Dominic Jaar shared his thoughts on Microsoft Office 2010 in The Lawyers Weekly magazine. The article in question asks lawyers, “Should you upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010 now?“.
Dominic makes two general notes on the usability and functionality of the 2010 version of the Office suite, namely, on the “Conversations” organization of emails in Outlook and the so-called “real-time” collaboration in Workplace. However, two sets of remarks are of particular interest for lawyers. The first is the difficulty of access to metadata: “metadata is important, it should be up front”. A second important remark is about the possibility to use the Office suite online and storing documents in the cloud: if the information is of confidential nature, “unless the cloud they use is in Canada”, Dominic has some reluctance to use such a service.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Anonymity and the right to geo-location privacy
Monday, August 23rd, 2010
Facebook recently launched its Places feature, which allows you (or your friends) to post your current location, in about the same way Foursquare does. It’s cool and trendy, what could possibly go wrong ? Well, aside from this obvious and somewhat manageable possibility, the omnipresence of locating technologies and ever more powerful software to analyse data may pass the tipping point where any expectation of privacy ceases to be reasonable.
That’s the idea put forth by Ted Claypoole in an interview by Nymity: “Geo-location privacy is based on the concept that everyone has a right to be anonymous in their location at some points in their life. […] Many of our most basic human rights are grounded in privacy and anonymity.” For instance, for freedom of assembly “to be effective, a person must be able to meet with others in private, avoiding tracking and surveillance.”
The subject is topical. It could not be addressed 200 years ago by the framers of the United States Constitution, for it was quite easy to achieve anonymity. With the recent opening of the GPS system to civilian applications and its integration in cars and cellphones, the paradigm is shifted. In fact, the trend is so powerful that “If we do not start asking questions now about rights to privacy in location, technology may make those questions moot.”
On an positive note, however, Claypoole note that while it may be too late in the United States to recognize location privacy as a basic human right, Canada and European Union have already done so.
The issue of geo-location was also the object of a New York Times article titled “Judges Divided Over Rising GPS Surveillance“. The core of the divide is explained by the necessary shift courts must make regarding privacy:
“Some legal scholars say the escalating use of such high-tech techniques for enhancing traditional police activities is eroding the pragmatic considerations that used to limit how far a law-enforcement official could intrude on people’s privacy without court oversight. They have called for a fundamental rethinking of how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the 21st century.”
Accompanying any shift of this sort is a period of uncertainty: the US Court of Appeal recently “overturned a drug trafficking conviction because the evidence against the defendant included tracking data from a GPS receiver that the police hid under his sport utility vehicle without a warrant”, noting the fundamental differences between tracking someone 24/7 at almost no cost and classic surveillance in public areas. Judge Richard Posner, however, argued to the contrary: “The Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th”.
Posted from Ledjit’s office, located 550 Sherbrooke West, Montreal (45.505678N, 73.571592W or so).
Foreign Language Documents Review
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
The OLP, the Organization of Legal Professionals, has a short article in its (first?) August Newsletter, the OLP Update, entitled “Approaches For Triaging Foreign Language Documents” and signed by Joseph Thorpe, one of the OLP’s board of Governors.
Mr. Thorpe identifies 4 strategies to approach foreign language documents review:
- Asking client to provide staff for foreign language document review and translation support
- Using MT (machine translation) to Translate All of the Documents
- Post edited MT
- Abstracts
- Human Translation
While I am a big fan of asking employees to find the relevant documents, as we use to do in the paper age, even if some courts (with which I beg to differ) are now saying it is inappropriate, it is often unrealistic to use clients’ employees to search and review documents for relevancy. This is particularly the case when dealing with higher management and specialized employees or professionals given their limited availabilities and the relative cost of having them performed what is often seen as more clerical work.
To me, the only way to ensure a defendable document review is to outsource it to bi- and multilingual reviewers who are fluent in English and can perform the review of English documents to get a good understanding of the case and the nature of the documents. They can then most efficiently complete the review of the documents in the other languages while ensuring a standard of quality in the overall review. These reviewers can normally be found for almost the same price as the English only reviewers and sometimes even for less, depending on the jurisdiction.
For instance, in Quebec, most lawyers are bilingual (English and French) and a large number speak a third or forth language, e.g. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, etc. While Quebec is a civil law jurisdiction, many lawyers are also common lawyers since most universities now offer what is known as a National program where you receive and LL.B in civil and common law. The cost of these reviewers is normally between $50 and $125 depending on the year of call, the jurisdiction(s) in which the lawyers are called, their experience and the number of languages they speak.
With respect to the use of MT, except when there is a clear case for proportionality, I have no confidence whatsoever in the technology. It is far from being ready for prime time. I must admit of using the BabelFish and Google Translate of this world to get a sense of what a Chinese website says but I would never rely on anything similar for document review in the course of a litigation or investigation. In fact, I don’t understand how that approach can be defended while, at the other extreme, some judges state that key words must be defined by experts… How can a machine properly translate slang, idiomatic expression, internal codes used by employees, etc.? How can it pick up on the subtlety of a language and differentiate humor and sarcasm?
Furthermore and perhaps most importantly, that approach requires a translation of all documents, including irrelevant ones, plus a review of all of them, thereby generating unacceptable costs and delays. The same arguments apply to abstract and translation.
Sadly enough the OLP does not allow its readers to comment, hence this post.
Canada’s Information Retention Gap
Friday, August 13th, 2010
Ledjit minds the gap. And bridges it!
“First, high storage costs. Studies show that storage costs continue to skyrocket as over retention has created an environment where it is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it. And it is not just the raw cost of tape stock and hard disks, but the higher costs of managing such massive stores. Second, backup windows are bursting at the seams. It is becoming increasingly common to hear of weekend backups taking more than a single weekend. Recovery times are even worse. The time it takes to restore such massive backups will bring any disaster recovery program to its knees. Finally, with the massive amounts of information stored on difficult-to-access backup tapes, eDiscovery has become a lengthy, inefficient and costly exercise.”
While these consequences are serious, so are the short-to-middle-terms benefits of the remedy. It would be a missed opportunity not to remind you that Ledjit is Bridging the gap between IT and the law!
Fundamental rights and Information technologies
Friday, July 9th, 2010In a small article published on The Gazette’s website, titled The delicate issue of law and technology, the undersigned comments a recent decision in criminal law by the Quebec’s Court of appeal .
Two main issues are identified. The first one: how should the plain-view doctrine be construed in the case of electronic documents search and seizures ? The second: how should we mediate, one one hand, the right of an accused not to be compelled to participate in self-incrimination, with, on the other hand, the arrival of ever more powerful and efficient cryptographic tools that can be used to conceal incriminating evidence?
If one can’t answer these questions, he may at least try to formulate them!
Compliance vs. Hard drives in printers, photocopiers and scanners
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Here is a news report that explains well something we have been telling our clients for a while now. Multifunction machines, scanners, printers, photocopiers, etc. contain hard drives which capture ALL documents that run through them, unless you take action!
This means that any confidential (personal information, privileged material, commercial and industrial secrets, etc.) information contained on the documents you print, copy or scan on a daily basis are retained on the hard drive contained in the machine unless it is wiped or set not to record images. That means, in many cases, you and/or your organisation are violating different statutes and regulations every day… As explained in this news report, this situation is exacerbated when you decommission these machines and give or sell them to third parties who, in turn, send them abroad to be reused or recycled:
First Neutral Citation
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Concluding twelve years of efforts from a lot of JTAC members, Justice Fran Kiteley, from the Ontario Superior Court and a former JTAC member, rendered the first judgment using neutral citation in R. v. ANDREW DEL RICCIO, 2010 ONSC 01. Congratulations!
Here are the documents prepared by JTAC which relate to this great initiative:
e-discovery without the headache – Policies, Processes and People
Monday, December 7th, 2009Below is a Powerpoint presentation by Dominic Jaar on this subject: – Covering the EDRM – e-discovery Readiness – Identification – Preservation – Collection – Processing
e-discovery – Advising your Clients on how to be Litigation Ready in the 21st Century
Monday, December 7th, 2009Below is a Powerpoint presentation by Dominic Jaar on this subject: – Litigation Preparedness – Information Management Framework – Document Management System – Templates/Forms – Preservation, Collection, Processing, Review, Production
Production of Documents, Technology and Costs
Monday, December 7th, 2009Below is a Powerpoint presentation by Dominic Jaar on this subject:
- Paper vs. Electronic document
- Metadata
- The Sedona Canada Principles
- The Electronic Discovery Reference Model
- Identification
- Preservation
- Collection
- Ressources
Ledjit on LinkedIn
Ledjit on Delicious