Month: March 2013

Total Time & Cost to ECA

Bill Tolson eDiscovery, Technology , , , , , , ,

A key phase in eDiscovery is Early Case Assessment (ECA), the process of reviewing case data and evidence to estimate risk, cost and time requirements, and to set the appropriate go-forward strategy to prosecute or defend a legal case – should you fight the case or settle as soon as possible. Early case assessment can be expensive and time consuming and because of the time involved, may not leave you with enough time to properly review evidence and create case strategy. Organizations are continuously looking for ways to move into the early case assessment process as quickly as possible, with the most accurate data, while spending the least amount of money.

The early case assessment process usually involves the following steps:

  1. Determine what the case is about, who in your organization could be involved, and the timeframe in question.
  2. Determine where potentially relevant information could be residing – storage locations.
  3. Place a broad litigation hold on all potentially responsive information.
  4. Collect and protect all potentially relevant information.
  5. Review all potentially relevant information.
  6. Perform a risk-benefit analysis on reviewed information.
  7. Develop a go-forward strategy.

Every year organizations continue to amass huge amounts of electronically stored information (ESI), primarily because few of them have systematic processes to actually dispose of electronic information – it is just too easy for custodians to hit the “save” button and forget about it. This ever-growing mass of electronic information means effective early case assessment cannot be a strictly manual process anymore. Software applications that can find, cull down and prioritize responsive electronic documents quickly must be utilized to give the defense time to actually devise a case strategy.

Total Time & Cost to ECA (TT&C to ECA)

The real measure of effective ECA is the total time and cost consumed to get to the point of being able to create a go-forward strategy; total time & cost to ECA.

The most time consuming and costly steps are the collection and review of all potentially relevant information (steps 4 and 5 above) to determine case strategy. This is due to the fact that to really make the most informed decision on strategy, all responsive information should be reviewed to determine case direction and how.

Predictive Coding for lower TT&C to ECA

Predictive Coding is a process that combines people, technology and workflow to find, prioritize and tag key relevant documents quickly, irrespective of keyword to speed the evidence review process while reducing costs. Due to its documented accuracy and efficiency gains, Predictive Coding is transforming how Early Case Assessment (ECA), analysis and document review are done.

The same predictive coding process used in document review can be used effectively for finding responsive documents for early case assessment quickly and at a much lower cost than traditional methods.

ECAlinearReview

Figure 1: The time & cost to ECA timeline graphically shows what additional time can mean in the eDiscovery process

Besides the sizable reduction in cost, using predictive coding for ECA gives you more time to actually create case strategy using the most relevant information. Many organizations find themselves with little or no time to actually create case strategy before trail because of the time consumed just reviewing documents. Having the complete set of relevant documents sooner in the process will give you the most relevant data and the greatest amount of time to actually use it effectively.

Discoverable versus Admissible; aren’t they the same?

Bill Tolson eDiscovery, Technology , , , ,

This question comes up a lot, especially from non-attorneys. The thought is that if something is discoverable, then it must be admissible; the assumption being that a Judge will not allow something to be discovered if it can’t be used in court. The other thought is that everything is discoverable if it pertains to the case and therefor everything is admissible.

Let’s first address what’s discoverable. For good cause, the court may order discovery of any matter (content) that’s not privileged relevant to the subject matter involved in the action. In layman’s terms, if it is potentially relevant to the case, you may have to produce it in discovery or in other words, anything and everything is potentially discoverable.  All discovery is subject to the limitations imposed by FRCP Rule 26(b)(2)(C).

With that in mind, let’s look at the subject of admissibility.

In Lorraine v. Markel Am. Ins. Co., 241 F.R.D. 534, 538 (D. Md. 2007), the court started with the premise that the admissibility of ESI is determined by a collection of evidence rules “that present themselves like a series of hurdles to be cleared by the proponent of the evidence”.  “Failure to clear any of these evidentiary hurdles means that the evidence will not be admissible”. Whenever ESI is offered as evidence, five evidentiary rules need to be considered. They are:

  • is relevant to the case
  • is authentic
  • is not hearsay pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 801
  • is an original or duplicate under the original writing rule
  • has probative value that is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice or one of the other factors identified by Federal Rule of Evidence 403, such that it should be excluded despite its relevance.

Hearsay is defined as a statement made out of court that is offered in court as evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Hearsay comes in many forms including written or oral statements or even gestures.

It is the Judge’s job to determine if evidence is hearsay or credible. There are three evidentiary rules that help the Judge make this determination:

  1. Before being allowed to testify, a witness generally must swear or affirm that his or her testimony will be truthful.
  2. The witness must be personally present at the trial or proceeding in order to allow the judge or jury to observe the testimony firsthand.
  3. The witness is subject to cross-examination at the option of any party who did not call the witness to testify.

The Federal Rules of Evidence Hearsay Rule prohibits most statements made outside of court from being used as evidence in court. Looking at the three evidentiary rules mentioned above – usually a statement made outside of the courtroom is not made under oath, the person making the statement outside of court is not present to be observed by the Judge, and the opposing party is not able to cross examine the statement maker. This is not to say all statements made outside of court are inadmissible. The Federal Rule of Evidence 801 does provide for several exclusions to the Hearsay rule.

All content is discoverable if it potentially is relevant to the case and not deemed privileged, but discovered content may be ruled inadmissible if it is deemed privileged (doctor/patient communications), unreliable or hearsay. You may be wondering how an electronic document can be considered hearsay? The hearsay rule refers to “statements” which can either be written or oral. So, as with paper documents, in order to determine whether the content of electronic documents are hearsay or fact, the author of the document must testify under oath and submit to cross-examination in order to determine whether the content is fact and can stand as evidence.

This legal argument between fact and hearsay does not relieve the discoveree from finding, collecting and producing all content in that could be relevant to the case.

Next Generation Technologies Reduce FOIA Bottlenecks

Bill Tolson eDiscovery, Information Management, records retention, Technology , , , , , , , , , , ,

Federal agencies are under more scrutiny to resolve issues with responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The Freedom of Information Act provides for the full disclosure of agency records and information to the public unless that information is exempted under clearly delineated statutory language. In conjunction with FOIA, the Privacy Act serves to safeguard public interest in informational privacy by delineating the duties and responsibilities of federal agencies that collect, store, and disseminate personal information about individuals. The procedures established ensure that the Department of Homeland Security fully satisfies its responsibility to the public to disclose departmental information while simultaneously safeguarding individual privacy.

In February of this year, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened a congressional review of executive branch compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

The committee sent a six page letter to the Director of Information Policy at the Department of Justice (DOJ), Melanie Ann Pustay. In the letter, the committee questions why, based on a December 2012 survey, 62 of 99 government agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations and processes which was required by Attorney General Eric Holder in a 2009 memorandum. In fact the Attorney General’s own agency have not updated their regulations and processes since 2003.

The committee also pointed out that there are 83,000 FOIA request still outstanding as of the writing of the letter.

In fairness to the federal agencies, responding to a FOIA request can be time-consuming and expensive if technology and processes are not keeping up with increasing demands. Electronic content can be anywhere including email systems, SharePoint servers, file systems, and individual workstations. Because content is spread around and not usually centrally indexed, enterprise wide searches for content do not turn up all potentially responsive content. This means a much more manual, time consuming process to find relevant content is used.

There must be a better way…

New technology can address the collection problem of searching for relevant content across the many storage locations where electronically stored information (ESI) can reside. For example, an enterprise-wide search capability with “connectors” into every data repository, email, SharePoint, file systems, ECM systems, records management systems allows all content to be centrally indexed so that an enterprise wide keyword search will find all instances of content with those keywords present. A more powerful capability to look for is the ability to search on concepts, a far more accurate way to search for specific content. Searching for conceptually comparable content can speed up the collection process and drastically reduce the number of false positives in the results set while finding many more of the keyword deficient but conceptually responsive records. In conjunction with concept search, automated classification/categorization of data can reduce search time and raise accuracy.

The largest cost in responding to a FOIA request is in the review of all potentially relevant ESI found during collection. Another technology that can drastically reduce the problem of having to review thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of documents for relevancy and privacy currently used by attorneys for eDiscovery is Predictive Coding.

Predictive Coding is the process of applying machine learning and iterative supervised learning technology to automate document coding and prioritize review. This functionality dramatically expedites the actual review process while dramatically improving accuracy and reducing the risk of missing key documents. According to a RAND Institute for Civil Justice report published in 2012, document review cost savings of 80% can be expected using Predictive Coding technology.

With the increasing number of FOIA requests swamping agencies, agencies are hard pressed to catch up to their backlogs. The next generation technologies mentioned above can help agencies reduce their FOIA related costs while decreasing their response time.

Healthcare Information Governance Requires a New Urgency

Bill Tolson eDiscovery, Information Management, Technology , , , , , , , ,

From safeguarding the privacy of patient medical records to ensuring every staff member can rapidly locate emergency procedures, healthcare organizations have an ethical, legal, and commercial responsibility to protect and manage the information in their care. Inadequate information management processes can result in:

  • A breach of protected health information (PHI) costing millions of dollars and ruined reputations.
  • A situation where accreditation is jeopardized due to a team-member’s inability to demonstrate the location of a critical policy.
  • A premature release of information about a planned merger causing the deal to fail or incurring additional liability.

The benefits of effectively protecting and managing healthcare information are widely recognized but many organizations have struggled to implement effective information governance solutions. Complex technical, organizational, regulatory and cultural challenges have increased implementation risks and costs and have led to relatively high failure rates.  Ultimately, many of these challenges are related to information governance.

In January 2013, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a set of modifications to the HIPAA privacy, security, enforcement and breach notification rules.  These included:

  • Making business associates directly liable for data breaches
  • Clarifying and increasing the breach notification process and penalties
  • Strengthening limitations on data usage for marketing
  • Expanding patient rights to the disclosure of data when they pay cash for care

Effective Healthcare Information Governance steps

Inadvertent or just plain sloppy non-compliance with regulatory requirements can cost your healthcare organization millions of dollars in regulatory fines and legal penalties. For those new to the healthcare information governance topic, below are some suggested steps that will help you move toward reduced risk by implementing more effective information governance processes:

  1. Map out all data and data sources within the enterprise
  2. Develop and/or refresh organization-wide information governance policies and processes
  3. Have your legal counsel review and approve all new and changed policies
  4. Educate all employees and partners, at least annually, on their specific responsibilities
  5. Limit data held exclusively by individual employees
  6. Audit all policies to ensure employee compliance
  7. Enforce penalties for non-compliance

Healthcare information is by nature heterogeneous. While administrative information systems are highly structured, some 80% of healthcare information is unstructured or free form.  Securing and managing large amounts of unstructured patient as well as business data is extremely difficult and costly without an information governance capability that allows you to recognize content immediately, classify content accurately, retain content appropriately and dispose of content defensibly.