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.  

E-Discovery Survey of Illinois Attorneys

The Law Bulletin Publishing Company of Chicago recently commissioned me to conduct a survey of Illinois attorneys regarding their experience with electronic discovery.  The results were initially published by the Law Bulletin in their 2008 Legal Technology Guide and are now available on-line at the Chicago Lawyer web site. 

They contain a few surprises that I won’t spoil by revealing here: simply follow the link to the article and see what Illinois attorneys are saying about e-discovery.

A WEEK OF SPEAKING

The past 10 days have been a whirliwind of travel and speaking engagements. After the panel for Esquire Litigation Solutions mentioned below, I stayed in Chicago to speak at a Litigation Readiness Workshop put on by Thomson LegalWorks.  The panel I was on focused on ED cost savings in the review phase and was moderated by Browning Marean of DLA Piper along with Brent Kidwell, Chief Knowledge Counsel at Jenner & Block and Kathleen Skapik, Regional Director of  TechLaw Solutions. The discussion was lively and much attention was paid to my assertion that we need a new paradigm for dealing with e-discovery that is based on using native files. Brent Kidwell disagreed and asserted his postion that TIFF based review was still the best tool, a position I countered by reminding people that the tools to handle native file without resorting to the TIFF/Bates number paradigm.

From Chicago it was back to New Orleans and the first ever Louisiana Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference. This event was a resounding success, thanks largely to the efforts of Eric Barefield of the Louisiana Bar. You can see a detailed report of the event by Monica Bay on her blog, The Common Scold. 

And speaking of Monica, knowing what a great baseball fan she is I took her out one night to see some Looziana baseball. The New Orleans Zephyrs are the AAA franchise of the New York Mets and defending champs of the Pacific Coast League. (I know, New Orleans is on the Gulf Coast..apparently major league baseball owners don’t have well developed geography skills)  A mild breezy evening, great local crowd and the home team won on a 3 run homer (by Fernando Tatis, who was called up by the Mets two days later). 

The next night Monica, Eric and I joined Connie Nichols and Kay Sloan (the owners of New Orleans service bureau Docusource) for a great local dinner at R & O’s (which in local vernacular is pronounced much like Arnauds but is a bit more relaxed and a lot less expensive than that crown jewel of French Quarter dining) Crawfish pie, fried hush puppies, great italian salads, soft shell crab and roast beef poboys …well you get the idea.  The highlight oif the evening was driving along Bayou St. John with the windows down, the radio blasting something by Neil Diamond and Connie and Monica in the front seat singing along as loud as they good.  Reminded me of high school days on a summer nite with a car full of buddies driving to the , ah malt shop..yeah that’s the ticket…milk shakes. With Morgan Fairchild.

The next week found me back in New York speaking on a panel for an ALM event on Outsourcing. This was a well attended event which focused on the various outsourcing opportunities in law firms with my focus, of course, being the pressure to reduce ED review costs, which by most estimates, amount to 70% of the toal cost of any ED project.

That afternoon it was over to Penn Station for an Amtrak ride to D.C. (shades of my old college days at Johns Hopkins when I’d ride that same train back and forth from Boston at holidays). I had been invited to attend the Litigation Support Leaders Conference becasue I had been nominated for one of the categories of the Betsy Ann Reynolds Awards for Excellence in Litigation Support they were presenting. 

The event was outstanding. Put on by the Litigation Support Today magazine family team of Albert and Tammnay Buckwalter and Alberts (very proud) dad, Publisher Charles Buckwalter,  the two day event had a who’s who of speakers, including Browning Marean, Neil Aresty, Georg Socha, Beth AND Bil Kellerman, Duane Lites, Jeff Beard,  Chuck Kellner, Joe Utlser, Tim Piganelli…the list of professional experts was simply outstanding.  Close to 200 people attended and it seemed hard to believe this was the inaugural even since everything ran so smoothly.  Can’t wait until next year.

The Betsy Reynolds Awards were handed out at a special dinner Wednesday nite and the winners were: Beth Kellerman  of Apple (Corporate Law), Florinda Balridge of Fulbright Jaworski (private firms), Carl Kikichi of the DOJ (gov’t sector) and I won the the Industry Support category for my work in New Orleans. For that work I specifically thanked all the industry experts above who had helped in that effort (especially Bil K) and, of course, Gayle without whose support and inspiration I would have accomplished nothing. 

LST has sent out a press release about and provided a video of the award presentations and some pictures from the event are posted below. 

 

CT Summation webinar on case preparation

On April 17th, I did two live webinars on e-discovery case preparation with Atty. William Kellerman,  E-Discovery Manager at Wilson Sonsini.  Many of you know Bil from his days as Director of Corporate Legal Systems for CT Summation. Prior to joining Summation, he was a commercial and labor & employment litigator with the San Francisco law firm Sullivan, Roche and Johnson and now at WSGR, he oversees the Electronic Data Operations Center (EDOC) which is designed to manage all aspects of client data associated with a matter from collection to production and post discovery case assessment.

We had two lively discussions that day with Bil repeating his well known assertions about the paradigm change from documents to digital data, a postion I’ve also been writing about.  Lot’s of great observations by both of us and CT Summation recorded the sessions. They are available on their web site under the heading “Past Webinars“. 

Esquire Legal Forum

Esquire Litigation Solutions hosted the panel session “How To Avoid An E-Discovery Crisis” today in Chicago which I moderated.  The panelists were Stuart Hubbard, firmwide E-Discovery Manager at Schiff Hardin; Dwayne Krager, Litigation Support Specialist at Foley Lardner and Denio DiFrancesco, Automated Practice Support Specialist at Mayer Brown.

The spirited discussion was attended by approximately 50 people and covered strategies to prepare for a Rule 26(f) meeting, the rol of litigation support in a Rule 26(f) meeting, technologies to streamline the review process and how to organize and manage data, both ESI and paper. The final few minutes covered the new paradigms of the change in definition of a document and how to deal with large amounts of native files without trying to TIFF and Bates number every page, a change all the panelsits agreed was already upon us.

Esquire filmed the presentation and I will provide a link to the video as soon as it is available.