At last week’s ILTACON in Washington, D.C., Beth Patterson, Chief Legal & Technology Services Officer for Allens in Sydney asked a panel why e-discovery service providers couldn’t standardize hash values so as to support identification and deduplication across products and collections. If they did, you could use work from one matter in another. If an e-mail is privileged in one case, there’s a good chance it’s privileged in another; so, wouldn’t it be splendid to be able to flag its counterparts to insure it doesn’t slip through without review?
Beth asked a great question, and one regrettably characterized by the panel as “a big technical challenge.”
One panelist got off on the right foot: He said, “I’ve created artificial hashes in the past where what I had to do was aggregate and normalize metadata across different data sets to create a custom fingerprint to do that.” But, he added, “that’s probably not defensible, and it’s also really cumbersome.”
Pressed by Beth, the panel pushed back. “It’s because artificial hashes are kind of complicated,” one panelist offered, and not “a trivial technical problem.” The panel questioned whether MD5 hashes were the appropriate standard or whether SHA-1 would be required, positing that cross-matter deduplication is “something that requires significant buy-in across a broad spectrum of people.” Beth’s request was ultimately dismissed as “not an easy challenge” and one that would be confounded by “people, process and technology” and “the MD5 hash stuff.”
ILTACON is the rare venue where reasonably well-adjusted and -socialized people engage in lively discussions of such things. It’s not just that ILTA folks understand the technology issues (“GEEKS!”), we’re passionate about them (“NERDS!”) and debate them respectfully as peers (“WUSSIES!”).
Beth’s idea deserved more credit than it got. It really is a trivial technical problem, and one that could be resolved without much programming or politics. Continue reading →
I lecture about 50-70 times a year, all over the globe. Of late, my presentations start with an exploration of the Internet of Things (IoT), focused first on my own IoT-enabled life and then addressed to the proliferation of IoT data streams in all our lives. Apart from mobile phones–the apex predators of IoT–discovery from the Internet of Things remains more theoretical than real in civil litigation; and instances of IoT evidence in criminal prosecutions are still rare. That will change dramatically as lawyers come to appreciate that the disparate, detailed data streams generated by a host of mundane and intimate sensors tell a compelling human story.
Ball in your Court 