Speaking in D.C.

I was in our nations capitol last Thursday and Friday speaking at the latest Paralegal SuperConference from Estrin Legal Education.  Thursday was an E-Discovery Overview session and Friday was an E-Discovery Workshop sponsored by Anacomp’s CaseLogistix in which I discussed the New Paradigm concept that Browning Marean and I spoke about in a Webinar we did for CaseLogsitix on July 9th.  Both the slide show and accompanying white paper from the presentation can be downloaded at no charge from the Anacomp web site on the Litigation Support Solutions  page.

And for anyone travelling to D.C. in the near future, be sure to check out the Newseum, the new Interactive Museum of the News located at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W, right across from the West Building of the National Gallery. It just opened in April and has some amazing displays, including an extensive collection of historic newspapers and magazines, some going back to colonial times, which are in hermetically sealed trays you can pull out and read. 

There are several emotionally wrenching exhibits, including the largest display of portions of the original Berlin Wall outside of Germany with eight 12-foot-high concrete sections of wall overlooked by a three-story East German guard tower that loomed near Checkpoint Charlie — the only such tower on display outside Europe. 

 

The one that literally made me stop in my tracks and well up with tears was the 9/11 Gallery with a section of the radio antenna from the North Tower in front of dozens of front pages from that awful day.  I wasn’t prepared for this and apparently it hits many people the same way … boxes of kleenex are set on ledges all around the gallery. 

But nothing on Katrina beyond a short film clip that only runs on a small monitor when you select it from several other choices. And doesn’t that just sum up the D.C. reaction to the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history?

 

 

 

Is New Orleans Recovering?

Well to answer that question people around the nation might look at the recently released statistic that 63% of our damaged homes are either fixed or currently under renovation, the fact that 2008 freshman applications to Tulane and Loyola have skyrocketed or the the fact that the St. Charles streetcar line has finally opened all the way to the end of the pre-Katrina route.

But here in the Big (Hot Humid and Damp) Easy, we look to the running of the bulls to signify that all is returning to normal. I know, you’re thinking “boy, Tom has suffered some serious geographical degradation since he moved to NO full time. Is he going to school down there?”  But fear not. We’re well aware that somewhere in the north of Spain there’s a little town called Pampasomething where some guy named Henway or something (and don’t even ask a local down here what’s a henway) wrote about some little bull running event. But I mean really, how good a writer could he be if he never lived in the French Quarter?  Williams, Faulkner, Walker Percy, James Lee Burke…these are the giants of American literature. OK, we’ll give him credit for a year or two in Havana  but he was mostly fishing and drinking, right?  OK again, the drinking gets him major cred in the Quarter, and throughout Looziana for that matter, but still….   

No, the REAL running of the bulls occured this morning at 8AM on Bourbon Street. Sort of.

A group of locals, several who have run with the bulls in Spain and one of whom is a member of the NOPD (really) decided to recreate the event here in town. They didn’t have access to bulls but they did know the next best thing for mayhem, violence and goring the not so fleet of foot. The BIg Easy Roller Girls. (really redux)  In fact, Chris Rose reported in his column this week that  when the leader of the BERG team (whose skating name is Archbishop Pummel) was asked if they could impersonate bulls, her reply was : “Sure, I’ve got a bunch of bad-ass chicks on wheels who probably wouldn’t mind beating up on a bunch of guys.”  That’s the way the girls are in NOLA.

 

So there I was at 8AM on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans Streets, standing in front of Johhny Whites Sports Bar, drinking coffee with a couple of cops and several puzzled tourists. Johnny Whites is best known for staying open throughout the Katrina disaster and it’s a complete mystery why it is called a Sports Bar since it is about the size of a VW camper van, has 6 bar stools facing one tiny TV and the only sport going on in the place is extremely serious non-stop alcoholic beverage consumption.  

But they have coffee.  Very good coffee. For a dollar.  I can’t remember if it was Chris Rose or Ernie The Attorney who said the best place to find coffee in the morning in New Orleans is in a bar although I’m leaning to Rose since it just sounds like something a newspaper guy would say. At least the newsies I used to know like Pete Dexter  ….  well before he went Hollywood on us.  But Ernie has his moments too.

 Anyway, at 8:15 here comes a couple of hundred people of all ages and sexes (in New Orleans we never say “both sexes”… too confusing) dressed like French waiters and screaming and yelling and running like they’re being chased by, well, a bunch of ladies on roller skates with tattoos and whiffle ball bats.  I gotta tell ya, it made me proud to be an American.

 

Across the street a couple came out on the balcony of their room at the Bourbon Orleans hotel and looked down at all the commotion.  One of them yelled down to me, “Do they do this every Saturday morning?”  I was going to tell him the whole story but it was too long and complicated and he was too far away so I just yelled back, “yeah, it’s a tradition for the French Quarter night shift bartenders and waitresses on Saturday morning.”  The cops gave me a funny look and I said “Hey, that’s going to sound a lot better when they tell the story back home in Spokane.”   They nodded in agreement and we all went back to sipping our coffee and watching the bulls.

Is the Bates number dead?

I’m doing a free webinar on July 9th with Browning Marean of DLA Piper sponsored by CaseLogistix from ANacomp.  We’ll be disucssing the concept of the new definition of a document and why we shouldn’t think of email and other electronic information in terms of pages to be numbered and converted to TIFF.  Should be a fun discussion.  

You can sign up on the Anacomp web site at the picture of the manual Bates Stamp machine.   

LegalTech West

If you’re like me and not attending LegalTech West in Los Angeles take a look at the live video feed  being provided by Orange Legal Technologies at Booth #124. They’re using the Mogulus platform, which also provides the capability for Chat, and a scrolling RSS Ticker on the feed.

It’s being provided by techno guy Rob Robinson who also does the Complex Discovery blog…great job Rob! 

 

Assistance for Iowa Lawyers

Ernie Svenson has a post on his blog today with pointers to the Linn County Bar Association which includes Cedar Rapids, a city hard hit by the recent flooding and location of the Linn County District Court.

Despite the flooding, the Linn County Bar is still planning to proceed with it’s annual meeting this coming Thursday, June 26 and several members of the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA, led by Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar,  J.R. Phelps of the Florida Bar, Katherine Sanders-Reach of the ABA LTRC and myself, are planning to aprticipate via video conference.

I was also asked to do a short article on recovery efforts in New Orleans immediately after the hurricanes here three years ago and as part of that article I had a conversation with Helena Henderson, Executive Director of the New Orleans Bar Association. Helena was a mainstay of relief effrots in the New Orleans legal community after Katiranas she on the phone with the ABA organizing relief efforts on Aug 30, one day after the storm, had the NOBA web site back on line immediately and was back in town herself in October, relentelssly working to get the legal community, including the local court system, back in place.

Her advice for the immediate aftermath of a large disaster was basic: “get a single point of conatact and send money.”  Her experience showed that the fastest immediate relief could be provided by a single agency (in her case, the NO Bar in associaiton with the ABA) coodridnating to contact local attorneys and provide them with immediate monetary assistance to get shelter, food and medical care if needed. 

So contact the Linn County Bar . They have a resource page for Flood Information, as well as a ‘Displaced Attorney Contact‘ page.  The ABA also has information numbers on their Disaster Recovery site as well as articles on disaster recovery  including several written by J.R. Phelps. I’ll post more here as the week progresses including more of my interview with Helena Henderson and others in the New Orleans local legal community.

ESI FAQ’s from OrcaTec

Herb Roitblat and the gang at OrcaTec have put together a great set of FAQ’s on ESI in basic, easy to understand language which, coincidentally, follows my second rule of e-discovery (which I have rather blatantly taken from the the cinemtaic attorney Joe Miller as played by Denzel Washington in the movie Philadelphia. )  “explain this to me like I’m a four-year-old, okay?” .

Great job Herb… you can download the document on the WhitePapers page of the OrcaTec web site or click here. 

 

New E-Discovery Survey

Xerox Litigation Services has announced a survey that it says evaluates the e-discovery preparedness of the legal community. The methodology of the survey is not spelled out in the press release which refers to “200 legal professionals surveyed” and makes several references to “companies” and “in-house review”.  Findings cited in the press release include:  only 29 percent of respondents judged themselves to be “extremely prepared” for e-discovery and 81% had a number of reservations about in-house review systems. Despite that, however, 95 percent of participants expressed faith in their company’s ability to manage e-discovery. Huh?

You can find the press release at the incredibly user friendly link

http://www.xerox.com/go/xrx/template/inv_rel_newsroom.jsp?app=Newsroom&ed_name=NR_2008June2_Xerox_Litigation_Services_e-discovery_survey&format=article&view=newsrelease&Xcntry=USA&Xlang=en_US  

or simply click here 

He played that good time music with the Bo Diddley beat

Bo Diddley  1928-2008

 

The Creators Game

Every year since 1971, Memorial Day weekend brings the finals of the NCAA Division I lacrosse tournament. This year saw a rematch of perhaps the greatest rvialry in collegiate lacrosse as my alma mater (and defending national champion) Johns Hopkins played Syracuse. Of the 36 championships awarded since the tournamnet was established in 1971, Hopkins and Syracuse had each won nine. All time, Hopkins has an astonishing record of 882-277-15 and 35 titles in the years prior to the tourney. The game didn’t quite live up to expectations as Syracuse prevailed 13-10 with many observers feeling that each team had played a better match in the semifinals on Saturday when Hopkins defeated number one seed Duke 10-9 and the Orangemen beat Virginia 12-11 in 2 overtimes.  ( I should note that the Hopkins baseball team won their game in the Division III College World Series on Monday and will be playing Trinity on Tuesday evening in the championship game.)

 

 

 

But for many, the greatest thrill was seeing a game that has been played by the First Nations of North America since before recorded history draw a record crowd of 48,970, the largest attendance for an NCAA title game outside the BCS football championship. When French missionaries arrived in the new world, they found the people of the First Nations all played lacrosse in some fashion. The two largest linguistic families in Canada both had names for Lacrosse; the Algonquin referred to it as “Baggataway”, an Ojibe name meaning meaning “they bump hips” and the Iroquois Nation referred to it as “Tewaarathon”, a Mohawk term for “little brother of war.” 

 

The game played by the mighty Six Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onodaga, Cayuga, Senca and Tuscaroroa) of the the oldest living participatory democracy on earth, collectively called the Ho-de-no-saunee or the People of the Longhouse, (the name “Iroquois” is derived from a Basque term Hirlokoa, meaning the “killer people” since the Six Nations were enemies of the Basque allies among the Algonguin nations) is the one that evolved into modern lacrosse.

The game had deep spiritual meaning for the First Nations: the Onondaga phrase dehuntshigwa’es literally means men “hit a rounded object” but has also come to mean The Creators Game, since some legends hold that the divine leader Deganawidah, who united the original Five Nations of the Iroquois, took the game that had been part of the creation myths of the First Nations (no one invented lacrosse; in all of the foundation stories, the Creator gave it). and used it a substutite for war and a means to settle disputes among the tribes.

In the earliest times of American Indian lacrosse, the game had few rules, if any. Lacrosse games would last for days, stopping at sunset and continuing the next day at sunrise. The fields had no boundaries and goals were usually between 500 yards to a half-mile apart, though sometimes they were several miles apart. The goals were usually marked by a single tree or a large rock, and points were scored by hitting it with the ball. There were no limitations on the number of players on a team, and often there would be as many as one thousand players in a lacrosse game at the same time.

The Lacrosse Museum and National Hall of Fame is on the Johns Hopkins University campus, and in front is a bronze sculpture called ”Dehontshihgwa’es (Creator’s Game),” with the following message on a plaque: ”The game of Lacrosse was given by the Creator to the Ho-de-no-saunee (Iroquois) and other Native American people many years ago. It is from the Iroquois that the modern game of Lacrosse most directly descends. May this sculpture forever honor the Iroquois and the origins of Lacrosse.”

 Interestingly it may do that in several unexpected ways. Lacrosse was actually formalized as a sport five years before hockey, which appears to draw many of it’s rules from lacrosse, and it is lacrosse not hockey which is actualy the national sport of Canada. In addition, the game of basketabll was invented by Dr.  James Naismith, the lacrosse coach at Springfield College in Springfield Mass as a way to help his lacrosse team stay in condition during the winter and many of the basic basketball plays, such as the screen and the pick and roll, actually come form lacrosse.   So the next time you watch LeBron James or Chris Chelios, remember you’re really watching The Creators Game. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Official “No More Bates Numbers” Coffee Mug

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I received this today from Matt Work, the CEO of Discovery Mining.  Apparently they were talking about dropping the use of Bates Numbers in 2004 but didn’t get much traction.  Thanks Matt … let’s get that dialogue going again.