There’s No Place Like Home

Well finally made it back to NO after 4 days in Pensacola ( a truly beautiful city which impressed me as a cross between New Orleans and Cape Cod)  Unevacuating was as disorganized as evacuating: first only people with special colored placards could get back in … only trouble was nobody I spoke to, including numerous police officers, had any idea what the placards were or where they came from. Then we could get in Tuesday nite…until Gov. Jindal heard Ray Ray say that and immediately issued a slap down. Then we could get in at midnite on Wed …curious time for rentry given there was a dusk to dawn curfew and that Jefferson Parish had a 6AM renetry time earlier that day …and to get to JP from the east you have to go THROUGH New Orleans. Finally even the Guard and state troopers gave up and simply walked away from the checkpoints as carloads of families were arriving with not enough gas to go anywhere but home.

So we’re home and you’d think the first priority is electricity in everyones homes. Or being sure their was food for all the people returning.  Or maybe gasoline to run the generators we have to use because the power isn’t on.  But no…apparently the most important thing in New Orleans right now is …NFL football.

That’s right … the city is telling police who have been bivouaced in local hotels they have to leave for tourists …but more than half the police had no power in their own homes!  The grocery store around the corner from me has no power and people going thru the dumpster they are using to clean out the store  to get food  …. but the city is cleaning up trees and brush around the Superdome.  Treme, the oldest black neighborhood in the US, has people sitting on their stoops in the dark while lights are on in all the downtown hotels.  And don’t worry about milk and bread for the kids…we hav plenty of warm beer and cigarettes.

Kudos to Gov. Jindal for his overall organization of the state repsonse and the local police and National Guard for their outstanding efforts in assisting people and most of all kudos to the great citizens of New Orleans and all of southern Louisianna who have endured yet another natural disaster with grace and charm … and continue to endure the ongoing natural disaster we call the Mayor. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

NOLA Evacuee

I was out of town last week and monitoring the storm since it was still in Haiti. I came back home Thursday nite to the frenzy created by our Mayors rantings (check Ernie’s site for a good report…I can’t bring myself to to even repeat his ridiculous drivel) . Gayle had flown from ILTA to have a relaxing weekend in the Quarter and instead got her first hurricane experience. We wandered the streets of the Quarter as it became increasingly empty, ate po boys in restarurants as they were boarding up, talked with National Guardsmen arriving in town and ate beignets by the river just before the Cafe Du Monde closed .. a sure sign the city is evacuating…no beignets.

Friday nite in my neighborhood, Bayou St. John near the Fairgrounds, was quiet as many people were leaving. Cansecos Esplanade Market (no web site..go figure!) was full of folks stocking up on necessary supplies: beer and cigarettes were the items in highest demand.  Sat at 2AM we got up to call a cab for Gayle to get to the aiport and catch her 7AM flight. Thanks to the great folks at United Cabs for arranging cab pools of people in the same neighborhood …when you’re in NOLA next, ALWAYS use United … and she was at the airport in plenty of time. The atmosphere there was calm and even light hearted thanks to the always outstanding NOPD who were handing out water and MRE’s, telling people to stay calm, everyone was going to get out on time.  (Take a clue from your own cops Ray Ray)

Once she was gone I got in a car with Joe Mencigar, a charter member of the Havana Social Club at the Crescent City Cigar Shop ( I swear that’s his real name) and we drove to Pensacola. Travel tip: relying on government instructions and a GPS to evacuate is sure to double your travel time …. go old school with a paper map and use your common sense. We’re at the Pensacola Crowne Plaza with a ton of Looziana folk: staff  here are great,  peoples mood is good and reports on the ground from Ernie; John Dunn at Road Kill and our friends at Camp Baghdad indicate power is out but no flooding or major damage so far. 

More later.

OK Let’s Just Chill Out

OK, so I’ve been out of town all week (doctors appointments and the ILTA conference) and I get back to find that the hurricane over Jamaica (that’s right, Jamaica … the island below Cuba, about 1200 miles from New Orleans) which is being reported pretty much everywhere in the world as likely to hit somewhere in the Gulf Coast sometime next week (1200 miles at 7 MPH…you do the math) is being treated in New Orleans as an uber Katrina event.

I’m talking National Guard call ups, impending mandatory evacuations, cancelled mail service starting today, announcement that there will be ABSOLUTELY no shelters for people stuck in the storm (thanks Ray …. brilliant move) Coming home from the airport last night the line of cars leaving town went on for miles. So we’ve gone from no reaction in 2005 to total overreaction in 2008. How ironic on the anniversary of Katrina    ….. whatever happened to just plain smart politicians? Whatever happened to taking care of protecting the public without whipping people into a hysterical frenzy?

Chris Rose said it best in his column today: “OK, people. Get ahold of yourselves! Remain calm.”  Or, in the immortal words of Bart SImpson (which I can tell you from personal experience you do NOT want to say to a TSA agent at an airport), “don’t have a cow dude”. 

Andy Adkins Looks Back

Andy is the Director of the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Among other accomplishments he has written two books and published several studies on legal technology, been the Chair of the ABA TechShow in 2000 and 2001 and avoided becoming a lawyer for nearly twenty years.

He just wrote a great look at those twenty years and how legal technology has changed over that time. Called Techno Retro, it’s a great read ..take a look. 

SURVEY SAYS Part 2 (or, If You Can’t Run with the Big Dogs, Stay on the Porch)

Here’s my own stab at a couple of surveys: if I’m going to make comments about other surveys I figure I should at least try to do one or two myself and give everyone else the opportunity to nail me for what I did wrong. This was originally posted on the web site of Florida ED consultants The Cipher Group back in March.

“I recently conducted two separate surveys of end users regarding their experience with electronic discovery. The first was with the Chicago Law Bulletin Publishing Company that was sent out to Illinois attorneys. The second, sponsored by IPRO Tech, was with ILTA and went out to their members, who are primarily large firm IT staff. Both surveys asked approximately 20 questions about the respondents’ level of exposure to eDiscovery matters, experiences with electronic discovery vendors and products. Both also contained a specific question which asked for their thoughts on the most important issues facing them in this ever-increasing area of practice.”

1. Education

“In both surveys, ‘education’ ranked in the top 3 of most important issues. The biggest surprise in the Illinois survey were the responses to the question which asked, ‘Are you familiar with the Federal Rules changes regarding electronic discovery?’ 70% answered ‘Yes,’ which means that 30% were not familiar with the rule changes. The latter figure seems somewhat astonishing given the high degree of coverage and the flurry of CLE activity surrounding changes that went into effect in December 2006. In the ILTA survey, 90% of respondents were familiar with the ED-specific changes to the FRCP, but 40% did not know if their state had implemented such a rule change locally.”

2. Vendor Performance

“The findings from the ILTA survey seem to suggest that ED vendors still have a long way to go in satisfying clients on the service part of their deliverable. More than a third of the respondents said they are unhappy with the quality of the performance from those vendors The fact that price as a significant factor in determining project satisfaction had a nearly identical proportion of responses to timeliness and slightly behind project management tells me that reliability and efficiency are the areas where vendors need to concentrate. I think it is most important that a vendor not try and achieve these goals through mere economies of scale, but through development of a deep technical and litigation-savvy knowledge base within its personnel. In the Illinois survey, the attorneys who answered with respect to the litigation support software they purchased from vendors confirmed my own experiences in working with various firms around the country that the vast majority of attorneys are either ambivalent towards, or unhappy with, the software they are employing. In this case, 2/3 of the respondents declined to rate their software of choice at all and of those who did (25% of the respondents admitted that they didn’t actually use it themselves, but left that task to a staff member), 42% found their choice ‘satisfactory’ or ‘ok.’ An equal number of respondents (13%) were either very happy or very dissatisfied.”

3. Workflow

“With the advent of electronic documents and new document types such as multi-page TIFFs, PDFs, emails, excel spreadsheets and audio files, the page-centric approach of Bates numbered single page TIFFs has faltered. The paradigm that worked for 100 boxes of documents is simply too cumbersome and prohibitively expensive for cases that routinely handle hundreds of gigabytes of electronic information. According to John Turner, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Anacomp, Inc. in San Diego, applications ‘…that retain the paradigm of the page and not the document will not be able to adequately support the new age of litigation. A modern platform must be able to review native documents that are not just paper equivalents, but must directly enable review of any file that is in common use in business today.’ Attorneys and their clients who focus on the new paradigm will save time and money by using this process for docu-centric native file review. I believe that we will shortly see technical solutions that will allow a Bates-like substitute to be employed within the native file production paradigm.

So what general observations can we take away from these surveys? E-discovery is cutting across all the legal demographics of firm size, case values and attorneys but a significant number of lawyers are still unfamiliar with the requirements and characteristics of electronic discovery. No single vendor is dominating the market and national vendors are clearly splitting the business with local shops. Although well known products such as Summation and Concordance have a high market presence they are being pushed by the rise of Web based applications and, although cost conscious, attorneys are rating both vendors and products on a number of other factors besides price.”

Survey Says

I’ve been asked by several bloggers to comment on the 08 Socha-Gelbamnn EDD Survey.  I’ll make a point on one specific issue below but generally my reaction this year is the same as it was for the past two years when I wrote a sidebar for Monica Bay in Law Technology News. (I figure she didn’t ask me to write it again this year since she assumed she could just change the dates and print the same column … and she’d probably be correct)  So instead I’ll quote a comment from across the pond which pretty much summarized my feelings.

 

British lit support technology consultant Andrew Haslam of Allvision Computing posted his thoughts on The Orange Rag blog and said, in part:

“The survey is an annual look at the vendors in the EDD marketplace, written by two independent consultants, George Socha and Thomas Gelbmann. The 2008 version has just been released after its nine month creation process, and is the sixth in the series. Vendors are ranked on how they operate in each of the stages defined by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (itself an industry agreed model of the various stages of EDD). The executive summary is free, with the full report costing $5000. The word survey is possibly a misnomer, as the information gathered is self-selected by vendors submitting their own figures on company growth and revenue. The methodology used to arrive at the rankings is not explained, and in previous reports, firms have complained of seemingly arbitrary analysis and resultant ranking.”

My specific comment has to do with the methodology.  I’m not sure that  self reported numbers from 107 vendors out of a market of more than 600 tells us much and “validation” by 29 law firms isn’t really meaningful without knowing something about those firms. I sent George Socha a private email asking about the demographics of those 29  firms, specifically how many were AmLaw 100 firms. I didn’t get a response but he did post the following comment to the Exectuive Summary of the 08 Survey on the EDD Update page later the very same day I sent him my email:  

 

“… we sometimes are asked whether our rankings are “statistically significant.” We do not attempt to address confidence levels, confidence intervals, significance levels and the like. We report the number of organizations from whom we obtained amounts of information that we deemed to be useful for our analysis.“

 Hmmmm, best to call it an analysis then and not a survey. And I’m not just picking on George and Tom here. Fios also published a report recently of a “survey” taken of  28 legal professionals from Fortune 500 corporations. How much illumination do we get from a .05% sample of a certain population?  Becasue with a survey of a given data population rather than compiling data about the entire population, the survey usually studies a chosen subset of the population, called a sample. The data are then subjected to statistical analysis and IF the sample is representative of the population, then inferences and conclusions made from the sample can be extended to the population as a whole. A major problem lies in determining the extent to which the chosen sample is representative

 

When you have a small sample size, very small differences will be detected as significant. so you want a large sample to be very sure that the difference is real (i.e., it didn’t happen by fluke).  So if you have 29 people responding the difference between 1 person saying CaseLogistix and 2 people saying CaseLogistix is so small as to be meaningless when the total number of possible respondents is 1 million (the number of attorneys in the US)  But put in percentage terms for purposes of that “survey” the difference is enormous …. the CaseLogistix percentage would increase by 100% from .034% to .068%.  If 5 people said CaseLogistix, their percentage becomes 17% but the increase in real numbers is still insignificant in terms of the total number of the target population.   

 

Now if the population is changed by concentrating on say the AmLaw 100 and we know that each answer is from a different representative of that group then we can say we have a 29% answer rate from our target market and that number becomes more compelling. And if that number (5 out of 29) still seems to be too low a number to be representative of our target population, we need to get more respondents. Because that is really the question we are asking here…what sample set is significant? Using a calculator you can find at  Creative Research Systems , it seems that 26 is the number you need for a population of 100 so then the 5 out of 29 becomes even more persuasive .

 

OK but I can see all the the technical sophisticates in the audience waving their hands, jumping up and yelling “oo oo” like Horshach on Welcome Back Kotter. (Yes Craig, I’m looking at you) OK, technically in statistics “significant” means probably true or not due to chance.  A research finding may be statistically significant ( or likely to be true) without being important. When statisticians say a result is “highly significant” they mean it is very probably true. They do not (necessarily) mean it is highly important. Or as former Harvard President Lawrence Lowell once wrote, statistics, “like veal pies, are good if you know the person that made them, and are sure of the ingredients”.

 

Which brings us back to George and Tom, who we all know and trust. As George also said in his post, “… not everyone may realize the degree to which we must depend on self-reported information. …  Much of the data provided to us, however, is not information that we can verify or refute. We have to depend on the integrity of the people and the organizations providing us with the information. At times, we feel it is necessary to give providers haircuts; we never, however, give them toupees.“

 

As I said above, hmmmmmmmmm.  I trust George and Tom but I’m not sure about the guys with the toupees. And the guys who put on their Mardi Gras costumes before they answered the questions?  You with the sneakers, out of the pool.

 

(for more on my own surveys of end users, see the next post. One of them is very significant statistically and one not so much, but hey, you can trust me. No really, the ponytail isn’t a weave) 

 

 

 

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!