-minded people more efficient
• Information discovery – Web 2.0 software and services change how people discover information

Information discovery and efficient connections make perfect sense, but how in the world would enabling personal expression improve corporate e-mail? Turns out that as more people join communities online, they are used to posting photos of themselves (or avatars) and expressing their interests, specialities, accomplishments, and more. This aides in creating networks of like-minded people (efficient connections) that make finding information easier (information discovery).

Connections are more efficient because they are self-selected through common interests, which filters information to be more relevant and is thus more valuable. Throw in tagging, social bookmarking, and trackbacks (cross-linking)and people can find information and webs of information in ways better suited to them compared to a taxonomy or literal search engine. Applied to corporate e-mail, contacts are grouped by each person’s personal network, and e-mails are tagged for concepts that the e-mail is about but does not explicitly mention.

So what does Web 2.0 mean to businesses? Better connected employees with better access to the right information.

Here is a must have for every lawyer and paralegal in your office. The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization for using technology to increase transparency in the U.S. Government, published this list of “insanely useful web sites” [via LXRR] add value to the torrents of government data making it more useful, accessible, or intelligible. These sites gravitate toward the legislative arena, but include:

• a better way to search Thomas and monitor legislation through GovTrack.us;
• DOJ Documents Search (www.trainingdb.com);
• find contractor misconduct;
• searchable database of federal spending and contracting (fedspending.org); and
• search public Congressional Research Service (CRS) documents (www.opencrs.com)

These sites provide extra value through adding newsfeeds (RSS feeds) for updates not just on news, but search queries. So every time new information arrives matching a query you created—even if it was six months ago—you are alerted through a newsfeed. Others like LOUIS search multiple sources, like the Federal Register, GAO Reports, and Presidential documents. Some synthesize data from multiple sources like MapLight.org does for campaign contributions and voting records. GovTrack, which serves as the foundation for many of these sites, allows people to create their own “monitors” for bills, votes, members of Congress, and even subject areas.

Better Google Searching Tips: We humans are lazy. That is the genius behind Google. By just entering a keyword or two into a search box, it works really well. For those of us who don’t have the luxury of laziness, like paralegals, this article at Law.com’s Legal Technology has great advanced searching tips in Google.

• Choose or exclude search results from particular web sites;
• Choose the number of results per page;
• Learn how an asterisk can “fill in the blanks”; and
  
• find all the web sites linking to page or site.

30 Acrobat Tips: It’s only for Version 8 and it is promoting an online webinar for Adobe, but this PDF of 30 tips in Acrobat has some gems.

• Better conversion of TIFF and PowerPoint files;
• Choosing sheets from Excel files;
• Search PDFs in a directory;
• Optimizing file sizes; and
  
• Comparing documents.

Practically every web service and site worth its salt is offering its information through a newsfeed. With Google Reader or the newsreader of your choice, here are some ways to gather business intelligence on industries, clients, and competitors.

Subscribe to feeds from company web sites. You can get press release and investor information from the likes of Pfizer. Apple has a number of feeds available. Still some old economy companies like Ford don’t have any feeds, but consumer products giant Johnson & Johnson is on the bandwagon.

Create feeds from Google News searches. Keyword search and create a newsfeed from the results. Search for the term “consumer recall” and Google News creates a feed that will update every time a news story matches the query. It works just like the “Google Alerts” feature, but without adding to all the junk in your e-mail inbox.

Even “old media” has jumped on the newsfeed bandwagon. The “Old Gray Lady” herself, the New York Times, has many RSS feeds available. In the left coast, the Los Angeles Times has scores of feeds. Local media can provide intel on local markets. (See Washingtonpost.com and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune).

What others around the Net are bookmarking. Social bookmarking site Del.icio.us can provide newsfeeds based on tags of sites its users bookmark. For instance, you can grab the feeds for “biotechnolgy” and see what people want to save to read for later, share with their friends or keep for reference.

The Job Market: Great intel can be found in whose hiring. Craigslist has feeds for Job postings by title and lets you focus on regional markets. Job listings in the classifieds of newspapers are also available as newsfeeds. Nationally, Monster.com has RSS feeds for job titles and categories, and some regions.

Blogs about clients and industries: Practically every blog comes with a newsfeed these days. And some of the best news comes out of industry blogs like Techcrunch, that leads the way in reporting on Silicon Valley. Google’s Blog Search lets you create feeds based on keyword searches just like Google News. Technorati lets you set up feeds for tags and keyword searches.

Have any more? Let us know!

We have updated our separate newsfeed of IT news for law and professional services firms filtered by the experts at SAGE. You can also view it online here (Thanks to the wonder that is Google Reader).

We read a ton of newsfeeds to stay updated on the constantly changing information technology field, and we comment in this blog on just a small fraction of what we read. There are a number of stories that just don’t make the cut for the blog, but are newsworthy nonetheless for IT pros and Administrators in law and professional services firms. Those stories are available through the feed, and you don’t have to wade through all the stories we do in a given day.

Some stories appearing just today in the feed include:

• Smarter Ways to Work With PDFs
• Spam Filter Causes Lawyer to Miss Court Date
• Court Ruling Could Have Major Impact on E-Discovery
• Microsoft eyes new ways to sell Office

How many times have you heard about the next great collaboration technology? We have done it before in touting out MindPort collaboration application for documents. But wikis are getting hard to ignore since they make so much sense for business. Why? They overcome the “inbox” problem. E-mail communication is great, but having multiple copies distributed throughout a dozen people’s inboxes is inefficient to say the least when those e-mails need to be referenced at a later date. A wiki provides a single, highly accessible place to coordinate activities and share information.

For the uninitiated, the Common Craft blog has a great video (a bit “campy” though) that explains what a wiki is and how it works. Applications we are seeing clients (and ourselves) implement are knowledge bases, client information, operations manuals, and project planning. There are a number of legal specific wikis covering circuit courts, tax law, IP and more. And in case you haven’t already made the connection, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one big wiki.

There are some challenges, mostly changing the culture of writing on the wiki rather than an e-mail. Getting the right wiki software and ensuring that it is widely accessible but also secure requires some thought.

Adobe’s “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” blog announced that they will be conducting a webinar on May 24 on document security that may be worthwhile. They will cover discerning whether PDFs have been tampered with, revoking PDFs and other security features. Many of the basics like restricting printing and copying will be covered as well. Registration is through Adobe’s web site.

Surprise, Microsoft if pushing integration among its products!  The latest kick is “business intelligence” the idea that databases serve data and content throughout an organization through Intranets, web sites, documents, and mobile devices. Microsoft’s take: publish everything through Excel spreadsheets, because the average Joe knows that if they don’t know SQL server. Otherwise, it is the common refrain from Microsoft that the combination of SQL Server, SharePoint 2007, and Office 2007 will send your users into blissful states of productivity and profits to stratospheric levels. But this time the dream includes a new application PerformancePoint Server 2007 that will provide dashboards, scorecarding, and other analytic tools.

Next SQL Server Goes Unstructured (sorta) . MS also announced the next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Katmai” will allow data integration with Office apps, allow unstructured data, and be released next year. (Bets are now being taken in Vegas whether it will be late). Unstructured data includes documents, XML, and geographic data.

Here's another helpful tip from the great folks at our OnSight Support Center. You need to search a bunch of documents a client sent you. You figure it will be a breeze because they are sending PDFs probably generated from the original electronic documents. When you open them, they are not text based PDFs at all but images! Now the unceremonious task of running OCR, spell check, and clean-up awaits you.

The new Standard and Pro versions of Acrobat 8 make that workflow a little less tedious. Acrobat has had the ability to OCR documents for some time, (once referred to as “Paper Capture” but now the more-straight-forward-if-less-elegant-sounding “OCR Text Recognition”), but it has boosted the exporting capability to Word, text, XML, HTML and image formats. Best yet, you can batch process selected files or a folder of documents using "Tools>Document Processing>Batch Processing." That just leaves the inevitable spell check and touch-up of the OCR results.

This provides a valuable stop gap when clients provide sets of PDFs that need to be full-text searchable, but are not so large as to warrant sending out to an EDD or similar vendor for processing.

Remember in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s character was told to get into plastics?  Today, we’re telling you “Newsfeeds” are where you want to be.

Need intelligence for clients? The scoop on competitors, or information by industry? Soon, newsfeeds will be the focus of any organization’s business intelligence and operations, providing unprecedented access and control over information. Once there was the photocopied news clippings distributed throughout the company, supplanted by e-mail subscriptions to a number of web sites and Google News Search. Now newsfeeds--XML files broadcasting the latest news, developments, or information straight to Google Reader or a similar newsreader--will be the channel through which business intelligence comes into your firm.

Soon every website, blog, and search engine will have a newsfeed. Most already have at least one (we have two and growing). Want to know what the client is up to? Subscribe to their newsfeed of press releases and news stories. What about the competition? Create a custom search on Google News or Technorati and get a newsfeed on any stories about your competitors. What are co-workers bookmarking on the Web? The newsfeed from the firm’s Del.ic.ious account will let you know. Want to be informed of updates to the client matter folder or extranet? A newsfeed could keep you informed.

Newsfeeds promise your organization access to vast amounts of information that can be funneled to departments, practice groups, and even individuals. What newsfeeds deliver is also the promise of targeted personalized information that have been the Holy Grail of Intranets and portals since their inception, but be far easier to manage. Stay tuned for more about this exciting technology.

We are thrilled to announce that for 2007 we are sponsoring ALISM, the Association of Legal Information Systems Managers. This deepens our support for the IT and legal community in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, as we already sponsor ILTA and the ALA Capital Chapter, as well as our membership in the LFVA. We are fully behind ALISM's mission to facilitate learning and communication among its members.

We'll be attending ALISM's meeting this Wednesday, January 24, 2007.  Also look for SAGE experts at ALISM meetings throughout the year.

In ALISM's own words:

ALISM facilitates the exchange of information regarding the technical and management problems peculiar to the legal automation environment, and to improve the standards and qualifications of information systems managers and their staffs. ALISM provides an environment where members share their experience with other members of the legal IS community and learn about new technology trends. ALISM members learn what other firms are doing, how other departments are run and networking with colleagues.

We are glad to be on-board and look forward to a great year with ALISM.

If the Apple iPhone’s innovative “multi-touch” interface stands up in real world use, it may usher in the shift in computing from desktops to handhelds. Laptops are already poised to overtake desktops the business world in the next few years, and sales have surged for smartphones like the Blackberry and Treo. The iPhone promises to overcome the last hurdle to widespread adoption of handhelds for most computing tasks: the interface.

We’ve discussed handheld devices and the supporting “information cloud” of data, information, and reference material that Blackberries/Treos make possible. Even laptops cannot compete with the mobility afforded by fitting snugly into a pocket. High speed cell networks and Wi-Fi have solved the bandwidth bottleneck, so the last hurdle to accessing the information in the cloud on a handheld was the interface: the stylus, small keyboard, and small, low-resolution screen. According to one tech pundit:

“[Apple CEO] Jobs is breaking the tyranny of the keyboard and trying to break the tyranny of the cursor as well. We've been able to get computers into our pockets for a very long time, but the issue has always been, 'what do you do with it?' You don't have a keyboard, you don't have a stylus and your thumbs are too big to type. This is the first serious attempt to break the tyranny of input. Until now, everybody's always focused on output -- is the screen big enough or sharp enough -- and the screens are high-resolution and bright. We've conquered that. Now the limiting factor is input.”

Simple input, fully capable high-speed web browsing, and reading documents on a widescreen display are all major advances in handheld computing. So whether you think the iPhone is the real-deal or over-hyped, if you or your employees want to be unchained from the desk, you should be rooting for the iPhone to succeed.

This post over at Legal Blog Watch talks about some reasons why lawyers and law firms don’t collaborate to the extent that Corporate America does. Citing culture, training, and nature of the work, the authors suggest the command-and-control structure of firms discourages intra-firm collaboration. We would add the conservativeness of the legal community toward new technology.

We don’t see law firms as the dinosaurs the post suggests. Law firms are slowly adopting extranets like MindPort for collaborating with clients, co-counsel, and experts. But if the deck is stacked against lawyers themselves, collaboration should be widely encouraged for other firm employees like paralegals, practice support staff, and other professionals and support personnel. As we have mentioned on the blog before, sharing knowledge and information is vital to productivity and work quality. Demolishing silos where information and expertise is locked up in practice areas or functional groups should be a top priority for any law firm administrator and management.

While many firms have been down the Intranet route (often poorly), extranets that are so successful externally can be applied to many projects and situations internally. New ideas in collaboration such as Wikis, social bookmarking, RSS, and more are coming to the forefront that are often inexpensive and easier to implement.

The Thanksgiving Holiday brings out the Charlie Brown holiday specials, and “Pig Pen” makes his annual cameo in the cartoons. Pig Pen has the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes, but what if that cloud was information, instead?

Look no further than someone carrying a Blackberry or Treo and see a whole new generation of high-tech Pig Pens followed by a cloud of e-mails, contacts, documents and more. The new mobile workforce is no longer restricted by their own memory or brain power since they have access to tremendous information resources at the push of a button. Handheld computing and wireless technologies have untethered knowledge from bulky reference items like PCs, dictionaries, file cabinets, etc. Now add GPS, RSS feeds and web services like Del.icio.us or Google Notebook, and information is at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone.

For example, Del.icio.us bookmarks can be an RSS feed, subscribed to through Google Reader, that has a mobile version accessible through any smartphone’s web browser. On the other hand, one SAGE employee visited a museum over the weekend where he ran into a person using his smartphone’s camera to photograph the plaque so they “could read them later.” With cameras on cell phone’s reaching 3 megapixels, each cell phone becomes a handheld scanner.

The challenge to IT in facilitating making all our workers like Pig Pen is thinking beyond secure VPN and Citrix, but how to use RSS and services to not only feed information, but also store and share with co-workers from practically anywhere.

Earlier this month, we posted on how to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to capture the collective intelligence of your employees and turn them into news feeds for everyone to see. Today we will discuss how you to use social bookmarking to put your firm, organization, or department at the heart of your network of clients, colleagues, or employees.

Sharing bookmarks through del.icio.us provides an easy and low-cost way to keep up a constant stream of valuable information. Some examples are:

• Keep employees aware of tips,tricks, tutorials, workarounds, or reference materials.
• Stay in constant contact with clients by feeding them important developments or identify opportunities and potential hazards.
• Attract prospects and establish your expertise with them.

Since del.icio.us creates newsfeeds (RSS feeds), everyone in your network stays current without the need for update e-mails that might be ignored or trapped in spam filters.

Social bookmarking also allows you to tap the collective wisdom of your network. With del.icio.us, you can invite each member in the group or other colleagues to share their bookmarks with you. Be sure to edit those bookmarks so they fit your purpose or theme. Everyone benefits from having more eyes keeping watch, and more brains thinking of useful and thought-provoking content.

As the fountainhead, you will become firmly established as the hub of your network, and will become indispensable to your clients, employees, and colleagues.

The hype-o-meter is twitching recently over porting common desktop apps like word processing and spreadsheets onto the web. EWeek and others have been declaring that web-based applications are coming of age. Google appears to be taking up the standard, leading a host of smaller developers in pushing the envelope of online applications. In fact, I am writing the first draft of this post on Google's "Docs & Spreadsheets ."

So should law and professional services firms head online for word processing?

Not quite yet. But for e-mail, many firms are already using Outlook Web Access (OWA), a web-based application. In fact, e-mail went web way back with Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail. Web-based apps tend to be more focused and have less features, largely because of the technical hurdles they face being online. Inline spell checking, drag and drop, and tracking changes are there, but forget mail-merging, if you care. This simplicity has won many adherents frustrated by how complicated desktop word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications have become. Online apps play to their strength--collaboration--where anyone with a web browser and the right privileges can edit, update, or otherwise provide feedback on a document. That same opennes, however, should scare the briefs off of any lawyer worth her salt.

But the road ahead holds a lot of promise. We envision a hyrbid scenario where apps reside on a firm's intranet, rather than the big-bad World Wide Web. Some of the advantages of online apps include:

• Easier deployment and seamless upgrades.
• Less expensive equipment on the desktop.
  
• Simpler licensing.
• Less configuration for managed environments.
• Built-in DMS: the documents are natively on the network rather than a local drive.
• RSS integration for new documents, updates, and document revisions.
  
• Microformats to reuse chunks of information rather than whole documents.

Under such an environment, the servers and connection speeds become critical. What is interesting, if web-based applications take off, it will mean that the pendulum will  have swung back toward a variant of the mainframe/terminal model of old.

Sharing bookmarked web sites within an organization can be tremendously valuable because it unleashes the collective wisdom of its people. Each person probably has a few gem web sites or pages that others would find very useful. Unfortunately, those gems are locked up in each person’s web browser.

Using the web service Del.icio.us, however, those bookmarks are freed from the browser and can be shared quickly and easily across the firm. Those shared bookmarks are then turned into RSS feeds that can be easily distributed.

Here’s an example. An employee finds a news article on a web page that discusses developments in your market. Using the Del.ico.us extension for either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, she bookmarks the page by clicking on a button. Up pops a dialogue box where the employee adds tags and summary information about the bookmark, and also adds it to the company’s master Del.icio.us account. Over the course of the day, 12 new bookmarks are added by various employees to the master account.

Employees (or even clients) can stay abreast of these new bookmarks through the RSS feed coming Del.icio.us, either in their newsreader, the firm’s intranet, portal or website, or to an extranet like MindPort. Even better, each tag within an account has its own RSS feed, so employees can focus on specific issues, news or client information. For instance, they can subscribe to the feed on a particular competitor to monitor its moves in the market.

This is win-win for everyone. The employee benefits because bookmarks are available wherever there is Internet access—from the office, home, or on the road. Sites and pages that they may have overlooked were spotted by someone else’s eagle eyes. Because sharing bookmarks are so simple, the organization benefits because all its employees scour the web on a wide variety of topics. Tags are a flexible organizational tool compared to folders, and can provide very targeted information.

In upcoming posts, we will explore other novel uses of RSS, such as re-mixing RSS feeds and using them to share with your communities of employees, clients, and potential clients.