The Dark Side of Big Data

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The Dark Side of Big Data The ongoing information explosion is reaching epic proportions and has earned its own name: Big Data.  Big Data encompasses both challenges and opportunities. The oppo... read more

Free report for download: How Content-Analytics can help Big-Data

The ongoing information explosion from the computer age gained significant momentum in the last decade (or so), finally reaching epic proportions and earning its own name: Big Data.  The realities ... read more

Technology Assisted Review, Concept Search and Predictive Coding: The Limitations and Risks

Technology Assisted Review (TAR) is a marketing term used in the eDiscovery community to describe the process of automatic classification of documents in a so-called legal review. Similar documents... read more

Language is Not Just a Jumbled Bag of Words: Why Natural Language Processing Makes a Difference in Content Analytics

State-of-the art text analysis supports multiple languages, which is critical when investigations go global and involve collections of information in various languages. In such scenarios, the techn... read more

From Quantitative to Qualitative Early Case Assessment

It has recently become clear that a new breed of early case assessment (ECA) is emerging. In recent years, many  eDiscovery vendors have focused on ECA as a means to trim down data volumes as f... read more

Corporate Governance is Finally Becoming a Reality -- Thanks to eDiscovery

At LegalTech 2012 in New York, many vendors showcased eDiscovery products for use in-house and in the cloud to adequately respond to eDiscovery. It seems most products still emphasize how to react ... read more

Another Great LegalTech 2012

I’ve just returned from another great, high-energy and exciting LegalTech conference in New York. I love that show! Large crowds of old and new friends, and incredible buzz. There was no shorta... read more

Text Analysis: The next step for eDiscovery, Legacy Information Clean-up and Enterprise Information Archiving

Text and content analysis differs from traditional search in that, whereas search requires a user to know what he or she is looking for, text analysis attempts to discover information in a pattern ... read more

European Privacy and Data Protection Regulations: Effective Defense Tools in eDiscovery But Also a Compliance Risk

Last week, nearly 300 privacy professionals gathered in Paris for the second International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) European Data Protection Congress. Completely focused on the l... read more

Why Legal, IT, Compliance and Investigators Must Work Together!

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Last week, I attended a great conference focussed on eDiscovery, information management and legal technology. The goal of this conference was to get IT, legal compliance and investigators to unders... read more

Legacy Data Clean-up: different approaches to manage different data

Tackling the e-mail problem E-mail is where the high costs and risks of e-discovery are concentrated. People keep their e-mails because it is easy, but these e-mail archives (PSTs) rapidly swel... read more

Factors that drive solid records management

Legal obligation Records retention always carries with it some type of legal obligation, regardless of the type or size of an organization. The de facto standard for how records-retention requi... read more

Visual Information Retrieval: the Next challenge in Information Management

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of thes... read more

The expanding role of records management: creating the foundation for effective and pro-active-discovery

In today’s evolving workplace each department or ‘business unit’ is treated as its own individual business, with its own cost centre, overheads and profit targets. Although this is good for healthy... read more

Records-Management: The foundation for high-quality KM

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Only when efficient records management policies and practices are in place can an organization hope to fulfill its enterprise-wide knowledge management goals. This approach has at its core the prin... read more

To More Cost Effective and Less Risky e-Discovery via an Effective RM Strategy

Considering the context outlined in the previous section, any records management solution should at least adhere to the following basic principles: Creates additional flexibility regarding ... read more

The Need for Pro-active eDiscovery

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Managing and controlling electronically stored information (ESI) is a matter of technology, but also of strict procedures, quality control and well-documented information management activities. ESI... read more

The Lost Art of Data Destruction: An overlooked key to records management and e-discovery

Although storing 250GB of data can cost less than $250, hiring an external firm to process and review this data for e-discovery can cost up to $1 million. The impact of these costs is particularly ... read more

Social Media and e-Discovery Solutions to Look for

Cloud adoption and social network content generation in the enterprise have serious implications for e-discovery. Employees are creating content outside the control of corporate IT governance and c... read more

Social Media: the Next eDiscovery Elephant in the Corner

For enterprises social media applications such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter bring both business opportunities and risk. There are many channels and the volume of data is enormous. Most... read more

The UK Bribery Act, “FCPA on steroids”

After heated discussions, delays and even a false start, the UK Bribery Act 2010 has finally taken effect this summer. The Bribery Act intends to respond to threats to sustained economic progre... read more

A new Role for Geo-location evidence in eDiscovery

The surge and ubiquity of geo-based technology, such as GPS apps in smart phones, is giving rise to a new world of location based electronic discovery (LBED). The geo-spatial data stored within a c... read more

WikiLeaks Makes the Case for Intelligent and Automatic Redaction

The WikiLeaks scandal involving the release of 250,000 classified State Department cables has put automatic redaction software in the spotlight. Apart from this example of the unauthorized release ... read more

eDiscovery is here to stay!

eDiscovery is not a typical technology cycle that goes up and down as a 7 year polynomial distribution. I believe that eDiscovery is here to stay. Personally, I am a strong believer in the fact tha... read more

Audio and Phonetic Search: What’s Working and What’s Not

Companies are on alert when it comes to endless amounts of data stored within the enterprise. But they must be equally vigilant about information that exists as spoken word. It’s a major challenge,... read more

The Potential Risks of In-Place Legal Holds

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You’ve conducted your legal hold interviews. You’ve identified the custodians and the potentially relevant data. So what’s the best way to preserve it? Do you make a copy of it or lock it down in p... read more

How to Become Litigation Ready

eDiscovery is a process that is completely driven by litigation response: if you are involved in litigation and have received a legal hold letter, you must follow the legal rules and best practices... read more

Handling Language Dependencies in eDiscovery, Records Management when using Content Analytics

Foreign language texts contain a lot of hidden information, making multilingual information extraction tools – and applications that allow cross-lingual information access – particularly useful. On... read more

Market research: 88% of FTSE 100 Companies at Risk of Litigation

Energy, travel and pharmaceutical firms at highest risk, also in Europe! In a recentsurvey of the FTSE 100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange, London) which indicates that 88% of the FTSE 100 are ... read more

Why Some Enterprise Search Tools Can Compromise the Integrity of your eDiscovery Process

As part of bringing eDiscovery in-house, one might consider using enterprise search tools, open source search tools, portal search, or embedded (free) search components to execute the negotiated Bo... read more

What is the Term ‘Early Case Assessment’ Really About?

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In the last couple of months, I have seen many different definitions of Early Case Assessment (ECA). Some vendors mold the concept of Early Case Assessment to support their own offerings--which isn... read more

Why you need a solid and defensible methodology when you bring eDiscovery in-house

The main rewards of bringing eDiscovery in-house are very clear: reducing costs and controlling risks—for the current legal matter as well as future litigation. What we have seen in many cases is t... read more

Search is dead, long live search!

Last week, Stephan Arnold wrote a great blog post about an older ZyLAB eDiscovery promotion video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6MhdqHlGzU) which I posted at You Tube a while ago (although we di... read more

How to Incorporate Legacy Information Clean-up into your Go Forward Strategy for Information Management

As the average rate of information growth in organizations holds steady at 30-40% per year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law), this is and will continue to create huge problems and liabilit... read more

If you want to learn which words to avoid in an email, here is a some advice from the Lehman Brothers investigations

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In one of my previous blogs, I discussed what to expect in so-called FRCP negotiated Boolean queries. The examples were based on the Lehman case. The crux of the article was to address the limitati... read more

Learn what a negotiated Boolean in eDiscovery is all about...

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Can your in-house search tools do this or do you have to rely on external vendors? When lawyers negotiate what data is relevant to exchange under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, they deter... read more

6 Practical Tips for Designing Taxonomy

Now I know this is not the most exciting topic, but it is worthwhile because the role of taxonomy is becoming increasingly important to the complete search experience as well as the automatic class... read more

To Infinity and Beyond!

This week, my nine year old son invited me to see the 3D movie “Toy Story 3” with him in the movie theatre. I was instantly reminded of Buzz Lightyear’s infamous quote “to infinity and beyond”. As ... read more

Self-destruct email: the final solution to limit your eDiscovery costs!

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I am sure that many of my blogging colleagues will also pick this up, if they have not already done so. Yesterday, I found this great article in Forbes on the final solution for the email dilemma: ... read more

Understand the Benefits and Limitations of Traditional Web Search Engines such as Google when you use their Appliances and Technology in-house for mission-critical applications

There is an inherent risk when a popular brand becomes the perceived archetype for a particular product group or task. Take Google as an example. Google is great for what it is designed to do –find... read more

Information Valuation: Reinvention of Knowledge Management or is there more to it?

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Recently, the term Information Valuation popped-up in various leading industry reports and in a few blogs, but the term is so new, there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it yet (as of June 11th, 20... read more

From Email to Enterprise Information Archiving

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It never ceases to amaze me that some organizations still lack a managed solution to archive employee emails, let alone policies and procedures to enforce any email archiving principles. Email is t... read more

Bringing eDiscovery in-house is the way to go, but beware of the risks!

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Bringing eDiscovery in-house is the way to go. At least, that is what recent surveys and analyst reports confirm. Reports from Gartner, IDC, The 451 Group, the eDiscoveryJournal (http://ediscoveryj... read more

Faceted Search: how to go from a Static to a Dynamic Taxonomy

Many search engines used in portals are optimized to retrieve predefined, specific and precise specifications. For those instances, one must know exactly which words to use and the search result fo... read more

IDC Reports: Information Explosion Leads to Stress! Or should we just use the right tools?

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Is it really a problem, or is it simply a matter of overlooking the right tools and technology? The ongoing information explosion is no longer news; We are all confronted with it, at work and a... read more

An easy start for information governance: legal agreements and contracts management

8 reasons why your organization should have implemented an automated and standardized solution yesterday! Contract management enables you to run an efficient and productive organization. Le... read more

Global and Proper Information Management in Reach

Now, more than ever, AIIM’s goals of global and proper information management are within reach! For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading association focused on helping professionals underst... read more

Tell Us a Little About Yourself

I am the Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of ZyLAB. From 1987 to 2009, I acted as President / CEO of ZyLAB. During my career, I have been involved in deploying in-house e-discovery software with... read more