Notable Articles in E-Discovery July – August 2014

Judge Rules That Microsoft Must Turn Over Data Stored in Ireland (Nick WIngfield, Bits)

"Microsoft has suffered a setback in its efforts to block federal prosecutors from seizing a customer’s data that is stored overseas.

Judge Loretta A. Preska of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday upheld a magistrate judge’s ruling that Microsoft must turn over the customer’s emails, held in a Microsoft data center in Ireland. Big technology companies have rallied around Microsoft in the case, seeing the ruling as a potential threat to their plans to offer cloud computing services overseas.

Microsoft plans to appeal the ruling. Judge Preska agreed to stay her order while the company pursues the appeal."

How much data can one smart home generate? About 1 GB a week. (Stacey Higginbotham, GIGAOM)

"In this week’s podcast Sorkin discusses how he is using data to make decisions about when to water his lawn and when to replace ol inefficient appliances. It’s one thing to guess that a new washer or dryer will save you money, but Sorkin has the data to prove it. We discuss this and why users should be in control of their data."

Data Breaches, eDiscovery, and the Importance of Digital Forensics (Sharon Nelson & John Simek, Legal Talk Network)

"Every law firm can run into incidents of employee misconduct, data breaches, and intellectual property theft. In the age of modern technology, data breaches, insider trading, and other security problems require extensive technological forensics. Partners and firm owners, as well as lawyers working within the firm, need to understand why a digital investigation is needed, what steps should be taken within an investigation, and who should be involved. Having this knowledge can save the firm thousands of dollars while uncovering the truth."

Who's managing your managed services? You, ultimately. (Paul Venezia, InfoWorld)

"With all of the hubbub surrounding cloud services, application hosting, managed services, and the like, the reality of offloading the management and administrative burden of applications and business services is often overlooked. It's easy to say you're covered because you're paying a company to handle all the administration of the hardware and software underlying your app, but in many cases, that support is extremely limited in scope."

The Lessons Thus Far From the Transition to Digital Patient Records (Steve Lohr, Bits)

"...the government-promoted drive for electronic health records has been assailed as everything from a handout to greedy tech companies to the advance guard of socialist medicine. In an editorial in February 2009, The Wall Street Journal called the program a “stalking horse for government-run health care.” Forecasts and studies of the impact of the incentive program have been similarly varied. Some predicted big dollar savings and improved care, while others came to the opposite conclusion, seeing higher costs and medical errors induced by complex technology."

Latest Grossman and Cormack Study Proves Folly of Using Random Search For Machine Training – Part Three (Ralph Losey, e-Discovery Team)

"Here is how Cormack and Grossman summarize their findings:

The results presented here do not support the commonly advanced position that seed sets, or entire training sets, must be randomly selected [19, 28] [contra 11]. Our primary implementation of SPL, in which all training documents were randomly selected, yielded dramatically inferior results to our primary implementations of CAL and SAL, in which none of the training documents were randomly selected.

Evaluation of Machine-Learning Protocols for Technology-Assisted Review in Electronic Discovery, SIGIR’14, July 6–11, 2014, at pgs. 7-8."

Flying in the Clouds: A Safety Checklist (Peter Krakaur, Law Technology News)

"Your data is in the cloud. Somewhere, sanctioned or not. Your fellow lawyers and employees are using traditional business applications from third parties in parallel with (or in place of) your company’s offerings—e-mail, text messaging, telephone, calendar, document creation, file storage.Think Google offerings (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar), DropBox, Box, iCloud, Office365, Skype, and WebEx."