I wish I can trace my friends and ex-colleagues in Zurich so that we can re-visit and re-craft the tales in the light of recent changes in banking secrecy in Switzerland. According to the recent BBC news: “The Swiss government confirmed that in line with OECD rules, it would now respond to overseas requests for information in cases of suspected tax evasion, and not just tax fraud”. Indeed the secrets are getting out and perhaps the gold vaults will also soon be opened for inspection, if my friends’ stories are indeed real.

I love stories especially when they stretches my imagination or lack of imagination (shock, surprises?!) and touches on my real life experiences. Well..Imaging walking above gold vaults just underneath your feet and at the same time being harassed by youngsters begging for money or small change. ‘Are They A Changing’ too in this non-secretive age or rather in this age of no more small changes in times of depression? I do hope so…

I just opened an e-mail alerting me on ‘10 Steps to Manage E-Discovery Projects’. Ah! Something just don’t change ; more steps and guidelines and this time instructing (‘like it or not’ ?!) lawyers to become project managers. Now that is a mighty call.

Having glanced the 10 Steps, I have only one observation (with lots of other reasons which I will not list here as they’re my secrets) that is – Project managers are not ruled by 10 steps activities nor can the ediscovery activities be codified into neat steps.

Imagine (now this is not lack of imagination) a lawyer (with all due respect) having to obey the code of ethics and work product or privileges stuff and then ‘like it or not’ being called to act as a project manager. Performing and/or switching role does not mean roles and responsibilities are clear or executable. In fact the multi-roles may create more mayhem when what one needs in ediscovery are clear roles and responsibilities. Also, imagine what the IT department will think of the Legal department?! Conflict all round I should think.

So I thank Bob Dylan for the imagination to ‘get real’ (lawyer acting as lawyer and project manager?!) and at the same time to imagine the impossible possible (like the change in banking secrecy).

Do view the ‘Other Legal Technology Videos’ and  see if you can catch the common themes in these videos and the electronic discovery videos.

The above legal article also mentioned the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) 2006 study which was also examined by Will Uppington in the article, Better Search for E-Discovery, March 11th, 2008

What I find interesting in Will Uppington’s article is the finding; ‘One of the best ways to get better search queries is to commit human resources to improving them, by putting a “human-in-the-loop” while performing searches’.

Reading in between these two ‘search themed’ titles, one from the legal side and the other from a technical perspective, highlighted the contrasting findings and interpretation on the TREC 2006 study

What else can we say/talk about the ‘human-in-the loop’, the ‘virtuous cycle of iterative feedback’ & “interactive” search methodology?

Well such phrases/concepts are not new. What is new is that the ‘human actions’ aspects are creeping (awareness?) into the ediscovery space. Other knowledge researchers outside the ediscovery domain have been busily coming up with phrases/concepts such as the ‘concept searching’ methodologies. Reality (or inertia adoption) testing of such newer technologies are clearly not well understood (too good to be true?) by the courts and practitioners.

On human actions and computer programs, a beautiful quote comes from my friend, Roger C: “While computer programs can write other computer programs, they can’t write the first program”.

To that I will add: An expert is only effective in the human-in-the-loop search if the expert is also an expert in the codes

The PowerPoint presentation on From ESI to Evidence and a pdf article on RAM preservation.

Thanks Mr. Hamilton.