The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/67910
Before implementing a TAR project, organizations should first ensure they have internal staff capable of carrying out TAR in a manner that is defensible and sound. As the eDJ Group's survey points out, less than half of the respondents felt secure in the technical and project management expertise currently in place that would be called on to support a successful TAR project. In addition to having a solid legal review team, corporations should prepare for emerging TAR technologies that will no doubt present themselves as TAR gains traction in the market. Having staff ready to become skilled in new approaches to TAR will be critical, as these emerging options will require vetting for quality control and defensibility purposes. Legal teams should also keep in mind there is no one-size-fits- all solution. By combining different review approaches, the overall workflow can be streamlined considerably. For example, using keyword searching for initial culling and then conceptual clustering for advanced culling, the resulting culled data set can then serve as a reliable sample to be used in subsequent propagation-based TAR. Being an emerging market, there will of course be no shortage of new TAR solutions offering quick, easy fixes to remedy manual review woes. Buyers should beware these elixirs, however, as nonstandardized markets place the burden of discerning good products from bad in the hands of the consumer. Be sure to understand what the new offerings are designed to do, how they are technically enabled and how they are deployed. Perhaps the most important action before using a TAR process is communicating this intention to other parties at an early stage. Until TAR is accepted as a trusted standard practice, early and thorough communication with the opposing party will help gain the court's approval of its use. As was seen in Judge Peck's opinions, this point was made abundantly clear. Take a Pragmatic Approach Looking ahead in the long term, TAR technologies may offer new methods of conducting broader-reaching information governance. However, until then, e-discovery practitioners should take a pragmatic approach to accepting and using budding TAR technologies. While TAR can bring rapid rewards through reduced costs for legal review today, TAR is not appropriate for every project and should not be regarded as such. Consider TAR only for certain cases that are clearly a good fit, capitalize on what is learned from those projects, and only then begin to apply it to other projects. As TAR gains traction and wider acceptance throughout 2012, practitioners will be able to draw on emerging case law and best practices that evolve in its wake. Barry Murphy is a contributing author for the eDiscovery Journal and the founding Principal of Murphy Insights. Previously, Barry was the director of product marketing at Mimosa Systems, a leading content archiving and e-discovery software. He joined Mimosa after a highly successful stint as a principal analyst for e-discovery, records management and content archiving at Forrester Research. He can be reached at barry@edjgroupinc.com. • MS Access has the ability to create temporary tables • Macros enable easy execution of reports with a reduction in mouse clicks Those who create reports typically back away from MS Access when they realize there is a learning curve to creating tables, queries, forms, reports and macros. But one must invest time in order to save time. Compared to most other report-writing products, MS Access deals solely with a "band" type of report writer. In other products, the band report writer is just at the end result: the visible information and the backend are laden with SQL statements and stored procedures that build the data for the report writer. How many times have you used tools other than MS Access and tried to join tables only to find the action could not be performed in one query, or the query became so complex that it could never be changed again? Using MS Access, you can build temporary tables with multiple queries, joining the temporary data to your schema, and then write a macro that just requires one click to execute the report. Attain complex reports without writing any visual-basic (VB) code. Take a serious look at MS Excel spreadsheets — they have vertical lookups (Vlookups), subtotals and conditional formatting. Or think about writing complex VB code or having stored procedures that build reports. You'll see that MS Access is a tool that does all of these things with power and ease. Instead of investing in the latest and greatest, fall back to this old standard to have the power to perform endless functions! Peer to Peer 83