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Technology, Techniques and Best Practices
Bob Ambrogi

About Bob Ambrogi

A lawyer and veteran legal journalist, Bob advises Catalyst on strategic communications and marketing matters. He is also a practicing lawyer in Massachusetts and is the former editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal, Lawyers USA and Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. A fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, he also writes the blog LawSites.

Article: ‘Taming Big Data E-Discovery Using the Cloud’

by Bob Ambrogi | June 10, 2013

The business world is accumulating data at a staggering rate. Every day, estimates say, we create 2.5 exabytes of data. That number will double by 2014. Just one business, Walmart, is said to collect more than 2.5 petabytes of customer data every hour.

In this era of big data, legacy locally installed appliances stop making sense as e-discovery platforms for corporations and their counsel. Just as businesses are increasingly turning to cloud systems for other enterprise functions, they are turning to the cloud for e-discovery. Without doubt, cost savings is the single greatest factor driving corporations and their law firms towards the cloud for e-discovery. But there are several other ways in which the cloud is better suited to e-discovery than an appliance.

In an article published in Computer Technology Review, Taming Big Data E-Discovery Using the Cloud, Catalyst CEO John Tredennick explains why cloud platforms are better suited than local appliances to handling the demands of big data e-discovery.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Proposed Federal E-Discovery Rules Approved for Public Comment

by Bob Ambrogi | June 10, 2013

In a post here in April, we discussed proposed changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure designed to enhance cooperation and proportionality and to standardize sanctions. At that point, the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules had just voted to send the proposed changes to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure for consideration at its meeting June 3 and 4 in Washington, D.C.

Now, Milberg lawyer Henry Kelston is reporting at Law Technology News that the Standing Committee has voted to approve for public comment the full package of proposed rules changes. The vote to move the package to the next step took place “with minimal discussion and no significant dissent,” Kelston writes.

Surprisingly, it was one of the most modest of the proposed changes that elicited the most discussion. Some members of the Standing Committee raised questions about whether a proposed change to Rule 1 is necessary or would have any impact in the “real world,” according to Kelston.

The change to Rule 1, which the Advisory Committee characterized as “modest,” is intended to encourage cooperation by making the parties share in the responsibilities imposed by the rule. As amended, it would read: “[T]hese rules should be construed, administered, and employed by the court and the parties to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” [Italicized text is new.]

Some members of the Standing Committee also questioned proposed Rule 37(e), to the extent that it would allow spoliation sanctions in the absence of willfulness or bad faith if the failure to preserve “irreparably deprived a party of any meaningful opportunity to present or defend against the claims in the action and was negligent or grossly negligent.”

As far as I can find, no record of the Standing Committee’s vote has yet to be posted on the U.S. Courts’ website. The May 8 Advisory Committee report on which the Standing Committee voted is available here [PDF].

With the Standing Committee’s approval, the proposals will now be published for a six-month period of public comment and public hearings. After the comment period, the Advisory Committee can consider whether to make any further changes and, if so, whether to solicit any further public comment. At some point, the Advisory Committee would send the package back to the Standing Committee for final approval. From there, the rules would go to the Judicial Conference for approval and then to the Supreme Court.

Filed Under: Court rules, Sanctions Tagged With: , ,

Court’s Suggestion to Use Predictive Coding Leads to Dispute over Cooperation

by Bob Ambrogi | June 6, 2013

Hat tip to K&L Gates Electronic Discovery Law blog for picking up on an interesting federal court opinion that, in the end, doesn’t actually decide anything substantive, but that is nonetheless notable for its illustration of some of the issues courts and counsel now face in the wake of last year’s groundbreaking opinion by U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck, Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, that was the first to give a judicial seal of approval to the use of predictive coding.

Perhaps most remarkable about this latest case, Gordon v. Kaleida Health, is that it was the judge, not the litigants, who suggested the use of predictive coding in the first place. Impatient with the parties’ year-long attempts to agree on how to achieve a cost-effective review of some 200,000-300,000 emails, U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio of the Western District of New York pointed them to the Da Silva Moore ruling and suggested they try predictive coding. Here is how he explains it in his opinion:

At the last of a series of ESI discovery status conferences with the court, … the court expressed dissatisfaction with the parties’ lack of progress toward resolving issues related to completion of review and production of Defendants’ e-mails using the key-word search method, and pointed to the availability of predictive coding, a computer assisted ESI reviewing and production method directing the parties’ attention to the recent decision of Magistrate Judge Peck in Moore v. Publicis Groupe & MSL Group, 287 F.R.D. 182 (S.D.N.Y.2012), approving use of predictive coding in a case involving over 3 million e-mails.

It was a sensible suggestion on Judge Foschio’s part. Unfortunately, rather than bring the parties to agreement, the suggestion only gave them new grounds on which to disagree. Defendants took the judge up on his suggestion to use predictive coding, but the parties then quickly fell into disagreements over the extent to which plaintiffs would be involved in the predictive coding process. Plaintiffs wanted their ESI consultants to participate with defendants in establishing a protocol. They also wanted to meet with defendants to discuss various search issues that they believed were critical to the integrity of the process.

Plaintiffs Seek Agreement on Protocol

Defendants objected to having plaintiffs participate in establishing the protocol and to meeting to discuss search issues. Instead, defendants sent plaintiffs their protocol and said they would also send a list of their email custodians. When plaintiffs received defendants’ protocol, they objected to its use, asserting there were several technical issues that plaintiffs’ ESI consultants would be willing to discuss and help resolve. When defendants refused this request, plaintiffs filed a motion to compel defendants to meet and confer in order to establish an agreed-upon protocol for using predictive coding.

In support of their motion, plaintiffs contended that when a party intends to use predictive coding, it is necessary that the parties jointly negotiate a protocol to guide the process. In making this argument, they relied in part on the Da Silva Moore opinion, in which Judge Peck said, “Electronic discovery requires cooperation between opposing counsel and transparency in all aspects of preservation and production of ESI.” In keeping with this spirit of cooperation and transparency, they asserted, they should be privy to information regarding how defendants would select the set of seed documents that would be used to train the predictive coding engine.

In response to this motion, defendants told Judge Foschio they had never objected to meeting and conferring with plaintiffs regarding the predictive coding protocol. Rather, they had objected to meeting with a specific ESI consultant retained by plaintiffs, because the same consultant had previously provided services to the defendants in the same case.

Although now willing to meet with plaintiffs, defendants argued that the court should not require them to agree with plaintiffs on specific protocols, contending that the predictive coding process should be subject to the general rule that the method of ESI production is within the “sound discretion” of the producing party. Finally, defendants noted that the Da Silva Moore court never required the party using predictive coding to provide the seed set to its opponents; rather, the party volunteered to provide that data.

In the end, Judge Foschio seized on defendants’ representation that they were prepared to meet and confer with plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ ESI consultants, provided it was not the consultant who had worked for defendants. Given this representation, Judge Foschio said, there was no need to address other issues raised by plaintiffs’ motion. Thus, the judge dismissed the motion without prejudice.

The Bottom Line

Although the opinion decided no substantive issue, it is interesting for its discussion of the relative rights and obligations of litigants when one party chooses to use predictive coding. The opinion never decides the extent to which cooperation and transparency are required. But it outlines arguments we are certain to hear many times over again in future litigation.

As I said at the outset, the opinion is also interesting in that it was the judge who suggested predictive coding in the first place. Just a year ago, it was remarkable when a judge was willing to accept the litigants’ use of predictive coding. Now, we have a judge recommending its use of his own accord. That is a clear indication that, in terms of judicial acceptance of predictive coding, we’ve come a long way baby.

Filed Under: Predictive Ranking, Search Tagged With: , ,

Judge Tells Non-Party Google: Show Apple Your Search Terms

by Bob Ambrogi | May 29, 2013

E-discovery disputes typically arise between the parties to a lawsuit. But what happens when a non-party to the lawsuit is subpoenaed to produce electronically stored information? To what extent do its obligations mirror those that apply to the parties under the federal discovery rules?

Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal

That was the question in a recent case in which the non-party was none other than search giant Google. The question arose after another technology giant, Apple, as part of its ongoing patent litigation against Samsung, subpoenaed Google to produce certain documents.

After Google produced documents in response to the subpoena, Apple and Google held a meet-and-confer at which Apple raised concerns about the deficiency of Google’s production. To alleviate its concerns and enable it to evaluate the adequacy of the production, Apple requested that Google provide a list of the search terms and custodians Google used to find the documents.

Google refused to turn over the search terms and Apple filed a motion to compel. Earlier this month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal, sitting in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., issued his ruling on Apple’s motion.

Discovery Obligations of a Non-Party

As Judge Grewal explained, Google shifted in its arguments for why it should not turn over the search terms. Initially, at the meet-and-confer with Apple, Google maintained that its search terms and choice of custodians were privileged under the work-product immunity doctrine. It quickly abandoned this argument, the judge noted, “no doubt in part because case law suggests otherwise.”

Before the court, Google argued that producing the search terms and custodians would be unduly burdensome. The judge dismissed this in short order, explaining that Google provided no evidence to support this argument. Google also offered, in lieu of revealing its own search terms, to consider search terms and custodians suggested by Apple, but Apple declined.

After failing with these arguments, Google finally got Judge Grewal’s attention with the argument he described as “the heart of its opposition.” Google’s argument was that its status as a non-party to the lawsuit exempted it from the same sorts of obligations parties would bear to show the sufficiency of their production, at least until Apple first demonstrated that Google’s production was somehow deficient.

Google complains that “the impact of requiring non-parties to provide complete ‘transparency’ into their search methodology and custodians in responding to non-party subpoenas whenever unsubstantiated claims of production deficiencies are made would be extraordinary.” At the hearing, Google explained that providing custodians or search terms would open it to further burdensome discovery by Apple.

Judge Grewal, in his opinion, immediately rephrased Google’s argument in words that foreshadowed what he thought about it:

Google raises an important question: is it “extraordinary” to expect third parties to be transparent about their discovery methods? Underlying Google’s premise is that transparency in the discovery process is a burden or that the methods of discovery are somehow sacrosanct, and that revealing those methods opens the floodgates to more requests for discovery.

To resolve this question, Judge Grewal relied on a case that neither party cited in its arguments, DeGeer v. Gillis, 755 F. Supp. 2d 909 (N.D. Ill. 2010). It, too, involved a party’s request that a non-party provide search terms and custodians. And it involved a similar impasse, in which the non-party refused to turn over the terms and the party refused to suggest new ones. The DeGeer judge — now-retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Nan R. Nolan — ordered the non-party to produce the search terms and custodians in the hope it would facilitate meaningful discussions between the parties regarding any deficiencies in the production.

Although she ordered production, Judge Nolan was not happy with either side in the subpoena dispute. The non-party, by failing to disclose its search terms and custodians, “violated the principles of an open, transparent discovery process,” she wrote. At the same time, the party that sought the search terms had no excuse for its intransigence in failing to suggest search terms and custodians of its own, she added. Both sides should have cooperated in agreeing on search terms and custodians before the production ever took place, she said.

Admonishments for Both Sides

Judge Grewal found this reasoning applicable to the dispute between Google and Apple, concluding that each came up short in meeting its duty to collaborate with the other:

As the DeGeer court observed, transparency and collaboration is essential to meaningful, cost-effective discovery. Google’s attempt to stand outside of these tenets because of its third-party status is unpersuasive. Although it should not be required to “subsidize” litigation to which it is not a party, it confuses undue burden with its obligations, once subject to a subpoena, to participate in transparent and collaborative discovery. Third-party status does not confer a right to obfuscation or obstinacy.

Apple likewise failed to collaborate in its efforts to secure proper discovery from Google. It requested search terms and custodians only after it suspected that Google’s discovery was insufficient, and when Google offered to run additional terms on additional custodians, Apple made no effort to explore meaningful collaboration on obtaining the documents it believed were not produced.

Many years ago, when I was a young Catholic-school student, we would have called that brief lecture on cooperation a “slap on the knuckles.” But it remained for Judge Grewal to decide the question before him of whether to compel Google to produce its search terms and custodians. This he resolved in short order:

The court finds that production of Google’s search terms and custodians to Apple will aid in uncovering the sufficiency of Google’s production and serves greater purposes of transparency in discovery. Google shall produce the search terms and custodians no later than 48 hours from this order. Once those terms and custodians are provided, no later than 48 hours from the tender, the parties shall meet and confer in person to discuss the lists and to attempt to resolve any remaining disputes regarding Google’s production.

The ruling is barely seven pages but it is remarkably rich in the lessons it provides. For one, it makes clear that the e-discovery obligations of a non-party in response to a subpoena largely mirror those of a party under the federal rules. For another, its stands for the proposition that disclosure of search terms and custodians is consistent with the obligation that the e-discovery process be transparent and collaborative.

Last but not least, we cannot leave Judge Grewal’s opinion without noting the zinger of a footnote he dropped. As noted above, one of Google’s arguments was that producing its search terms and custodians would be unduly burdensome. After dispensing with this argument, Judge Grewal added the following in a footnote: “The court cannot help but note the irony that Google, a pioneer in searching the internet, is arguing that it would be unduly burdened by producing a list of how it searched its own files.”

Read Judge Grewal’s opinion here.

Filed Under: Case law, Search Tagged With: , ,

Listen to Interview with Catalyst CTO Larry Barela on E-Discovery in the Cloud

by Bob Ambrogi | May 22, 2013

Larry Barela

This week, lawyer and writer Ari Kaplan interviewed Larry Barela, chief technology officer at Catalyst, about e-discovery in the cloud. They discussed Insight, Catalyst’s cloud-based e-discovery platform, and how it differs from other available platforms.

Larry talks about the advantages of a single dynamic XML back-end and the benefits of cloud-based software. He also address concerns about the security of cloud-based computing and offers his predictions for the continued operation of e-discovery functions in the cloud.

You can listen to the interview here: A Catalyst for Reinventing the Cloud.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Should There Be An International Standard for E-Discovery?

by Bob Ambrogi | May 20, 2013

By early July, a committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is slated to release a working draft of an international standard governing the discovery of electronically stored information. This is just an early step in a long process that could take years to conclude. The outcome, however, could be publication of a final standard that would provide technical and procedural guidance for e-discovery worldwide.

The ISO's Central Secretariat Headquarters in Geneva.

The potential significance of this was explained to Law Technology News earlier this year by Eric Hibbard, CTO for security and privacy at Hitachi Data Systems and co-editor of the project. If e-discovery products and services are certified as ISO-compliant, then a party and its counsel could more easily decide what to purchase, and judges could be more certain that e-discovery follows uniform methods, Hibbard said.

From what I can find, little is available on the ISO website about the project, which is ISO/IEC NP 27050. (Many of the documents on the ISO site require a password for access.) The project is being undertaken by Subcommittee 27 (SC 27) of Joint Technical Committee 1, which is a joint effort of the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission. SC 27 focuses on security techniques.

The best overview I’ve seen so far is a piece written for Law Technology News by Steven Teppler, chair of the information governance and e-discovery practice for the Sarasota, Fla., law firm Kirk Pinkerton. As Teppler explains, SC 27 gave final approval to development of the standard when it met in France in late April, after an earlier delay in the approval process. By early July, a working draft is due. Comments will be gathered over the summer and considered by SC 27 at its meeting next October in the Republic of Korea.

As currently envisioned, Teppler writes, the standard will focus on providing guidance with respect to terminology and a range of technological and process challenges associated with e-discovery and ESI. However, the project could evolve into a multi-part standard that could include actual requirements in addition to guidance, he says.

The project scope involves the development of an international standard that addresses activities in e-discovery, including, but not limited to identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, and production of ESI. Another project aim is to help clarify issues that are not directly addressed in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, such as identifying, collecting, and processing ESI. In addition, this standard will provide guidance on measures, spanning from the initial creation of ESI through to its final disposition, which an organization can undertake to mitigate risk and expense often associated with e-discovery issues.

One article that I came across argues that the ISO has already promulgated a standard for e-discovery, ISO 9001, the international standard for certifying that a company follows high quality management principles. Be that as it may, there is no question that a uniform set of precise and specific standards could be beneficial both for consumers and providers of e-discovery services and technology. The only real question, perhaps, is whether agreement on such standards could ever be reached.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Why the Cloud is Better for E-Discovery: eWeek Interviews Catalyst CEO

by Bob Ambrogi | May 9, 2013

As big data makes it more complicated for enterprises to respond to discovery and regulatory requests in U.S. legal matters, many are finding that there are multiple advantages in moving their e-discovery efforts to the cloud. Recently, based on its interview with Catalyst founder and CEO John Tredennick, the digital magazine eWeek published a slideshow, E-Discovery Management More Effective in the Cloud: 10 Reasons Why. Click the image below to go to the full slideshow.

Filed Under: Catalyst News, Cloud Computing, Uncategorized Tagged With:

University of Florida and Catalyst Team Up to Offer Law Students an Innovative, Hands-On Data Analysis and Review Course

by Bob Ambrogi | May 8, 2013

[The following is a guest post written by William "Bill" Hamilton, partner at Quarles & Brady and executive director of the UF Law E-Discovery Project. He was the principal instructor for the course he describes.]

This spring, the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Catalyst teamed up to break new law school ground by offering an ambitious, experimental e-discovery course, “Electronic Discovery Data Analysis and Review.” The course followed the “basic” e-discovery course that the University of Florida law school has offered since 2007, and which uses Catalyst’s products for demonstration purposes. This time, however, the students would get their hands on the data.

Bill Hamilton

The course quickly attracted more than 30 UF law students. The course also caught the attention of the University of Florida Department of Computer & Information Science and Engineering. Two of its students audited the course. (The department has collaborated with UF Law to build a random sampling tool that will shortly be available for a fee download.)

To power the course, Catalyst built and provided the students with an e-discovery “sandbox” consisting of over 800,000 Enron documents where students were able to perform class assignments and experiment with the cloud-based search technology of Catalyst Insight. It is truly impressive to be able to search hundreds of thousands of documents in less than a second. For the students, huge data volume suddenly became a real problem and a real opportunity.

The course featured virtual presentations by Jim Edelman, senior search and analytics consultant at Catalyst, on keyword search problems that featured “war stories” and lessons learned; training on Catalyst Insight by the Catalyst training team; in-class presentations by Catalyst search consultant Ron Tienzo on predictive coding and review design; and a dynamic presentation by Catalyst’s CEO John Tredennick on predictive coding processes given at the recent UF/EDRM conference on electronic discovery for the small and medium case.

Practical Learning for Law Students

The Data Analysis and Review course progressed by tracking Catalyst’s product development trajectory. Simple free-form search exercises soon became enhanced with faceted searches that then became Catalyst defensible tracked searches and that were ultimately complemented with machine learning processes. At each step in Catalyst’s evolution, the class tracked the case law and articles that have pushed forward the search revolution of the past two years.

We even broke up into teams and tested ourselves in mock Rule 26(f) conferences based on real search problems. We also discussed the trials and tribulations of designing a review (passes, quality control, reviewers, batching, coding, privilege, etc.) and then had to design a review using Catalyst’s graphic tool. Doing it yourself requires thought, perseverance, imagination and a certain mental toughness. Application is the real learning moment.

This UF Law course featured a unique combination of participation by Catalyst professionals who dedicated their time and energy and a non-traditional practical problem-focused law school course designed to prepare students for real-world experiences. We read case law but also watched a UF Law Information Services team break down a PC and explain data storage, memory, and processing. We studied case law and secondary sources, but we also learned that developing actual search queries in a real-time environment is not easy. It takes practice, practice and practice. We studied the Catalyst user manual, but learned that even a program with an intuitively designed user interface has power features that are manageable only with experience.

E-discovery education can only meet its challenge when legal service providers offer hands-on data analysis and management experience. E-discovery education must not only talk the talk, but, as Craig Ball has emphasized for years, must walk the data walk if it is to produce competent e-discovery professionals. Hats off to Catalyst for helping to make this happen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

In Praise of Proportionality: Judge OKs Predictive Coding After Keyword Search

by Bob Ambrogi | April 29, 2013

Predictive coding purists might argue that the process is tainted if it is preceded by the use of keyword searching to reduce the document set. As a matter of fact, that was exactly what the plaintiffs argued in the multi-district litigation against Biomet over its M2a Magnum hip implant. But in a ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Miller Jr. said that proportionality trumped purity, and that even if predictive coding might unearth additional relevant documents, the cost would far outweigh the likely benefits.

Emblème de la JusticeThe ruling came in a highly contentious matter in which Biomet has already produced 2.5 million documents out of a universe of 19.5 million. The plaintiffs say Biomet has not produced enough and that the production should total closer to 10 million documents.

Biomet began the process of producing documents in the summer of 2012, before the multiple lawsuits over its hip implant were centralized under the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. It started by using keyword culling, reducing the number of documents from 19.5 million to 3.9 million, or 1.5 terabytes of data. Deduplication further reduced the number of documents to 2.5 million.

Biomet then employed predictive coding to identity relevant and privileged documents from among the 2.5 million that remained after keyword searching and deduplication. It also invited the plaintiffs to suggest additional search terms and offered to produce the rest of the non-privileged documents so that plaintiffs could verify that it was producing the relevant documents.

This process has cost Biomet $1.07 million so far and will end up costing between $2 million and $3.25 million, according to Judge Miller’s ruling.

The plaintiffs objected that Biomet’s initial use of keyword searching tainted the predictive coding process. They argued that keyword searching is less accurate than predictive coding, citing a recent article that said that keyword searches generate only a 20 percent responsive rate, compared to at least a 75 percent responsive rate for predictive coding. Because Biomet started with the less-accurate keyword searches, the entire process is flawed. The only remedy, they asserted, is for Biomet to go back to where it started and employ predictive coding against the original set of 19.5 million documents, with plaintiffs and defendants sitting together and jointly going through the process.

Balancing Cost against Benefits

Against this backdrop, Judge Miller framed the issue this way:

The issue before me today isn’t whether predictive coding is a better way of doing things than keyword searching prior to predictive coding. I must decide whether Biomet’s procedure satisfies its discovery obligations and, if so, whether it must also do what the Steering Committee seeks.

Judge Miller easily decides that Biomet’s process complied with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and with the Seventh Circuit Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information, as well as with principles set forth by The Sedona Conference.

By contrast, he says that plaintiffs’ request that Biomet go back to Square One “sits uneasily with the proportionality standard in Rule 26(b)(2)(C).” The cost of this, he notes, would run in the “low seven figures,” but Biomet’s testing suggests it would find only a “comparatively modest number of documents.”

It might well be that predictive coding, instead of a keyword search, at Stage Two of the process would unearth additional relevant documents. But it would cost Biomet a million, or millions, of dollars to test the Steering Committee’s theory that predictive coding would produce a significantly greater number of relevant documents. Even in light of the needs of the hundreds of plaintiffs in this case, the very large amount in controversy, the parties’ resources, the importance of the issues at stake, and the importance of this discovery in resolving the issues,I can’t find that the likely benefits of the discovery proposed by the Steering Committee equals or outweighs its additional burden on, and additional expense to, Biomet.

Judge Miller concludes by stating that he assumes Biomet will remain open to meeting and conferring on additional, reasonable search terms and to producing the non-privileged documents included in the statistical sample. “Beyond that,” he writes, “if the Steering Committee wishes production of documents that can be identified only through re-commenced processing, predictive coding, review, and production, the Steering Committee will have to bear the expense.”

The full text of Judge Miller’s order is below. (If you are not able to see the embedded document below, click here to see it.)


Filed Under: Case law, Predictive Ranking, Search Tagged With: , , , ,

San Francisco Seminar: Technology Assisted Review for the Real World

by Bob Ambrogi | April 25, 2013

In San Francisco next week, Catalyst is hosting a unique lunch and learn opportunity—a special presentation on the use of Catalyst’s Predictive Ranking technology to cut the cost and time of e-discovery review.

Using intelligent algorithms, Predictive Ranking can help significantly reduce the volume of data in a matter, saving review time and cost. Predictive Ranking offers the ability to prioritize the documents most responsive to a matter, so your review team gets to them earlier and can quickly make key decisions about the case.

Catalyst’s Predictive Ranking is unique among systems for technology-assisted review in its ability to respond to the dynamics of real-world litigation, including rolling collections. This seminar will start with an overview of Predictive Ranking and other forms of TAR and then demonstrate how Catalyst’s system differs.

The speakers at the seminar will be:

  • Jeremy Pickens, Ph.D, Senior Applied Research Scientist, Catalyst Repository Systems. One of the world’s leading search scientists and a pioneer in the field of collaborative exploratory search. Dr. Pickens has six patents pending in the field of search and information retrieval, including two for collaborative exploratory search systems. At Catalyst, Dr. Pickens researches and develops methods of using exploratory search to achieve more intelligent and precise results in e-discovery search and review.
  • John Breen, Esq., Vice President and Discovery Counsel, Union Bank. Mr. Breen is responsible for discovery-related activities at Union Bank. Mr. Breen continually refines the processes around e-discovery to ensure defensibility and to save time and money. Mr. Breen evaluates and selects technology and optimizes processes for a variety of matters. He is also involved with information governance initiatives throughout the bank.

This free seminar will be held Thursday, May 2, noon to 1 p.m., at the offices of Kirkland & Ellis LLP in downtown San Francisco. To register and for more information, view the event page.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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