The Law and the Technology
University of Virginia Law School
Monday -Thursday, October 12 to 22, 2009
Classes meet at WB 121 from 8:30 to 9:50 ET
Course Lead: John Tredennick
Welcome
This course will explore how the current information explosion is transforming the civil litigation and regulatory process both in the United States and around the world. We will examine developing case law and standards for electronic discovery and address the practical problems and issues which arise in the preservation, collection, searching, processing and production of electronic data. The course will also provide an introduction to technologies, tools, and software currently used in this rapidly developing specialty area. Read the full course description
On these pages you will find our course schedule, topics, materials and suggested reading for each class. I will also use these pages to introduce our course faculty (we have a lot of great people joining us to share their experiences) and provide information about our analytical project using Catalyst CR and the TREC Enron document collection.
This course should be fun. One of our top Magistrate Judges will share his perspectives (and discuss his opinions) on important electronic discovery issues.Two of the most experienced (and prolific) forensics and collection experts will talk about technical issues involved in collecting data. Another forensics consultant is flying in from Hong Kong to talk about the hazards of collecting data in China, Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia. And, we have two senior litigation partners from two large international law firms coming to share their experiences with electronic discovery battles involving both English and foreign-language materials.
I intend to challenge you with a real-life search and analytics problem during our two weeks session. We have loaded over2 million emails into Catalyst CR, our search, analytics and review platform. You will be given a practical legal issue to research taken from the TREC competition. The challenge will be to develop a strategy to find responsive documents that would help you answer the legal issue.
We will start by creating 5 teams and giving you login accounts and some initial training. Later in the week, two of our top search experts will share their techniques for drilling into large volumes of documents. In week two, the CEO of Equivio, an Israeli company that provides powerful analytics software, will show you the techniques they used to solve the problem without using hundreds of reviewers to go through the documents.
It has been some time since I walked the halls at Virginia Law. I am looking forward to coming back, playing at being a professor, and learning as much as I teach. I hope you enjoy the course too.
Regards
John Tredennick
303-810-1918
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Course Information and Other Links
- Course Description: The full description
- Course Outline for Week One and Suggested Reading Materials
- Course Outline for Week Two and Suggested Reading Materials
- Applied Search Project: TREC and the Enron Collection
- About the Faculty: Learn more about our Course Faculty.
Special Notes
- Changed rules for Applied Search Project. This is now an individual effort and serves as an alternative to the exam.
- Uploaded Richard Kershaw's Slide Presentation for Thursday week two.
- Uploaded new report on an FTC settlement with six companies over Safe Harbor misrepresentations for Thursday, week two.
- Posted the assignment and rules for the Applied Search Project.
- Posted the recording for Tuesday's class in week two.
- Posted new slides for Amir Milo of Equivio Presentation on Understanding Analytics for Tuesday week two.
- Posted new Electronic Discovery Resources page.
- New article suggests France will now cooperate with U.S. electronic discovery requests. Posted for Thursday on week two.
- Posted the PowerPoint slides for Thurday's class on the Search Cases and Effective Search Techniques on week one page
- New posting of Chris Ohly's Slides on week two page.
- New article on Judicial Sanctions posted for Wednesday's class in week two .
- New coaching assignments have been posted for the TREC project.
- Corrected URL for Catalyst CR: Please add the s to https://demo.catalystapps.com/cr. The s denotes that the site is secured. Transmissions to and from the site are encrypted.
Course Home | Week One | Week Two | Applied Search Project | Faculty | Course Description | Resources Page