Why Information Governance is Eclipsing eDiscovery

Everywhere you look right now, Information Governance, “IG,” has taken center stage.  I have had the pleasure of speaking twice in a week on the topic – once to records managers at ARMA’s Northeast Regional Conference and once to litigators at McDermott’s Technology in the Law Symposium.  Why is IG so hot and why is it overtaking the discussion on eDiscovery?

IG is hot, hot, hot

IG is the Next Big Thing because it is a catch-all concept that covers a lot of currently important ground:  compliance, data ethics and breaches, data management and intelligence, workflow, visualization and analytics.  All of these elements play a key part in IG, and always have.  So, why is it hot now?  The biggest factor is the Target data breach of over 70 million customers’ personal data.  The scope of the breach (nearly 25% of all American citizens were affected) and the wall-to-wall media coverage has helped propel responsible data management into the forefront of society’s concerns.  In fact, a Pew Research study in January found that over 50% of Americans are “worried about the amount of personal information available about them…”  The IG train of responsible data management has left the proverbial station and is speeding its way through the legal system, through Wall St., and through consumers’ concerns and buying behavior.  Nothing speaks louder than consumers and their wallets.  For Target, “Satisfactionwith the overall shopping experience was down almost 2 percentage points inMarch, with declines “most acute” among middle-and-upper-income shoppers” as late as April, 2014 -four months after the breach was announced.

Why is the IG discussion eclipsing the eDiscovery discussion?

For starters, eDiscovery is old news.  The earliest uses of the phrase stem from 2004, nearly a decade ago, and well before the FRCP changes in late 2006.  Today most litigants, and certainly their outside counsel & advisors are very familiar with its concepts.  In fact, most service providers in legal, lit support or eDiscovery already have a wealth of tools and solutions to choose from.  Need Early Case Assessment?  ESI Processing?  Predictive Coding for Doc Review?  There are a plethora of solutions, all heavily vying for your attention.  The truth is, it’s just not that complicated anymore and the solutions have decreased so much in cost that almost all solutions are accessible to almost all matters.  In short, eDiscovery has become as exciting as word processing or scanning.

But the eDiscovery blahs are only half the reason for the decline in discussion.  The other half is that intelligent IG encompasses eDiscovery.  eDiscovery is subsumed by smart DDC (data, document & content) management, right along with litigation holds, retention policies, workflow routing, exception handling, data breach response and investigations.  Today, eDiscovery is but one of any number of critical activities undergone by major corporations all the time.  It’s just not the fire drill it used to be, and those implementing IG will see to eDiscovery’s needs along the way.  

So, where does that leave us?

Unfortunately, this leaves us woefully and inadequately prepared to handle IG.  The passel of eDiscovery tools do little to solve problems that are much larger than typical litigation matters every imagined.  The the records management side of the house is of little help with their diminished budgets, and dearth of tools available for large-scale data mining and management.  Thus there is promising opportunity for IG-oriented solutions that take the best of both worlds, with an eye towards intelligent DDC management from the outset.  Stay tuned, blog readers, and see where Valora heads next...

IBM Watson Runs a Food Truck?!

What to do after winning Jeopardy against the world’s best players?  Open a food truck, of course!  Yes, that Watson is now running a food truck, and apparently it creates some truly delicious dishes!  Confused?  Don’t be.  The intelligence behind the Watson engine that successfully answered hundreds of randomized Jeopardy questions is now the creative engine behind a gourmet food truck.  IBM is endeavoring to show that predictive analytics have uses in the most unusual of places!

As with most predictive analytics, there is still an important role for humans to play in providing balance, judgment and expertise.  Watson does  the data-crunching heavy lifting to find interesting and appealing flavor combinations, faster (better?) than human beings can do on their own, and then trained chefs implement the Watson directions.

This hybrid approach should have a familiar ring to it.  Let the software do the hard, data-intensive number-crunching and then marry that output with human skill and finesse.  It’s a winning combination and one that we employ here at Valora every day.  We utilize our analytics, indexing, and rules platform, PowerHouse, to organize, catalog and find relationships in content for us and then we add the human skill, the expertise, to refine the output and do custom things for specific projects.  

Here’s an example:  We run 50,000 emails and attachments through PowerHouse, which quickly finds well over 150 attributes about each item.  Then we ask PH to find important relationships and insights, such as trend data or topic clusters.  From there, we adapt the rules programming to customize the output so it yields middle initials, or zip + 4, or the top 3 issues per document, or whatever it is that any particular customer needs.  Load it up to BlackCat for easy, online review (often by the client’s workforce) and we’re done.  Predictive analytics mastery!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think pork belly moussaka sounds amazing!

Interesting Predictions about Data Analytics from Gartner

By 2017, analytic applications offered by software vendors will be indistinguishable from analytic applications offered by service providers.

"Traditional vendors of analytic platforms recognize that in order to expand their reach beyond traditional power users, they must deliver packaged domain expertise and applications to enable self-service by a wider range of users. Service providers are seeking to turn custom project work and domain expertise into repeatable solutions that can be adopted by other organizations more easily.

The result is that end-user organizations selecting analytic applications will have a significantly wider variety of possible providers to evaluate. Organizations evaluating software vendors will almost always find a SaaS version of their packaged applications, and the similarity of product concepts will shift the emphasis of competition to the domain expertise embedded by the vendors into the application. Software vendors will increasingly face a co-opetition situation with their traditional service provider channels, forcing them to augment their own professional service capabilities. Service providers will use packaged applications as an integral part of their customer relationships, implying that there is a greater specialization in the services that they provide."

-Gartner Press Release 12.16.2013

Data Analytics Steal the Show at DC Technology in the Law Symposium

I was delighted to serve as a panelist at the Technology in the Law Symposium, held earlier this month by the DC Bar Association and McDermott Will & Emery, LLP.  Three panels spoke on the use of predictive technologies and analytics and their use in the courtroom, for eDiscovery and well beyond.  Panelists ranged from outside counsel litigators, to DOJ government attorneys, to service providers and consultants, with Hon. Judge John Facciola presenting the keynote.  The lively, and at times contentious event featured three broad topics:  What the Courts are Saying About Predictive Coding, Predictive Coding Pessimists v. Optimists, and the Use of Data Analytics in Other Areas.

“There’s no greater compliance training than grand jury subpoena.” John Kocoras, Partner, McDermott, Will & Emery

While much of the early discussion around Predictive Coding was, well, somewhat predictable by now, (Key messages:  PC is good, it is proven for doc review, courts are onboard, don’t be reckless with it), the panelists and audience really became animated about the uses of predictive analytics beyond simple relevance review.  Panelists John Kocoras (MWE), Kristian Werling (MWE), Sandra Serkes (Valora) and Kurt Michel (Content Analyst) described scenarios where predictive technologies were being used in multiple corporate settings to assess M&A documents, contracts or financial statements and seek out areas of corporate compliance exposure.  At one point, moderator Jason R. Baron (Drinker Biddle) jokingly asked the panel whether such technologies could accurately predict legal case outcomes.  Answer:  Yes, within reasonable margins of error.

In all, the inaugural Symposium was a roaring success for the 150+ attendees from all over Washington, DC and beyond.  MWE is hoping to expand on their initial success and present several more related symposia in 2014.  Well worth the free attendance!

Technology-Assisted Essay Grading

The NY Times recently reported on the growing use of automated essay grading systems, what we in the legal & records space might call "Technology-Assisted Grading," or "TAG." This is yet another instance of the rest of the world utilizing predictive technologies in conjunction with statistical pattern-matching to create an ultimately subjective judgment of the content of a document. Even more interesting than the fact that MIT & Harvard are making this technology available for free via edX (my alumni donations at work??), is that the higher education community is having the same heated arguments that are occurring right now in the legal arena. Here is the best comment from the piece:

"Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.."

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly the argument raging now by outside counsel (playing the part of professors in the article) attempting to hold onto their turf, once considered "untouchable" by technology. While it is true that computers can't "read" either student essays or litigation emails, they can be trained to recognize the salient elements that make the essay strong or the litigation email privileged. Those traits are easily describable as Rules. Either a document fits the Rules, or it doesn't. Nuances are accounted for with confidence scoring and sampling for accuracy (precision & recall). As long as there is sufficient auditing and exception handling, the work quality should be outstanding at a fraction of the time and expense of the purely manual method.

If recent advances have taught us anything, it is that nothing, and certainly no job function, is immutable. It doesn't matter whether the work task is rote (like tightening bolts), cerebral (like computation) or subjective (like analysis), it can all be done by the right algorithms, utilizing the proper training, feedback and statistical sampling.

Furthermore, when subjective work product is automated, society gains impartiality, consistency, speed and reduction of cost for the same services. That allows us to do more, work faster and create better results with fewer resources – the very definition of progress.

It is time to stop fighting the obvious, accept the reality, incorporate the efficiency gain and move on. I'm ready for my essay grade, please.