Choose law affirmatively

Listening now to a webinar by Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle and Susan Cartier Leibel of Solo Practice University on “going solo.”

As someone who went solo in the practice of law back in 1994, then decided that legal tech was FAR more interesting, I like their perspectives.

I’ve been watching the growth of their blogs and reading them for quite some time, and I think they’ve both hit upon a communication style and have the reach to make them worth bookmarking.

OK, what I mean is that there are blogs that are worth bookmarking, and others which you can always find through blogrolls. Bloggers run in crews, so one gateway to the crew of Elefant and Leibel really only requires one bookmark.

My suggestion is that before you bookmark (or, even better add a blog to your Morning Coffee [hmmm name changed!]), you take some time to check out the blogroll. See if another blog in their crew speaks to your issues. if so, book mark that one.

For example, I separate them into these groups because if a blogger has bookmarked something, why should I? So, I often read blogs of Kevin O’Keefe’s clients, I bookmark at source, because I can always find his clients from there.

That and LinkedIn.

OK, so one comment that really made me want to blog is the perspective that people who go solo MUST have the proper outlook on their venture.

You’re not doing it because they’re something wrong with you. You’re not doing it as a placeholder until you can get a “real job.” You’re doing it because it suits you, you’re excited about it and you want to provide great service to clients in a new way.

Right now, they’re talking about not needing a year’s savings to do it. That’s funny. Other than the independently wealthy, and certainly in my case, a few month’s savings was more like it.

A law practice doesn’t require a year’s savings, it requires a client.

The one caveat, however, is that were I straight out of law school, I would NOT suggest opening up a firm. Why? Because there are plenty of older people out there who need your help and who can give you guidance. Confederate with an older lawyer and your practice will move along much faster.

I won’t recap the entire webinar, except to say that legal technology has indeed changed everything. This is the truth behind my early criticism of the argument that legal technology would allow BigLaw to obliterate small firm practitioners.

It kinda goes against the grain to recommend this, but in this case, I think a commercial “university” might be worth doing.

So, here’s the link: http://solopracticeuniversity. com

If you’re interested in solo practice, go listen to their webinar.

And then, read Carla Harris’ book and apply what she’s telling you.

The new Sedona publication

I will have a detailed and reasoned critique of The Sedona Conference® Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process out as soon as possible.

I think this is pretty important stuff, so I want to take the time to do it properly.

Until then, read the work done by Tobias Mayer.

It will give you a VERY good idea of why the Sedona piece doesn’t work for me and why it’s pointing decision-makers in the wrong direction for all the right reasons.

Thanks to Ralph Losey for flagging it! I might not have read it for awhile had it not been featured on his blog with all those pictures of people I do NOT want to emulate!

Sedona Webinar

Well, we’re not allowed to blog about what happened “in the desert,” but here’s a webinar that will break some of it down for you!

Finally, someone talking about doing something OTHER than tagging (I hope)!

This webinar will introduce a new Commentary from The Sedona Conference® Working Group on Electronic Document Retention & Production (WG1), “Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process,” which discusses the need for greater use of project management, sampling, and other forms of metrics and measures aimed at improving the quality of ediscovery. Our expert panel will be moderated by Kenneth J. Withers (Director of Judicial Education, The Sedona Conference®) and will include members of the Commentary’s drafting team: Jason Baron (Director of Litigation, National Archives and Records Administration), Maura Grossman (Counsel, Wachtell, Lipton Rosen & Katz), and Joseph Looby (Senior Managing DIrector, FTI Consulting, Inc.).

Alternatives to the traditional model and the creative use of project management are what we’re working on in my little shop, so enjoy this presentation. Here’s the link!

Cataphora…Yummy! Part I

I’m in love with H5 and not just because of their killer website and name that has more cowbell than I can handle, but I also am having special moments with Cataphora.

In the run up to the Sedona Conference, I’m taking another look at legal tech from the perspective of what lawyers really need and I’m pretty sure that the teeny weeny email application I’m writing (prototype due out at the end of the summer) is on the right track.

That being said, Cataphora really does have the right approach and are FIXING IT! “It” being the way search and retrieval of meaningful content is and ought to be done.

So, understand their mission, if you choose to accept it (and you should):

Defining principle

Cataphora’s success and very existence are based upon one defining principle. This arose from a conceptual breakthrough that was simply stated, yet proved to be radical in its practical effects. This idea was that, in order to truly understand a document, you have to know about the circumstances in which it arose. In other words, you have to understand its context.

The negative

Ok, they’re a bit … oh, I don’t know whiny and snarky,

Trustworthiness is a core value in the legal marketplace and at Cataphora. We strongly recommend examining all vendor claims carefully. One way to do that is by looking at how their website used to look. The Wayback Machine makes that easy – just go here and enter the URL for the vendor in which you are interested.

I mean, really! Who CARES what a website looked like in the Wayback Machine?! Is this really part of the E-DISCOVERY dog/pony show to which unsuspecting clients are subjected? Didn’t think so.

If that’s the standard, then most legal tech projects would be doomed, because when some of us were using computers in litigation, some others of us were still in high school counting spots. And, of course, some others of us were practicing law and making googobs of money (ahem!). Besides, an appearance on the Brewster Kahle show is not really an indicator of algorithmic quality. It just means you’re lucky, really smart or have your own private Tardis.

OK, so I don’t think Cataphora folks are lucky. I think they’re really, really smart. Buuuut, it’s not exactly rocket science. Maybe it was 10 years ago, but not any more. Ever looked at Digg Labs?

Two Patents? Hmmm. Gotta think about that one.

I’ve read both, but now I’d better look at the pictures, because this is one area where I’m pretty sure there’s so much out there now that these patents may not hold much water. Not a huge fan of business method patents anyway, but when they involve stuff that seems to be open-sourced to the hilt, it gives me pause.

I could be so incredibly wrong, so I’ll take another look, but at first blush, what they write about on the site seems right out of Collective Intelligence, a book I keep next to the bedside, cuz I’m that much of a dork.

Back to the Positive

But, Elizabeth Charnock, the founder of Cataphora is a much bigger dork, said with all sorts of love, so I think worship might still be in order.

Plus, she’s a girl, and that makes her AWESOME! And, a little scary.

I love Cataphora because….

they “get” the wisdom of letting computers do what they do best. And, computers don’t really care whether you have 1 or 2 terabytes. Which means that you can leave your data unculled, and the computer will keep chugging along.

Not only that, but once the data has been marked as “non-responsive,” it can still be used for all sorts of things. Like weighting. And, making your useful dataset searching smarter. Wanna know how? I bet you do!

Call me! No, really: call me.

So, let’s get real: [ bold statement ] there’s absolutely NO real reason to cull ESI ! [ /bold statement ]

I found this really HYSTERICAL presentation the other day entitled The Real Cost of Privilege Review ( and here) and all it did was make me think of lollipops. Read it and weep.

I want to know who out there is wasting soooo much money…so I can sign them up as clients, because this sort of process is so yesterday, even your 10-yr old could probably re-engineer it to get better and more cost-effective results. I mean, hasn’t anyone ever played pick up sticks???

So, why am I adamant that people stop culling? Because it’s like trying to speak French without any understanding of grammar.

To be more precise, I’m advocating that lawyers stop culling at the first tier, as if their lives depended upon a massive reduction in terabytes. I’m suggesting that culling ought to be done by the computer, and that valuable metadata (in a really, really board sense) ought to be retained until the end of the project. I’m intimating that the document corpus is a body and it’s integrity depends upon the entirety of its members.

In other words, in Cataphora-lingo:

Cataphora is the first and only provider to develop deep analytics (not mere data statistics or simple email widgets) that give insight into the facts expressed by the ESI dataset. True analytics can (among many other things) detect individual and organizational “heartbeats” and de facto organizational substructures, evaluate typical versus anomalous behavior, assess consistency and variation in an organization’s processes, and detect patterns of data deletion.

If you’ve got lawyers doing the culling and searching, here’s yer sign: you’re going about it the wrong way. It’s like taking a hachet to an old growth forest of oak with no appreciation for the vital role played by acorns.

I say, hire yourself a legally-trained person who knows about taxonomies and understands the difference between DATA, INFORMATION and ARGUMENT.

Lawyers, do not. Not unless they’ve taken “Data 101.” They usually work bass ackwards and try to squeeze everything into theory, instead of first trying to understand what they’ve got.

This is where Cataphora’s mission is key: understand the forest before you start cutting trees.

Thus, sayeth the Mighty Snarker, thereby ending-eth the lesson!

Law school…a place for depressives?

I’ve stopped asking myself how I end up on the pages I do, but this was an interesting blurb:

4. Law school is a factory for depressives.

It used to be that if you had a law degree it was a ticket to a high salary and a safe career. Today many people go to law school and cannot find a job. This is, in a large part, because law school selects for people who are good with details and pass tests and law firms select for people who are good at marketing themselves and can drum up business. Law firms are in a transition phase, and they have many unfair labor practices leftover from older generations, for example, hourly billing and making young lawyers pay dues for what is, today, a largely uncertain future. Which might explain why the American Bar Association reports that the majority of lawyers would recommend that people not to go into law.

The speaker is a young grad student someone put out by the dim prospects for life as an adult in the working world. She lays out the worst case scenario of graduate school and one has to agree that her perspective is probably more accurate than someone who has been out 20 years or more.

Still, I can’t help but believe that what’s missing in her perspective in an understanding about the tools law school gives the lawyer. it’s not just a matter of being chosen for a top law firm and working at the local human society.

Think of the opportunities for growth lawyers would have if they were required to take at least one business course (not from lawyers, but from experienced business people) as well as a sociology course (again, from experienced professionals)? Imagine if there was preparation for a career in the medico-legal field that did not require a dual degree?

Young lawyers deserve a greater sense of reality than they currently receive. At present, the profession fails to take to hear the fact that there is a breadth to the practice of law that can hold a lot more people. Were law schools to step up to the plate and stop the chrade of superiority and ranking, they might just start to train people accordingly.

Until then, I encourage law students to ask people outside of academia about all the cool stuff you can do with legal training in your background!

Just don’t bet the farm on it.

The State of Document Review

No, it’s not a Second Life island.

It’s doc review and it’s being held under the microscope this past week.

Disclaimer

I do doc reviews. I like doc reviews.

And, yes, I’ve practiced law,–corporate, criminal, legal services, international, state, federal, appellate…blah, blah, blah! And that, more than any other reason, is why doc review is just fine by me.

And, yes, like many others, I do doc reviews because I have an ulterior motive. Eh…I want to master the Art of the Doc Review.

• Do I worry about finding a job? Sometimes…but then again, there aren’t that many experienced Japanese business fluent U.S.-licensed attorneys willing to do document reviews. So, eh, I feel pretty OK with my little contribution to international dispute resolution.
• Do I particularly care about who will win the case ? Nope. Not my job.
• Do I stay up late at night worrying about my metrics? Nope! If they tell me to slow down or change the way I code, I will.
• Do I miss making lots of money? Duh! But, there are other things in life and getting paid to dork out on doc review software while moving the mouse now and then sure beats *working* for a living!

No…I’m one of those oddballs who does the Time Warp inside my head every time a new Japanese Document Review listing hits Craig’s List…more on that later.

State of Document Review

Ok, so what is the State of Document Review?

First, I would say that in terms of hiring lawyers to do the work…that’s almost near the end. But, there’s a shift that will happen that will save a few…more on this later.

Between technology and outsourcing, American lawyers will soon be completely ghettoized to the point where it makes no sense to continue to pay bar dues.

The question is whether the firms will continue to support the downward spiral in document review wages…and whether attorneys will continue to accept them after the markets pick up and clients get litigation happy feet once again.

If the ABA and other organizations step in with a stimulus package (”Document Review is The Practice Of Law”), that will slow the hemorrhage, but that’s about it. New lawyers already have nowhere to go and they’re not, therefore, as able to stay competitive when the rent man comes calling.

The professionalization of document review, in my mind, therefore, is a good thing. But, only if the rates go back up.

Oh sure, we’ll always have small firms that can take on the big firms when they need taking on, but like that partner from Heller said recently,

“For less than $100 a month, we have all the capability we had at Heller,” Kim said. “For a small, three-person shop to have the big-firm capabilities that five to six years ago you could only get at a huge shop is a cool thing.“

What worries me is that there are so many people out of work now…what are they going ot do in the short term when teh rainmaking was down to partners like Kim adn they never got the chance to build their own client base?

Second, my prediction is that law as we know it in America is going to be re-imagined in a major way. It has already started with Obama’s transparency program. There’s nothing the big firms, solo practitioners or the ABA can do about it, because contrary to popular opinion, law is NOT rocket science. In fact, there’s very little science involved: it’s mostly method. And, computers are very, very good at methods.

Which brings me to my final point for now…

Third, it’s the technology, stupid! There are some VERY cool companies and products out there that are making legal tasks magnificently easy. There’s cutting edge work being done in document review, which will have a trickle sideways effect on the rest of legal practice. Just you wait and see!!

Have you read Serge and Brin’s thesis “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“?

I HAVE! And, it’s still effin’ brilliant, because it has given people permission to conceptualize data-related tasks, sort of like one of those massive firecrackers on July 4th that keeps going and going until the next one and you never get a break in the action, so you’re never sure where one ends and another begins.

[ Oh geeze. Do NOT google firecracker images. Just don't. ]

Throw in a few lines of Bekkerman and the implications are not even 1/2 fulfilled, as far as law is concerned. So, colleagues of mine: hold onto your hats!

Companies with CRAP interfaces better hold onto their lunches, though, because companies like H5 and Mimosa are taking things to the next level.

These companies truly rock. Why? Because the stuff they’re doing is me + $10 million dollars. What’s not to like?!

Richard Susskind’s New Book

Richard Susskind’s new book “The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services” is making the rounds, and it’s a must read.

I wrote all sorts of notes on his last ones, which I’ll upload when I get the chance since at least one volume is over there on the shelf, but chances are, the foreward on the new book will have something like “Oh, well, Yes, I *did* write a book on legal technology several years ago…but this is the book you should now read.” So, why not start there and I’ll drag up the other stuff later.

To be honest, on the whole, I thought his original model was…er…eh…not all that brilliant. I actually said so in a presentation I gave to the PHP Works! conference in Toronto and got away with it, because PHP5 was much more exciting than legal software.

In other words, the programmers there didn’t give a sh*t about legal software as a service (as it is now called) even though I jumped up and down and said how cool legal tech could be delivered over the Internet…I think some of them were just happy to see a girl who wasn’t there just for lunch [sigh].

It was a good presentation…not it wasn’t…but it wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen. Anyway, no sense being embarrassed: I’ll try to find at least the PDF of the slides and post it. I think I sent it to M. Susskind way back then, so I might as well stand by it!

Maybe Susskind’s work was seminal,–but then again, lots of things are seminal. That doesn’t make them right. I guess the main problem I had was that it was what I’d call “top down analysis.” I’m pretty sure I also thought the economics was off, because in my experience, the differentiator for big firms was not the technology (rapidly being brought to the average attrney), but the ability to marc=shall resources to GET THINGS DONE by throwing bodies and consolidating influence.

But, who am I? Nobody. So, get the book and judge for yourself! Oh, and read the review by the Adam Smith, Esq. Blog for an idea of what you’re getting into.

Then, come on back and argue with me!

Not much use to those of us in the trenches envisioning the tools that lawyers could use. See, the problem with any book about legal technology is that it’s old before it makes it to the bookshelves.

And, in the early 2000s, it would have been old before the final edit, because things on the ground were moving at the speed of a Yahoo yodel.

So, I’ve two books to read somehow in the next few months (hopefully I’ll get a BRIEF…a few weeks is all I want… breather between projects).

Then, we can have a nice chat about the “State of Document Review.”

TRECing along

Found an incredible site today, the H5 site.

It’s a lot easier doing this when you have 30 industrial-strength brains to my 1 eco-friendly noggin, but OK, I’ve never been put off by a [ huge freakin' ] challenge.

[sigh]

Anyway, through their site, I found the site I’d been looking for, which talks about information retrieval from large data sets. Thank goodness I was particularly curious today, or I’d have NEVER found it! …Well, I would have, but given that I’ve been looking nearly a year, that says something about either it or me.

What was I looking for? Well, it’s the TREC site. Looking for it too? Well, here ya go!

The Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) workshop series encourages research in information retrieval and related applications by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. Now in its eighteenth year, the conference has become the major experimental effort in the field. Participants in the previous TREC conferences have examined a wide variety of retrieval techniques and retrieval environments, including cross-language retrieval, retrieval of web documents, multimedia retrieval, and question answering. Details about TREC can be found at the TREC web site, http://trec.nist.gov.

You are invited to participate in TREC 2009. TREC 2009 will consist of a set of tasks known as “tracks”. Each track focuses on a particular subproblem or variant of the retrieval task as described below. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the tracks. Training and test materials are available from NIST for some tracks; other tracks will use special collections that are available from other organizations for a fee.

Might be a way to get invited to Sedona…can I get a proposal together for the Legal Track in like 4 days? Hmmmmmm…

Got 42 billion legal documents?

I didn’t think so.

So, I totally agree that we can do away with the Bates system for identifying unique documents in litigation and move towards hashing them instead.

Here’s why:

Question: you’re ITM and you’ve been sued 1,000 times. Probably not an exaggeration.

How often did you get a discovery request for your organizational chart? Probably about 500 times.

Which means that upwards of 500 cases, 5 people on YOUR side [ 2 lawyers, 1 paralegal and 2 document reviewers ] touched that document, meaning 2500 external touches for one document. Even at $ 1.00 per touch (HA!) that’s $500.00 per document over it’s litigation life.

Add in the internal touches, court touches and appellate level touches and I sure hope it was full of pretty colors, because if you’re ITM and you LOST that lawsuit, you’ve just paid double.

This is a technical problem, not a legal one, although the impact upon the legal/litigation community could be severe. What this means is that software developers MUST figure out a better way. Because we can.

This is a great playground to be in, –especially given the economy…

So, in looking at TinyUrl, I wondered why they only used 6 slots for their hash.

For purposes of the guess, a “close enough” estimate of how the algorithm works would be to look at the possible items that go in each slot [a-z] and [0-9] and see how many variations were available, mathematically speaking.

How a hash is generated isn’t important, because there are several well-defined ways of doing so. The only thing that really matters is that the generator interface check that a hash has not already been used and generate another one in the teeny number of exceptions when a double is created.

The math of it is fairly simple, so I’ll spare you the link clicking to Chemical-Ecology and simply give it to you:

a to z is 26 letters plus 10 digits for a total of 36 items in each slot. There are 6 slots, so the formula for this is

36P6 = 36! / (36-6) = 1,402,410,240

Then, I wondered how the total would change if I got greedy and added oooone more slot.

The formula becomes:

36P7 = 36!/(36-7) = 42,072,307,200

That is a LOT of documents. Which means that IBM might be able to fill the bucket, but very few other companies will. In fact, the Forbes top 200 might want their own buckets, which would STILL be better than the current Bates system

[ mathematical corrections are always welcome! ]

Now, according to my Outlook text files, they send the potential variations through the rook with a text version format of [ 76193731-000000DGC.eml ]

Soooo, if we then ask how likely it is that the courts will be deluged with documents on the order of 42 BILLION, then I think it’s safe to say that it makes sense to pile all documents into one bucket and assign them unique litigation numbers rather than have each party Bates stamp their own.

The potential ROI for companies that are repeatedly sued (Forbes top 1000?) is impressive. Can you imagine how much money clients would save, if 90% of discovery documents were found to have already been assigned a number??

It’s a simple matter to ensure that the numbers are truly unique, so the next step would be to tag them appropriately. In fact, companies could keep repositories forever and provide an API to specific discovery requests, rather than actually delivering discovery.

Something to think about in these days of cloud computing!

Multilingual Ontologies

Something to think about, that goes beyond the issue of multi-byte data ( a problem that can be solved ).

Law is a process of communication that reflects and re-inforces what is and is not “OK.” Even though we have only a few major systems of law (Anglo-American, Civil, tribal, communist, etc), the complexity of law is why “lawyer” can stand as it’s own as a profession. As lawyers, we interpret the interpretations of culture, thereby recreating culture in an infinite loop.

So, as we think about the relationship between law and the semantic web, we see just how hard it is to develop cross-cultural ontologies. It’s hard, because defining what a group is, is one of the functions of “culture,”–that is, it’s one of the things that separates cultures.

One aspect of the Obama Administration that I most look forward to, is the manner in which Obama has that conversation with the nation, and the way in which a broader ontological approach to policy and international relationships takes hold.

In fact, both Michelle Obama and Barack Obama come from the legal elite, which means that the conversation will show a balance of the populism which characterized his communication throughout the campaign, as well as the “pragmatism,”–a form of foundational conservatism.

Finding a way to reconcile tomatoes and tomah-toes is what this article is aboot/about:development of multilingual ontologies “New Method For Building Multilingual Ontologies That Can Be Applied To The Semantic Web.”

Definitely worth a read, as is this blog by David Provost:

Solutions like Nstein’s and others can help to reduce the expense of human tagging or even introduce tagging where there’s been no human available to perform this task. Utlimately, costs can only be reduced to zero and businesses rely on revenues and profits for success. Nstein is cognizant of this fact and tries to point its customers in the right direction – for example, once a publisher’s content has been tagged it can be tailored to produce a feed based on a person, place, or thing. For some publishers this can represent a new and very welcome revenue stream. Another example is a common trait of NLP technology, which is the publication of additional content links that are related to the primary article on a given page. Again, some publishers will find the resulting performance an improvement over their current state of affairs.

Checklist Mentality

Pilots think using checklists and mechanics don’t. Pilots need perfection, mechanics solve problems creatively.
This marks a fundamental difference in the way they process information and a reason why intercession is often necessary to make sure that the plane gets into the air and stays there until the time it’s supposed to land. And then, of course, it needs to land safely.

Following the theme of different thinking about the law, I wonder if we can also learn from a movement to get doctors to do the same thing:

A new study has found that hospitals could cut surgery complications by about 30 percent and resulting deaths by 40 percent if doctors and nurses follow a checklist of safety rules before, during and after performing surgery.

The checklist, issued by the World Health Organization last year in response to soaring reports of hospital errors, lists 19 steps that surgical teams should follow, starting with making sure that the right patient is on the operating table, the site of incision has been located, and that the proper procedure is about to be performed. “In this era of highly intense and sophisticated technology, sometimes a very simple technology, which only takes a few minutes, can have a very positive impact,” says Richard Reznick, head of surgery at the University of Toronto in Canada and co-author of the study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It’s not going to work to simply give doctors a list of things after which they yell “check!” I would suggest that the doctor calls out the item and the techs around him or her get to answer “check!” This would instill some quality control over doctors who are notoriously imperious in the operating route.

Either that, –or force hospitals to send doctors to semi-annual trainings to ensure that they comply with the established operating procedures…