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.

Do you want to be the hero that saves the day when disaster strikes? Or the person that goes unnoticed but does all the little things to prevent catastrophes from happenings? If you are in IT, you should want to be the latter.

This came up in an internal meeting recently. Our top engineer used this great analogy:

"Who gets more recognition? The fireman who pounds the pavement and gets residents in her neighborhood to install fire detectors and replace batteries in existing ones, or the one that runs into a burning building and pulls out an elderly lady. The fireman who ran into the burning building may be lavished with praise in the local media, but the one who walked the streets and made sure fire detectors were working in the neighborhood probably saved more lives."

In IT, we should never set ourselves up to be heroes. No doubt, disasters will strike. There are far too many factors and unforeseen events for us to control cost-effectively. The focus of our IT skills and knowledge should not be geared toward donning a cape and pulling a "MacGyver" in the face of impending doom.

Our focus should be on monitoring, periodic maintenance, upgrades and refresh schedules. This also includes a crucial interpersonal aspect: counseling management regarding the importance of maintenance, upgrades, and making time available for preventive measures.

So strive for anonymity in IT. You will likely accomplish a lot more.

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.

A friend of ours working in the e-discovery processing business recently received an 18 gigabyte PST that had to be processed. In the e-discovery arena, a first step with electronic data we receive is to search for any PSTs and determine their size. The larger the file, the longer it will take to process for attorney review. In this instance, the immediate problem was that the file could not be copied to the network server. Every attempt failed as the copy process kept timing out.

Our friend went to “The Oracle”, as he likes to call Google, and searched for a software solution. He found a program called GatherBird Copy Large Files. After installing the shareware version, he copied the file without issue. Whew! Today’s technical glitch solved.

We all need to be prepared before we find ourselves in a similar situation. If you know of other products available to the litigation support and e-discovery community capable of copying very large files, please post a comment and share your experiences.

Today brings black clouds for the IT department in the form of a new book by noted IT critic, Nicholas Carr.  Mr. Carr, who made his bones last year with an article contending that corporate IT departments don't provide any strategic advantage, has a new book where he predicts that future IT departments will be operated by one person sitting at a computer issuing commands to outsourced providers via the Internet. Alas, the lonely system administrator gets even less respect and will be the Maytag repairman for this century.

This seems to overlook the fact that software and systems have not evolved to be intuitive and easy to use for the end-user. So who will have the skills to help people with IT, freeing them do whatever it is they do best? As a managed service provider (in other words, outsourced IT provider) we know the value of having great technical staff directly aid our customers whether it is with a question about a word processing program or troubleshooting their messaging system. We provide site visits to facilitate interaction with our customers and build relationships of trust and mutual respect.

Now if that is the evolution of the IT department -- a greater focus on the end-user and better customer service -- we are all for it.

We bring you another obvious but instructive nugget from marketing guru Seth Godin and how it pertains to IT in organizations: make promises and keep them. His context is companies and marketing, but this is just as relevant for how IT should approach its customers within a law or professional services firm. Don't over-promise. When you make promises, follow through on them. If you need to "over"-anything, over-deliver.

IT often complains of a lack of respect from the professionals in the organizations they serve. Here is a sure fire way to get some. Everyone respects the person who delivers on what they promise. They are reliable, trustworthy. That goes for individuals, departments, and consultants. Making overblown claims about the benefits of a new software or equipment that you can't back up is the way to lose respect. Set realistic expectations and then exceed them. Doing so will garner tremendous respect.

The sales numbers have come in from Windows Vista, and they are not good. Despite Microsoft's spin on Vista sales, it is not the blockbuster product it was touted to be, whether in sales or capabilities. That has left many tech and business pundits to ponder why: Was the previous version XP that good that there is no reason to switch? Is Vista that bad? Or is the technology and industry shifting to reduce its relevance?

Here is a question to ponder in the New Year: Is the operating system as important as it once was?  And will it continue to be so in the future?  In fact, it could be argued that operating systems have diminished in the public's psyche while the web browser has ascended. Most people use online e-mail applications like GMail and Yahoo! Mail, while headline grabbing social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace exist only online. Applications once only found on PCs have been migrating to handhelds -- like e-mail. While Apple's iPhone stole the spotlight from Vista in 2007, business people have been e-mailing like crazy on Blackberries while Gen Y is all thumbs sending billions of SMS messages. Then there is the success of Salesforce.com and the many applications hosted over the Internet, whose only interface is the web browser.

There are more reasons why the days of powerful, high profile operating systems may be on the wane. Basic staples of computing like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations going online with Google Docs. If you are part of the 94% of Americans who have no idea what Google Docs is, you may still use Word or Excel remotely via Citrix over the Internet. New virtualization technologies allow that same hardware to run multiple operating systems, and different operating systems simultaneously. (This article was written in Google Docs on a Mac that has a virtual copy of Windows XP running on it.)

So will 2008 mark the decline of the operating system?  We will see.  Share your thoughts in the comments!