On the Mark

Writing an e-discovery blog while trying to do your real job can prove challenging. The need to post witty, irreverent and timely on-point content is great — and seemingly unending. In the blogosphere we’re seeing movement away from single-voice blogs and toward multi-voiced blogs where several authors post in order to satisfy the content beast. As a single-voice blog, I can totally respect Ralph Losey’s efforts. So today, I’m taking a moment to point out some great work by a genuinely nice guy who writes a well respected e-discovery blog.

Ralph Losey is a highly regarded industry veteran. He’s also a gentleman I met at a Sedona Conference meeting and whose work I’ve enjoyed a great deal ever since. The first of his two home runs ran a couple of weeks ago, and brought up very interesting points about keyword searching and a recent case that could send chills down the back of partners all across the country.

Here’s the link: Inadequate Keyword Searches by Untrained Lawyers May, in Some Circumstances, be Sanctionable

Here’s the case: Diabetes Centers of America, Inc. v. Healthpia America, Inc.

Ralph writes:

This recent decision in Texas suggests that inadequate keyword searches could lay a predicate for spoliation sanctions when the defective searches caused evidence to be lost.

The shortcomings of keyword searches are well known. When you add untrained attorneys into the mix and give them the task of properly searching and then making decisions with respect to production and preservation of data, well… you know more litigation is sure to follow.

If keywords are not coupled with technology that has analytic capabilities, the likelihood of missing relevant and responsive documents is increased greatly. Later this week I’ll be serving on the Search and Information Retrieval panel at The Sedona Institute’s Getting Ahead of the E-Discovery Curve CLE program in San Diego. We’ll go into considerable depth on the topic so that attendees won’t find themselves in the situation above.

The second of Ralph’s home runs is his most recent post on the recent Qualcomm Six case and the sanctions order that’s been vacated against the six attorneys, though not against the organization. I like that Ralph spends the necessary keyboard time on his blog to add all the special links and care his readers can use. I’m not a big fan of music twinkling in the background as I read, but his coverage is great and very informative. He also uses a neat mouse-over plug-in on his blog, and given the free nature of WordPress plug-ins, I’m sure On the Mark will be copy-catting him as soon as I can get my admin to make the change.

Item last. Schadenfreude

While watching the news last night regarding Elliot Spitzer, a couple of words came to mind. One German, schadenfreude, and the other English, epicaricacy.

I’m not going to define either for you. Double click on each word and the wiki will appear. I will tell you that a buddy of mine “on the street” relayed that as soon as the news of “Client Number 9″ and his Mayflower Hotel activities made it down to the trading floor, a spirited round of applause went up. Seems the street feels a little bit of Karma came home to Mr. Spitzer yesterday. The Wall Street Journal covered it. Huffington even blogged about it, too. IMHO Spitzer is done and the only question now is WHEN?

As one of Hillary’s super delegates, I wonder if he’s going to hang around long enough to cast his vote. Given the coverage, he may not make it through the day, much less the week.

On the Mark

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