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!

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!

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…

Oxo as a Model for Law 3.0

I was thinking today about the prospect for a program that refits the homes of the elderly (while they’re off visiting the grands or something) so that they can be self-sufficient longer.

A very good reason to move to Florida.
But, then I started thinking about Oxo products (which I use and love). Since I think they had a great, simple idea, I decided to look at their mission statement, as a way to take a working-break from devising the mission statements for my own projects. This is what I learned:

OXO is based on the concept of Universal Design. But what is Universal Design and how does it benefit users? In simplest terms, Universal Design means the design of products usable by as many people as possible. In the case of OXO, it means designing products for young and old, male and female, left- and right- handed and many with special needs.

“Universal Design“? Cool. This phrase deftly encapsulates my dreams of master-minding a revolution from the perspective of legal technological innovation. Wish I had thought of it myself. Here’s one articulation of the Principles of universal design:

PRINCIPLE ONE: Equitable Use

PRINCIPLE TWO: Flexibility in Use

PRINCIPLE THREE: Simple and Intuitive Use

PRINCIPLE FOUR: Perceptible Information

PRINCIPLE FIVE: Tolerance for Error

PRINCIPLE SIX: Low Physical Effort

PRINCIPLE SEVEN: Size and Space for Approach and Use

BWAAAHHHAHHHAAA~!

Here’s what one path looks like:

Step One: learn something about the law. Check!
Step Two: impatience with the inanity of legal practice becomes intolerable. Check!
Step Three: understand that my highest use is NOT chasing clients. Check!
Step Four: Battle with middle-class demons for 15 years. Check!
Step Five: Say, what the hell! I gotta be meeeeee! Check.

So, when Ron Gruner asks, as he did in his White paper, “What’s Holding You back?” I can sum up the answer in 4 words: A Team To Execute

That’s all and that’s it.

Now, in solving that problem there is a major dependency, called “money.” But, money is not the first consideration when it comes to “getting stuff done.” The Amish don’t need money to build barns, they need people.

The dirty little secret of capitalism is that there are a LOT of people who are not money-motivated. Most of them work long hours for other people. They’re not motivated by money,–they’re motivated by the things money can buy, their own limitations and their fears.

People aho are not money motivated are usually people with experience having lots of it. They know money doesn’t buy happiness and having “enough” money is relative to one’s perceived needs. That’s one of the lessons that allows our veterans to survive on the street,–the military taught them that survival isn’t about money, it’s about resourcefulness.

One thing I know is that there is a deep pool of people who have passion and who would gladly trade a Lamborghini and 100-hour work weeks for a satisfying 60-hour work week (let’s be realistic). Those are the people I need to find.

I find them, then I find someone with money to pay them to execute the visions.

That’s it and that’s all.

The imPERTinence of Law 2.0

Law 2.0 and it’s bratty little sister, 3.0 is a form of apostasy, the beginning and maturation of a fundamental shift in the way legal services are conceived, produced and consumed.

Law is a type of religion,–much like science. There is a technique to legal analysis that one learns in a “law seminary.” Catechismic competency is perfected state by state, with national definitional certification possible through tests such as the multi-state and professional ethics exams. The bar number is proof that one is ordained to wax on, wax off in arenas from the court room to Court TV.

There’s yet to be a law school that develops its curriculum with the idea of training lawyers to think differently about the law. Indeed, the only people who are allowed to think differently are professors, who are granted tenure based on the combination of connection and disconnection from orthodoxy. And, of course, their ability to pull alumni dollars. Such is the nature of accreditation.

However, the argument can be made that once one has spent 20 years outside of academia, its high time to start thinking about the way law could be improved. That’s why I’m obsessed with Law 2.0 / 3.0 technologies. There aren’t many of them, but we’re starting to see some really great stuff, alot of which is chronicled on Wired GC. I’ll try to open up a dialogue with the Vallex Fund, as well, since it states that it has an objective of investing in legal technological innovation:

The Vallex Fund will encourage entrepreneurs to consider the legal industry as a major, new opportunity. “Big Law” alone is a $100 billion industry whose clients are increasingly dissatisfied with the ever increasing costs of legal services. This is not a new trend. Over the last forty years many studies and surveys have been conducted chronicling the problems, inefficiencies and even abuses within the nation’s civil law system. Yet many, both inside and outside the legal profession, believe improvements have been far too slow in coming. A new approach is needed. As experienced entrepreneurs, the Vallex Fund’s management and investors believe an entrepreneurial approach can help expedite change and fresh thinking as it has so successfully done in other industries.

If law is a car, Law 2.0 deals with connection between dealers and manufacturers(efficiencies), dealers and consumers(reputation) and used car economy (mashups). It’s time for a bailout.

And, to get that bailout, Law 3.0 is here to find out what goes on under the hood,–and what should go on when you turn the key. It’s a revisit of the engine(Wankel, Diesel, Electric Hybrid). It’s a way of reclaiming the auto shop for the high-school fix-it guy. It’s not stopping to ask permision to rebuild a car from the spare parts and junk yards, rather than being forced to source parts from the manufacturer.

At the base of Law 3.0 is a soulful revisioning with respect to the concept of “car” from a semantic point of view, taking the car as an algorithym and figuring out which problems it solves and whether there are better ways to solve it.

In this revolutionary approach to manipulation of the rules and processes upon which law is premised, there is TREMENDOUS opportunity.

To get a handle on this, one way that the Obama Administration is poised to help us is with its Project Management approach to problem-solving. Few lawyers would argue that litigation management is as much about managing the process as about managing the content. So, it’s time for us to heal ourselves and let the geeks help us by creating analgies between the problems we face and solutions that already exist, so we can innovte rather than regurgitate.

We need to take another look at process, and figure out new ways to solve the problems faced by, e.g. The Rules of Civil/Criminal Procedure and Code of Military Justice. We need to ask whether they really work for us,–a collaborative discussion that will make itself clear as the Obama Administration works it’s way through the closing of Gitmo.

Rather than an economic approach (which I fear is the legacy of the Chicago School) to law, I urge The Deciders to consider, instead, a Project Managment approach. This means replacing the fundamental premise of scarcity and supply/demand curves with the analysis of problems and steps needed to reach a solution. This requires tools like PERT:

PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was able to incorporate uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in R&D-type projects where time, rather than cost, is the major factor. [ Wikipedia ]

PERT is brilliant stuff. And, it’s something that the techno-geeks around us understand fantastically well, because most are familiar with tools like agile development and scrum.

They.get.stuff.done.and.stuff.works.

We were to take some of those processes and appoaches, the refrain “Yes, We Can! after January 20th will be (with apologies to Montell Jordan ) “This Is How We Do It!”

It’s Getting Hot In Here, So Take Off All Your Clouds!

There are some tres, tres cool apps out there. It’s not like I discovered them, but I found ‘em, so I’m passing them on.

The first is KloudShare, an up and coming “platform as a service” provider. PaaS is a value-added service which allows you to contract out platform development functions.

Who wants to work on the platform? Not me. I just want the darned thing to work, so I can go about building my application.

Examples include Amazon Web Services, something I signed up for today, just to see what it is, and Google’s App Engine. Very cool idea. Provided the data is secure and uptime remains ast 99.99%, what’s not to love about this, from the perspective of small business.

I am waiting on tippy toes to find out how KloudShare intends to contribute to cloud application development, but they’re in stealth mode for now, so I’ll walk through their stuff when they provide stuff to walk through. But, from what I can surmise from the blog, I like it though. I really, really like it for the legal space.

And, then, there’s Gnip. Hysterical tag line (go read it for yourself). I LOVE their simple way of getting around the captcha problem. =====\/

Simple and it works. Hello!

And …oooohhh!!….this lovely diagram of how one company is walking along the bleeding edge. I can’t possibly the only one who finds this stuff Akshay Kumar + Alex Bogusky yummy!

BTW, Alex takes Brad Pitt’s place due to his Clintonian definition of “cheating.” I’d call him a schlub, cuz I like the way it rolls off the tongue…but he’s clearly the opposite, by definition. Plus, I could really care less what he and Angelia got up to: Mr. & Mrs. Smith was hysterical.

Want help deciphering the PJTERN stack?

Python: the octopus that grabs stuff from disparate data sources; simple language to learn, making it sing is another matter; foundation language for building web apps on the cheap

JRE 1.6 – uses Java’s Runtime Environment for the business rules to make web data requests of the managing hardware + software (server)

TerraCotta – “shared memory for clustering/redundancy” seems to mean that it takes the tasks that relational databases don’t do well, and does it for them.

Ejabberd : instant messaging server written in Erlang (a language I’d never heard of until today) that apparently makes it easier to write “concurrent” applications (think 7 dwarves all carrying Snow White)

Ruby: the New Old black. It’s a highly configurable platform for building agile application development…hunh?…ok, it’s GOTTA be on your dev’s resume somewhere, if you’re exploring web apps; foundation language for building web apps on the cheap

Nginx – a Russian HTTP and mail server, that permits load balancing

This is all pretty low level tech, which is why I don’t deal with it normally. But, the picture was pretty. I was curious. And, there you go. It’s amazing what you can do, when you don’t have to BUY the foundational components of your web application! Prolem solved!

Have You Seen This?

Google has a fantastic (dare I suggest Tufte-inspired) way of presenting geographic data. Ok, so it’snot all that new, –but it just showing up in my searches, so it’s new to me. I love it!

The implications of Google’s multiple representations of data along a time line suggest gorgeous ways of presenting legal data. Learn more at the hysterically named Google Operating System blog.

Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for noting that to get this feature up front, add view:timeline” to any query. I tried “Kumamoto Castle” and it had stuff! Not a lot of stuff, but stuff.

What stumps me, however, is that the timelines only show up about 1/2 down the page. They should be at the very top of the organic search results. I think it’s a fair assumption that people interested in the Bay of Pigs, for example, aren’t likely as interested in going there so much as learning the history. Even if the assumption is travel, there’s plenty of real estate left for ads.

There’s a bit of wizardry there,–probably something to do with Gears, because the images load dynamically,–and fast!

Google is sure making it harder and harder NOT to adopt their invasive-but-free technology.