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!

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!

Don’t send that confession to a lawyer you don’t know!

Check out the recent ABA Ethics Newsletter.

There is a highly informative article about the responsibilities of lawyers when it comes to “unsolicited” information received from potential clients.

On the web, lawyers are sent information everyday that could lead to a conflict of interest. The most common case would be the one in which both parties to an accident shotgun an email to all lawyers on-line giving detailed information about the same accident.

In the past, a lot of men’s support groups told their members to interview a lot of lawyers with the sole objective of preventing the wife from later retaining that lawyer. I’m sure it still goes on, but the better lawyer will interview people FIRST for conflict, then for details.

The woman who inadvertently revealed her extramarital affair to her husband’s divorce lawyer used an electronic form on the firm’s Web site to submit information about the case, noted the California State Bar’s ethics committee. In order to proceed, she was required to consent electronically to certain terms, including an agreement that no “attorney-client relationship” or “confidential relationship” was formed.

It’s not so easy on the web, because people seem to lose all sense of self-protection when e-mailing lawyers on the web. I’m sure it’s because they simply don’t know and it would never occur to them that someone else got there first.

So, what is a lawyer to do, when the wife of a client sends an e-mail admitting that she’s a compulsive gambler, and asks for his help in getting a quickie divorce so she can marry the guy she met in Vegas the week before?

Well, the ABA has given some guidance, and it’s not always what you might expect.

Client Intake Software Suggestions

Some points of notice to people designing advanced web tools for lawyers that involve incoming clients:

1) Build in a system of electronic intake triage.

Don’t just warn the potential client using boilerplate legalese. Make it interactive by asking the person to identify all other parties and then have that display FIRST, before the e-mail content appears. Do this in all e-mail forms exposed to the public. Heck, do it on the intranet too! You never know when a disgruntled, but not-quite-clued-in employee will write asking about how he can get out of a non-compete agreement.

But the committee decided that those disclaimers were inadequate, and that the lawyer could not represent the husband. The committee said they were “not in sufficiently plain terms to defeat the visitor’s reasonable belief that the lawyer is consulting confidentially with the visitor.”

The committee noted that a disclaimer stating, “I un­der­stand and agree that law firm will have no duty to keep confidential the information I am now transmitting to law firm,” would have eliminated any reasonable expectation of confidentiality, allowing the lawyer to represent the husband in spite of the wife’s admissions of adultery.

This is SUCH A SIMPLE SOLUTION!

What you want is documentation of the information and of the fact that it was NOT viewed by counsel. This is a way to help lawyers keep their current clients and prevent mandatory withdrawal. No lawyer wants to withdraw prematurely from a juicy case.

I think this is also the main reason paralegals get a first crack at information. If the paralegal hears it, it’s not as big a taint on the lawyer.

2) Inform the client from the second s/he walks in the electronic door NOT to divulge incriminating information UNTIL they have a written representation agreement.

Prudent lawyers will build in a back door for clients they find they don’t want (I call it the “yeah, I punched my boss” or “it’s just a white lie, –no one will know” client). Further, most bars require a written services agreement in order to secure the right to payment anyway.

There are many services out there (one I’m building included) that will help triage cases for lawyers. Details later.

3) Always ask clients to identify immediately whether they have received or filed court papers of any kind.

Give up the legalese, simply ask: did you get any court papers or anything that LOOKS like a government paper about this??

Then ask again.

Then politely inquire the crumpled paper sticking out of the back pocket, that has the words “SUMM…” written on it, but partially obscured by ketchup.

There are ways to do this electronically. Not that hard to think about.

Does your software package do any of this? Let me know! Leave a comment!

Customer Relationship Management Software

Here’s an interesting list entitled ” 10 things every CRM software solution needs to include“:

1. Familiar and user-friendly interface
2. Tight integration with the Microsoft Office system and Office Outlook
3. Reliable back-office integration (time and billing, etc.)
4. True platform flexibility
5. Current technology
6. Quick and easy access to your data
7. Customizable views and workspaces
8. Powerful reporting and analysis tools
9. Mobile access to data
10. Quantifiable ROI and total cost of ownership

You can get the White Paper by CRM4Legal here. Honestly, I really am not sure how they re-concile dependence upon Microsoft products with some of these items.

In my book, a Law 2.0 office absolutely has to learn to leverage .doc, .html and .pdf formats. So long as those file types are supported, the job is 80% done. Nearly every other format can be converted into one of these three, so let’s look at why these are the key file types for web 2.0 communication.

What do Lawyers Do?

If lawyers were crows, we would stand around all day yakking. That’s because most of what we do is communicate. Some people think that our primary directive is to generate paper, but that’s not quite true: we generate paper, because that’s the way we communicate ideas for purposes of preserving those ideas.

So, if we generate paper to communicate ideas, it behooves us to first ask the question as to whether paper is required.

In court, the stenographer only generates paper when she needs to do so. In modern courts, the read back is done without printing,–it shows up on the computer screen in real-time. Further, more courts are learning towards providing the jury and judge with computer screens, so that very little documentary evidence need ever be printed out. Print outs these days are more for effect than for accurate communication of the ideas contained within.

What a huge revolutionary shift from the concerns of the Best Evidence Rule! Some might say that it’s really a smooth transition from the issue of photocopies and I would agree, but I remember when mimeograph copies were quite literally cranked out by hand because copying by xerox was far too expensive.

Office Communication

Heaven forbid we should ever stop talking to each other, but within the office, communication by collaborative application or email ought to be the rule for items that require a history. IM is fantastic, but it’s too easy to lose knowledge or transition an IM decision to documentation, unless someone has figured out a way to automatically print and tag an IM conversation for later retrieval. Does anyone know whether it has been done??

In my view, even phone messages should always be taken on-line adn placed in an attorney’s Tickle List. I have gone through as many phone message books as anyone, and it’s simply inefficient and messy given the tools now available. At the very least, look into somwthing quick and dirty like Caliente or PhoneSlips. The interfaces on these applications are amazingly AWFUL, but they look like they get the job done.

On the other hand, your son or daughter should be able to whip one up for you in about an hour using Access or PHP.  I wrote called “QuickMail” for a legal call center, which I am probably going to give away as open-sourced freeware.

Third-Party Written Communications

Website Operations