A recent post on ars technica describes an emerging trend dubbed IT consumerization. Basically the idea is that the technology industry’s innovations are now primarily focused on the consumer market. Great new technologies start with the consumer and are later adapted to the enterprise. Think iPhone or Gmail & Google Docs. It’s a big shift.
“… the office has gone from being the place where you spend time with cutting-edge technology, to a technological boneyard where you’re perpetually trapped about three years in the past.”
This sounds really familiar. I hear it all the time from customers and friends. One close friend of mine works remotely for a company and says it can take up to 5 minutes over the VPN to open a document. Her efficiency (and to some degree sanity) is seriously crippled by something as simple as sharing documents in a secure fashion. Most of us can name 5 great web-based document sharing services that are fast, secure, and pleasurable to use. If the internal IT infrastructure can’t keep up with better and less expensive solutions, it’s time to move on. Find consumer grade solutions.
We’ve been talking a lot internally about how to approach the e-discovery roadblocks our customers are feeling pain about. As mentioned in a previous post, E-Discovery seems like an overly broad and at this point, totally overused term.
Its the perfect problem for us; full of complexity, difficult to assess, open to decisions that are politically driven instead of driven by technology strategy. It’s full of problems and issues that people are spending a lot of money and effort on, but are left with a feeling of agony because they cannot find an easy solution.
At Nextpoint, we have been thinking about these problems for a while; how to create a faster, simpler, and less expensive way of performing e-discovery, that contains post-discovery functionality. After all, producing an email is where the evidence starts, not ends.
Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. That’s the whole point of technology. With a tractor an energetic farmer could plow six times as much land in a day as he could with a team of horses. But only if he mastered a new kind of farming.
We’re all learning to cope with an exponentially increasing amount of information. I’ve yet to find anybody with a bigger burden than attorneys, just in eDiscovery review alone. Clearly the attorneys and firms that are able to overcome this burden have a huge opportunity to excel. Because of that fact, a lot of law firms and corporate legal departments have set out to build tractors or are making huge capital investments in technology and the teams of people needed to maintain those investements. Meanwhile there is an infinite amount of land to be plowed. Why not lease the tractors and plow bigger fields?
Courtney got this link from her sister. It’s a newspaper ad from 1989 for the Tandy 5000 MC Professional System. First off, it just jumped off the page what an anachronistic view of technology this contained. It’s expensive, over $8k, and the monitor and mouse aren’t included! It also lacks power — just the phrase “lightening fast 20MHz” made me snicker.
But it got me thinking about the idea that Nextpoint is moving our customers off of this platform — finally, more than 20 years later! But the idea is still pervasive, down to the idea that this “strictly business” Micro (ha!) Computer operates “network operating software”. The fundamental model that this ad proposes - a standalone computer with business applications loaded on it connected to a network - is one all of the largest law firms in the country employ today.
That model is quickly being out-moded. Why? The users of the Tandy 5000 MC Professional System would be able to boot into and start using their business applications far quicker than any big firm lawyer can today. It just doesn’t work as fast as it used to. What other technology model can you say that about?
Shout out to our neighbors at Threadless who are the cover of Inc. magazine. Really cool stuff, I’ve linked to the 37signals blog because it’s got the cover image.
I always grab a book to read when I go on vacation. Something that doesn’t pertain to my work is typically the primary objective and I like it to be printed on actual paper. So a couple months ago on a trip to Florida, I picked up a copy of Steve Martin’s autobiographical “Born Standing Up.” Funny thing is, while it had nothing to do with software development or legal technology, I came out of it full of new ideas. Martin tells the story of his career as a stand-up comic. Where he started and why he stopped. It was funny, but in a completely different way than his stand-up act was funny. More than anything else, it was inspirational and a shrine to innovative thinking. Here are some of my takeaways that can be applied to any innovative business model from “Born Standing Up.”
It takes time to innovate. As Martin explains “overnight success” was only achieved after 10 years of struggling. It takes time to get things right and in the early days you’ll only have fans that really want things to change and improve.
Innovation is a partnership between the artist and the audience. In Martins case many of his favorite bits just didn’t fly. He decided to tuck them away and bring them back later. Don’t keep pushing things that don’t work because you think it’s right. And when an inadvertent act proves funny, keep it in the show.
Leverage your strengths. Martin started off his show business career working in a magic shop at Disneyland. He had a small act of non-comedic magic that he would later leverage in his stand-up act in a very innovative and funny way.
Look for opportunities from set-backs. As Martin stated “stand-up is seldom performed in ideal circumstances” and “the seedier the circumstances, the funnier one can be.”
Steve Martin may be a comedian, a trade many of us think comes naturally, but just like anything else it takes over coming many challenges to be a successful innovator.
In all aspects of life today, bigger is better, so why shouldn’t this apply in the courtroom? With many computer screens, projector screens, and televisions now featuring a 16:9 aspect ratio, rather than the 4:3 ratio, document treatments should fill the screen no matter what the screen size.
By looking at the image below, which overlays the two sizes, it is obvious how much more room you get with the widescreen pullout.
Both document treatments are from Nextpoint, the only web application on the market today to scale proportionally to the proper screen aspect ration. And when presenting evidence to jurors, bigger is always better.
It’s a difference you can really see! The individual images follow.
A recent post on law.com discusses the maturity of computer assisted search and review technologies. It describes some recent tests that were run comparing the predominant boolean search methodology with newer approaches such as concept searching, clustering, taxonomies, and um… Bayesian classifiers of course (calculating probabilities based on known relevant results). What they determined in summary was that no single search algorithm outperformed boolean searching, but when combined with boolean search more responsive documents were returned. Unfortunately, as you may have guessed more nonresponsive documents were also returned.
So is there hope for automated computer review technology? I wouldn’t get rid of your manual review process, but I’m a firm believer that computer assisted review will continue to improve and play a valuable role in the future of document review. One possibility is a hybrid approach along the lines of performing a narrow key word search, manually reviewing the results, and then implementing clustering and/or a bayesian algorithm on the remaining document set. Unfortunately, there are still some critical issues preventing this hybrid approach from taking hold.
First and foremost, we need transparency in the search algorithms. Transparency is really what makes boolean searching so powerful. If you could implement an alternative review algorithm with the same level of transparency, then it begins to work. For example, you could run a search that shows documents with a similar layout as those containing some critical keywords. Perhaps that helps you find other brochure documents that market tobacco as beneficial to your health but don’t explicitly state “good health” or “tobacco”.
Second, there needs to be an open platform for applying these algorithms in your evidence management repository. We run into occasions where it makes sense to implement a clustering algorithm for a case, but in doing so we need to port 10 million pages of documents into a separate repository. It’s difficult to justify the time and cost when a review team is readily available.
So keep your finger on the pulse of alternative search and review technologies, but I wouldn’t count on manual review going away anytime soon. Without transparency you’ll never reach agreement between parties on the scope of the review. And without an open platform for applying multiple approaches, you probably won’t save any money when compared to manual review.
