Today, I published my primer on processing.  It’s fifty-odd pages on a topic that’s warranted barely a handful of paragraphs anywhere else.  I wrote it for the upcoming Georgetown Law Center Advanced E-Discovery Institute and most of the material is brand new, covering a stage of e-discovery–a “black box” stage–where a lot can go quietly wrong.  Processing is something hardly anyone thinks about until it blows up.

Laying the foundation for a deep dive on processing required I include a crash course on the fundamentals of digitization and encoding.  My students at the University of Texas and at the Georgetown Academy have had to study encoding for years because I see it as the best base on which to build competency on the technical side of e-discovery.

The research for the paper confirmed what I’d long suspected about our industry.  Despite winsome wrappers, all the leading e-discovery tools are built on a handful of open source and commercial codebases, particularly for the crucial tasks of file identification and text extraction.  Nothing evil in that, but it does make you think about cybersecurity and pricing.  In the process of delving deeply into processing, I gained  greater respect for the software architects, developers and coders who make it all work.  It’s complicated, and there are countless ways to run off the rails.  That the tools work as well as they do is an improbable achievement.  Stilli, there are ingrained perils you need to know, and tradeoffs to be weighed.

Working from so little prior source material, I had to figure a lot out by guess and by gosh.  I have no doubt I’ve misunderstood points and could have explained topics more clearly.  Please don’t hesitate to weigh in to challenge or correct.  Regular readers know I love to hear your thoughts and critiques.

I’ll be talking about processing in an ACEDS/Logikcull webcast tomorrow (Tuesday, November 5, 2019) at 1:00pm EST/10:00am PST.  I expect it’s not to late to register.

The milestone of the title is that this is my 200th blog post and it neatly coincides with my 200,000 unique visitor to the blog (actually 200,258, but who’s counting?).  When I started blogging here on August 20, 2011, I honestly didn’t know if anyone would stop by.  Two hundred thousand kind readers have rung the bell (and that’s excluding the many more spammers turned away).  I hope something I wrote along the way gave you some insight or a chuckle.  I’m intensely grateful for your attention.

By the way, if you’d like to come to the Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute in Washington, D.C. on November 21-22, 2019, please use my speaker’s discount code to save $100.00.  The discount code is BALL (all caps).  Hope to see you!

I’ve spoken at nearly all the legal technology conferences that have come and gone over the last thirty years.  Some, like LegalWorks and LegalTech West, are extinct (suggesting there is no appetite for legal technology west of Las Vegas).  Others, like ABA TechShow and LegalTech New York soldier on, shadows of what they once were, annually rearranging well-worn deck chairs.  They’re still frantic and fun to attend but TechShow has devolved to a mostly regional attendance and LegalTech’s influence has waned such that the most interesting meetings occur outside the Hilton.  Lately, the dynamic and influential meetups are those dedicated to a single product and its ecosystem (think Relativity Fest or ClioCon).  A stalwart exception, and an event I always try to cover, is ILTACON, the annual confab of the International Legal Technology Association. ILTACON remains vibrant and relevant, having found its compass after several rocky years of internal squabbling.

I just returned from Orlando and five days of impressive ILTACON content at the Swan and Dolphin hotels near EPCOT.  I talked about discovery tools and whether they’ve kept pace with the sea changes in electronic evidence.  My take: lawyers are behind the curve and tool vendors aren’t doing nearly enough to bridge the gap.

I’m a passionate student of architecture, with no particular skills, but boundless enthusiasm.  Thus, it was pleasing to experience the Swan and Dolphin Hotels, icons of post-modernism and two of the late architect Michael Graves’ most successful efforts.  Postmodernism was to last-century architecture what the leisure suit was to 1970’s fashion.  PoMo is no mo’, and none need mourn its passing.  Audacious in 1990, the Swan and Dolphin remain a good fit for the fever dream of Walt Disney World.  Outside of Orlando and Las Vegas, the absurd scale, palette and garish embellishment would have long lost its luster; yet in the House of the Mouse (and dead-flat Orlando), they still work.  Aesthetically, that is, not functionally.  The interiors are awful and the sprawl exhausting.  Home to ILTACON’s evening events, the dark, charmless Pacific Ballroom, should be renamed the Hangar of Terror (photo below.  Note the free throw competition hoop and backboard with tables beyond. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?).

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I give dozens of talks each years on electronic evidence where I discuss geolocation data and its transformative potential as evidence in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation.  Smart phones constantly track our movements using gyroscopes, accelerometers, global positioning features, geolocation apps, cell tower triangulation and three independent radio systems. Our steps are tallied, altitudes logged, and, for many, vital signs are monitored, too.  We are earthbound astronauts, instrumented and coupled to sensors and telemetry as thoroughly as any who journey into space.

This doesn’t fully resonate with audiences until I guide them through their own phones, showing the level of detail with which movements are tracked.  Some listeners boast that they’ve set their privacy settings to block geolocation.  They’re the ones most surprised to learn that, although they can disable their ability to see their own geolocation history and stop geolocation data from being shared with apps, they can’t disable geolocation broadcasting and still have a functioning phone.  Here’s the bottom line: if a phone can operate as a phone, it must broadcast its geolocation coordinates with a precision of ten meters (~30 feet) or better.  U.S. law requires it.

When I broach geolocation data and see that look of “we already know this” creep across faces, that’s when I ask for a show of hands of how many in the audience use iPhones.  Nearly every hand shoots up.  I then invite them to drill down in their phone’s Settings with me to the Significant Locations logs.  Surprisingly, most have never done this before and are shocked, even frightened, by the richness of detail in the data.

To try it on your iPhone,navigate through Settings>Privacy>Location Service>System Services> Significant Locations.  Unless you’ve disabled your ability to see geolocation data, you’ll arrive at the phone’s History list setting out locales visited, and the number of sites gone to within those locales.

But, wait!  There’s more! Continue reading →

Two-and-a-half years ago, I concluded a post with this bluster:

“Listen, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and all the other companies collecting vast volumes of our data through intelligent agents, apps and social networking sites, you must afford us a ready means to see and repatriate our data.  It’s not enough to let us grab snatches via an unwieldy item-by-item interface.  We have legal duties to meet, and if you wish to be partners in our digital lives, you must afford us reasonable means by which we can comply with the law when we anticipate litigation or respond to discovery. You owe us that.  Alexa, are you listening?”

Amazon hasn’t listened; but, Apple lately gave users the ability to download our data.  Credit for this awakening goes to the European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect on May 25.

Data takeout capabilities are essential to protecting civil liberties and meeting legal duties.  Google’s given users a simple, effective means to repatriate data (including Gmail and calendar data) for five years, although search histories have only been supplied for two.  Twitter’s supported robust data takeout for five years; and eight years ago, Facebook became the first big social media site to offer its users the ability to download contributed content.

Apple is late to the party but it didn’t come empty-handed.  The Apple takeout is extensive and can be huge.  My download comprised 63GB in 26 compressed Zip archive files.  It took Apple five days to assemble the data and make it available for download; then, I had to download each file, one-by-one.  There’s no way to download them all, leaving the distinct impression that Apple doesn’t want takeout to be too easy.  In fairness, had I opted to have Apple deliver my data in 25GB chunks (the largest chunk option) instead of the 5GB file limit I specified, it would have been easier.

In my case, almost all the volume were photos replicated in iCloud.  Notably absent was my messaging, which Apple can’t archive and thus can only be obtained from the iPhone or a backup of same (see my post Mobile to the Mainstream). Continue reading →

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Once you’ve preserved the contents of a mobile device, how do you extract responsive content in forms that are searchable and amenable to review?  Most information items on mobile devices aren’t “documents” that can be printed to a static format for review.  Instead, much mobile content is fielded data that must retain a measure of structural integrity for intelligibility.  This article looks at simple, low-cost approaches to getting relevant and responsive mobile data into a standard e-discovery review workflow, and offers a Mobile Evidence Scorecard designed to start a dialogue leading to a consensus about what forms of mobile content should be routinely collected and reviewed in e-discovery, without the need for digital  forensic examination. Continue reading →