TERIS partner Nuix, and EDRM, the leading standards organization for the eDiscovery and information governance market, announced yesterday that they republished the EDRM Enron -resized-600.jpg)
PST Data Set after cleansing it of private, health and personal financial information. Nuix and EDRM have also published the methodology Nuix's staff used to identify and remove more than 10,000 high-risk items at nuix.com/enron.
The EDRM Enron data set is an industry-standard collection of email data that the legal profession has used for many years for electronic discovery training and testing. It was sourced from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's investigation into collapsed energy firm Enron. In early 2012, the EDRM Enron PST Data Set and the EDRM Enron Data Set v2 became an Amazon Web Services Public Data Set, making them a valuable public resource for researchers across a variety of disciplines.
"Recently, we have been working closely with Nuix to cleanse the data set of private information about the company's former employees and make the cleansed data set readily available to the community," said George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, co-founders of EDRM. "These efforts help to protect the privacy of hundreds of individuals and we encourage anyone who finds private data that we did not remove to notify us."
Using a series of investigative workflows on the EDRM Enron PST Data Set, Nuix consultants Matthew Westwood-Hill and Ady Cassidy identified more than 10,000 items including:
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60 items containing credit card numbers, including departmental contact lists that each contained hundreds of individual credit cards
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572 containing Social Security or other national identity numbers—thousands of individuals' identity numbers in total
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292 containing individuals' dates of birth
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532 containing information of a highly personal nature such as medical or legal matters.
Many items contained multiple instances and types of information. This included departmental contact list spreadsheets with dates of birth, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, home addresses and other private details of dozens of staff members. 
The investigative team also clearly demonstrated that these items did not stay within the Enron firewall. For example, some staff emailed "convenience copies" of documents containing private data to their personal addresses.
"Nuix and our partners have conducted sweeps for private and credit card data for dozens of corporate customers and we are yet to encounter a data set that did not include some inappropriately stored personal, financial or health information," said Eddie Sheehy, CEO of Nuix. "The increasing burden of privacy and data breach regulations, combined with the strict requirements of credit card companies, make this an unacceptable business risk.
"Using the methodology we are publishing alongside the cleansed EDRM Enron data, organizations can identify private and financial data, find out if it has been emailed outside the firewall and take immediate steps to remediate the risks involved."
Nuix is currently applying the same methodology to the EDRM Enron Data Set v2, which it will also republish at nuix.com/enron.
Nuix will host a Twitter chat to discuss the release of the cleansed EDRM Enron PST Data Set on Thursday, May 23rd 2pm – 3pm ET. Nuix experts will describe the process of identifying unsecured financial, health and personally identifiable information in corporate data. Follow the hashtag #NuixChat and send in your questions beforehand to @nuix.
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By Julia Romero Peter
VP of Business Development, TERIS
If you have had any exposure to eDiscovery and the wonderful world of all things ESI, you are probably wondering if there is a secret dictionary or handbook out there to help you navigate the jargon – especially since this industry seems to use more acronyms and catch phrases than the Feds do! So today, I will humbly attempt to shed some light on a few of them for you.
ESI - Electronically Stored Information
Albeit, this is an easy one, but at least admit that at first you wondered...
ESI is used to refer to all information or data found in computers, tablets, mobile phones, servers, the cloud, social media sites, etc. (Basically, it refers to anything stored digitally that may need to be processed, hosted, and reviewed.)
ECA - Early Case Assessment
This is by far one of the most overused and under-defined terms in our repertoire, though you don’t have to go far to find a variety of definitions. For example:
At the LegalTech NY 2010 conference, the panel defined ECA as “the implementation of litigation analysis and management protocol that provides for the assembly and review of appropriate information on an expedited basis (30‐90 days) in order to provide a preliminary assessment of the case and the optimal method for proceeding.” [1]
In an article in the January 2006 edition of Counsel to Counsel [2], Lawyers Eric W. Iskra and Charles L. “Chuck” Woody, of Spilman, Thomas & Battle PLLC, wrote:
“Under the ECA method, counsel take an aggressive stance, gathering information as quickly as possible to ensure the company can determine the most favorable way to resolve the case instead of simply reacting to opposing counsel. This process involves making a concerted effort to complete all the major work within the first 90 to 120 days of a lawsuit’s filing.”
In an article published in the Buffalo Business Journal [3], author Matt Chandler talked with Lisa Smith, a partner with a Buffalo-based law firm, Phillip Lytle LLP, who described ECA as a cost-benefit analysis used to determine what a successful outcome would entail for a client.
"There may be times when you can spend five years on a case and prevail at trial," she says, "but that may not be a success to your client." Smith says there are several factors that need to be considered during an early cases assessment, including deciding the ultimate goals in the case. "It front-loads the decision-making and we decide: Do we want to look at settling, arbitration or litigation?"
The ECA lifecycle includes:
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Risk-benefit analysis
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Preservation of information and securing legal holds on documents that may be relevant to the case
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Collection of relevant documents/ESI for review by attorneys and experts
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Information processing, filtering, searching, and analysis
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Information hosting for document review, commenting, and editing by attorneys and experts
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Producing documents for presentation to all parties involved in the case
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Reusing any relevant information in future cases
Notwithstanding this and similar definitions and explanations in practice, ECA usually amounts to sophisticated culling, reporting, and clustering of data that is neither early nor an assessment of a case. It is nothing more than a reactive attempt to play catch-up.
In order to truly conduct an ECA with a return on investment (or ROI), you need to start the process before you collect your first gigabyte of data. ECA should occur when you are assessing whether to file or defend a suit, or immediately thereafter. Conducting your case’s assessment at this point will ensure that you not only have a defensible approach, but that you minimize eDiscovery costs across the lifecycle of the case, especially down the line when you’re conducting a document/information review.
At the end of the day, the most expensive phase of eDiscovery is attorney review. It’s simple logic: if you process less data, you will be billed less by counsel.
Processing
This is the second most overused and under-defined term in our industry. Every attorney, corporation, and service provider defines processing differently. It can include the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), information governance, the cloud, social media, and big data.
EDRM - Electronic Discovery Reference Model
The EDRM is not the be-all and end-all of eDiscovery, but it is a good place to start. While every law firm, consultant, and ESI provider claims they follow the EDRM, few actually cover the entire EDRM, which includes:
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Information Management
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Identification
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Preservation
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Collection
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Processing
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Review
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Analysis
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Production
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Presentation
Information Governance
Like ECA, this is another term for which there is no consistent definition – the various players define it in a manner that best suits the service they offer. I define information governance as the entire kit and caboodle relating to a company’s information/data, be it paper documents or ESI – not just document retention policies and document retention, but the true life cycle of information, which includes:
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Hiring of the custodian
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Assignment of data sources - mobile phone, tablet, PC/MAC, server, shares, wikis, etc.
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Maintenance, upgrades, and backups of data sources
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Creation and enforcement of retention policies
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Legal holds/identification
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Preservation
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Collection
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Processing
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Review
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Analysis
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Production
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Presentation
The Cloud
The origin of the term ‘cloud computing’ is a bit hazy. At a conference in 2006, Google’s Eric Schmidt referred to Google services as “belonging in a cloud somewhere,” thus putting the term ‘out there’ for the world. However, there are other references to cloud computing that date back to the 1990s, including an application made to the US Patent and Trademark Office in 1997 to protect the term as a service mark. (It was later abandoned.) [4]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing, in part, as:
“… a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” [5]
Cloud computing is not a new concept. For the past several years, this subject has come up at just about every industry conference under the sun. The fact is that the cloud is just a collection of servers…somewhere. The ‘somewhere’ is probably in an SSAE 16 SOC Type 2 facility, which is, without a doubt, a lot safer than your computer or your counsel’s.
Social Media
Dictionary.com defines social media as “web sites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts: Many businesses are utilizing social media to generate sales.” [6]
I believe that any litigator who ignores social media is neglecting a goldmine of information, and this is especially true for employment cases. Most individuals really have no censor and post just about everything on social media sites, and not just the obvious sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites where members share information such as Waze, Words with Friends, Scramble, Foursquare, etc. Many of these sites include geotags and other useful information.
Do NOT neglect this source of ESI. It is easy to collect and review; and can potentially change the outcome of a case.
Big Data
Big data is a relatively new term. It need not send you running for the tools, but it does take planning and some capital expenditures to tackle.
According to IBM, “every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.” [7]
Basically, the archiving and data management tools built in the 1990s and earlier 2000s can no longer adequately house the data sizes of larger corporations. When your data size is in the petabytes, solutions tend to be bogged down. You could either pay for another solution or execute a well-planned and developed information governance protocol that includes the remediation of data outside legal holds and applicable retention periods. We recommend the latter.
So there you have it. When deconstructed, ESI lingo isn’t nearly as mysterious as it sounds, though like all technologies, it has the annoying tendency to spawn vague jargon.
[1] “Legal Tech NY 2010: Early Case Assessment — how far left can you go?” http://www.theposselist.com/2010/02/09/from-legal-tech-ny-2010-early-case-assessment-how-far-left-can-you-go/
[2] Early Case Assessment, Counsel to Counsel, January 2006, pp. 9 http://www.martindale.com/pdf/c2c/magazine/2006_Jan/C2C0106_BP_Spilman.pdf
[3] Early case assessment can save time and money, by Matt Chandler, Buffalo Business First, March 31, 2008, http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2008/03/31/focus8.html?page=all
[4] United States Patent and Trademark Office Trademark Status & Document Retrieval http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75291765&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
[5] The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf
[6] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/social+media
[7] What is big data? http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/
TERIS taps experienced eDiscovery sales executive to manage its Houston presence
Houston, TX – August 28, 2012 – TERIS announced today that it has hired Jacqueline Safran as Regional Director, Electronic Sales for its Houston office. In assuming this new position, Safran will build and manage an important territory for the company. She brings to TERIS a deep background in electronic discovery software sales and client management. TERIS Texas continues to see strong increase in its eDiscovery business in the state in 2012, and it counts on Safran to strengthen the company’s presence in the Houston market.
Safran has more than 12 years of professional experience, successfully migrating from an early start in marketing to become a successful eDiscovery software sales executive focused on providing corporations and law firms with eDiscovery and information management technology. She has successfully provided solutions covering every phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), and excels in understanding organizations’ business needs and providing clients with technology that best meets their requirements.
Safran comes to TERIS from Exterro, where she was Director of Sales for South Eastern US. Prior to Exterro, her eDiscovery experience included positions with Iron Mountain and Guidance Software.
At TERIS, her responsibilities include:
- Consulting with existing and potential clients on eDiscovery strategies.
- Development of multi-layer relationships between TERIS, corporations and their outside counsel.
- Formulation of workflow strategies and cost-saving initiatives focused on the EDRM.
“Jacqueline’s strong professional eDiscovery sales experience will serve our clients well in Houston,” said John Hartman, Managing Partner, TERIS Texas. “Our TERIS Texas team offers a breadth of expertise that adds real value to our clients as we continue to provide five star service in the region. We are excited about the growth prospects for Jacqueline and are confident she will help us continue to grow in Houston – and beyond.”
Safran received her BA at Loyola Marymount and is on the Board of Directors for the Houston chapter of Women in eDiscovery.
ABOUT TERIS
Founded in 1996, TERIS provides legal support and sophisticated eDiscovery and Information Governance solutions to corporate legal teams and law firms across the U.S. and internationally. TERIS’ staff of almost 300 was named one of the top 20 eDiscovery service providers in 2008 by industry researcher Socha-Gelbmann. The company has offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, and Dallas. To learn more about TERIS, visit TERIS.com or follow the company on Twitter at Twitter.com/DiscoverTERIS or Facebook (Facebook.com/DiscoverTERIS).
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Media Contacts:
David Kaufer, Twelve23
206-262-7302 or David.Kaufer(at)Twelve23.com
Seattle, WA – APR 04, 2012 – TERIS announced today that it has joined Exterro’s partner network to deliver the most complete, unified e-discovery platform to its corporate clients. As the first litigation services provider to offer the full Exterro Fusion® e-discovery software suite, including the advanced data management capabilities in Fusion Zeta™, TERIS is enabling its corporate clients to realize immediate ROI with integrated workflow, project management, and cost management capabilities across the entire EDRM.
“TERIS has seen increased demand from our corporate clients for an integrated, all-in-one e-discovery and information governance software platform. As an Exterro partner, we now deliver the most complete e-discovery suite directly to the source, eliminating the need for transferring of electronic evidence across multiple, disparate point solutions. The integrated approach presents tremendous cost savings, process efficiencies and risk reduction opportunities for our clients,” said Peter Sternkopf, Chief Technology Officer of TERIS.
TERIS provides e-discovery services and technologies that enable clients to assess their cases quickly and accurately. Exterro Fusion delivers a 360-degree view into the critical data and workflows required for defensibly and cost-effectively managing e-discovery, from identification, legal hold and in-place early case assessment (ECA) to collection, processing, analysis, review and production. With Exterro Fusion added to its full suite of services, TERIS now delivers the increased control and visibility required for defensibly managing all e-discovery tasks through a single, unified central command center.
“For many corporations, e-discovery remains a fragmented process. The addition of Exterro Fusion® to TERIS’ litigation service offerings will enable corporate legal teams to significantly drive down their legal costs in one, unified approach,” said Chad Smith, Director of Service Partnerships at Exterro. “We look forward to working with TERIS as a strategic partner, helping our clients tackle the complex challenges posed by ever-changing litigation requirements.”
ABOUT TERIS
Founded in 1996, TERIS provides legal support and sophisticated eDiscovery and Information Governance solutions to corporate legal teams and law firms across the U.S. and internationally. TERIS’ staff of almost 300 was named one of the top 20 eDiscovery service providers in 2008 by industry researcher Socha-Gelbmann. The company has offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, and Dallas. To learn more about TERIS, visit TERIS.com or follow the company on Twitter at Twitter.com/DiscoverTERIS or Facebook (Facebook.com/TERIS).
ABOUT Exterro
Exterro, Inc. is the pioneer and leading provider of workflow-driven e-discovery software for corporations and law firms. The proven Exterro Fusion® platform delivers a 360⁰ view into the critical data and workflows required for defensibly and cost-effectively managing e-discovery across the EDRM spectrum. The innovative suite of e-discovery applications built on the Fusion platform unifies all phases of e-discovery – from identification, legal hold and early case assessment (ECA) to collection, processing, analysis, review and production. Fusion’s open architecture integrates seamlessly with existing business processes and enterprise infrastructures. To learn more, visit www.exterro.com.
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Media Contacts:
David Kaufer, Partner, twelve23, 206-659-1495 or David.Kaufer(at)twelve23.com
Andrew Bartholomew, Exterro, 503-501-5133 or andrew.bartholomew@exterro.com
