Litigation research: Market challenges, technology, and the advantage of GenAI
Editor
With case complexities and data volumes on the rise, litigation teams must find new ways to manage, (...)
“Agentic AI” is on the cards
Editor
It's been two years since ChatGPT enamoured the world. When ChatGPT first launched, everybody was am(...)
Featuring expert Kerry Scott Boll of JustEngage - please take our snap-poll on social media usage
Social media is not only shaping a new culture, it is also tremendously affecting business progress and influencing globalization. As a business tool, social media platforms create greater communication channels so people can make informed decisions about people, places, services, products, and businesses, and get quick access to information around the world. Kerry Scott Boll, founder of social media consulting firm JustEngage, says the best way to get more business is to offer great services and connect with the general public to show them you care – and to show it online.
Introduction by Christy Burke, Host of Legal Technology Observer
Predictive coding is one of those legal technology terms that seems to mean everything and nothing all at once - and it brings up the term “algorithm,” which is enough to send math phobics running for the proverbial hills. Here to make sense of predictive coding for LTO readers are eDiscovery experts Sharon Nelson and John Simek. In this guest post, Sharon and John explain the challenges of defining predictive coding and point to the recent incident with Judge Peck and the Da Silva Moore case which shows that today’s courts are grappling with this topic, too.
Featuring experts George Socha and Tom Gelbmann
When I asked George Socha and Tom Gelbmann about how EDRM has changed the industry, it became clear to me that EDRM more than demystified eDiscovery - it defined eDiscovery and finally opened a line of communication between vendors and consumers that had never really been established before. At various legal technology conferences people were talking to vendors to place where their products and services fit into the model. Dispelling any confusion about eDiscovery was the primary goal of EDRM, and it seems to have gone above and beyond that.
Featuring experts George Socha and Tom Gelbmann
When I first became exposed to the legal technology industry, it seemed like every new thing I heard about on a daily basis couldn’t be easily looked up or even explained. In an industry where an acronym is defined by another acronym and that acronym has its own cryptic (at least to the lay-man) definition, I was relieved to be introduced to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). EDRM spoke my language. It put what I didn’t know into perspective and it became the gateway to my understanding of eDiscovery. By the way, eDiscovery is basically discovery files in digital, not paper, form.
Implementation & Training and Quick Poll results
LTO posts from Wednesday and yesterday have made the case that CMS and PrMS programs have the potential to make your practice much more efficient. However, you’ll need to invest time and energy to get the system installed and your colleagues trained. Additionally, once the system is operational, there will be some additional work at the outset such as data entry and migration. You need to convince yourself and others that the up-front increase in work and the learning curve will pay off once everything is stored and organized electronically. So how do you make this happen?
How do you know what type of system you need?
Based on yesterday’s post, you know what a Case Management System and a Practice Management System are, so you can start to do some research. Andy Adkins, CIO of Steptoe and Johnson, an expert on case management, offers three tips to those firms conducting their initial research on the subject.
Featuring Andy Adkins, CIO of Steptoe & Johnson PLLC and founder of the Legal Technology Institute
CMS, PrMS, what are these acronyms and why do you need to know? As a legal technology newcomer, I have now learned that these refer to Case Management System and Practice Management System. But what is the difference between these? Who better to ask than Andy Adkins, CIO of Steptoe & Johnson PLLC and widely recognized expert on case management, having written “The Lawyer’s Guide to Practice Management Systems,” published by the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section.
Welcome to Legal Technology Observer (LTO), a 6-week concentrated blog on Legal IT Professionals providing practical knowledge about legal technology, eDiscovery, and social media for legal professionals who are not legal IT experts – yet!
LTO is designed to be useful for all legal and legal IT professionals, but especially for people who are relative newcomers to legal tech, eDiscovery or social media who are looking to learn the ropes. For those outside the legal technology “bubble”, the industry can seem like a sea of acronyms and buzzwords, so we will ask experts to define terms clearly, without jargon.
For more than a decade, I have been hearing that dictation is going away, yet it is still here and going stronger than ever! Young attorneys, doctors, executives, and many other business professionals grew up typing and prefer to type, so why should they dictate? With speech recognition, who needs a transcriptionist or secretary?
The reality is that this is the same argument that was being made 20 years ago when young executives said we prefer to just write things out with a pen! Even the Egyptian pharaohs knew it was a better use of their time to stay focused on those priority tasks that only they could do, and instruct (dictate) things to those who are better suited to complete certain tasks than they were.
Courtroom showdowns make for great movie scenes, but To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch would be shocked to hear that the courts are only resolving a fraction of today’s legal disputes. A growing number of cases are being resolved by online tools, and sometimes lawyers and judges are not even involved. Impartial web-based systems apply computation, algorithms and cryptographic technology to bring about resolution quickly and inexpensively.
A growing stable of private sector companies are beginning to compete with the judicial system for “customers” and are also changing the face of traditional Alternate Dispute Resolution or ADR, which has typically included mediation, arbitration and other alternatives to the courts.
This month has seen the release of Blackberry 10, at least to the developer community. If that’s what RIM intend to release later in 2012 then I’m afraid we may be all bidding adieu to the familiar sight of Blackberry in Legal and beyond.There is no way that a touch screen OS from Blackberry will break the Android and iOS dominance, nor keep Windows Phone from being the #1 challenger to the top 2! These other three are slowly chipping away at the “risks” that ActiveSync technology supposedly brings compared to the BES infrastructure and a copycat OS isn’t going to save RIM.
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