LegalTech Day One: Relativity 8, Statistical Sampling, Law Firm Security

Evan Koblentz

Law Technology News

01-30-2013

E-discovery system scalability and statistical sampling, computer security, and U.S. Supreme Court justices all garnered the attention of legal professionals at LegalTech New York on Tuesday.

Chicago-based kCura Corp. will make large-scale databases the focus of Relativity 8.0 (exhibit hall: 210), which will be announced this spring, CEO Andrew Sieja said. It's vital for kCura to make its document review software grow with the Big Data trend — the company has already seen one service provider running 80 million documents in a single workspace, Sieja noted.

To help that customer and future customers, "We're making improvements to our data model. We've got to overhaul things in the [database scheme] to support these larger cases," he said. "We're playing a game of continuing to evolve our software to handle it."

As databases grow, it's equally important to give customers faster data searching tools, Sieja said. "We're working on a new distributed searching index ... and also concurrency," the latter enables customers to execute simultaneous operations against a single index, he explained.

On the processing side, where kCura debuted its software in fall 2012, there have been "a handful of customers who have bought it and are starting to run real data through it," Sieja said. There aren't yet any third-party applications for the processing software, unlike kCura's review ecosystem, which has dozens of aftermarket plug-ins. But the company has had early discussions with partners about that possibility, he said.

STATISTICAL SAMPLING

It can be brain-bending, but statistical sampling has plenty of value to law firms, not just academics, experts here said.

DiscoverReady senior vice president Maureen O'Neill, Oracle Corp.'s director of e-discovery Pallab Chakraborty, University of Waterloo computer science professor Gordon Cormack, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz counsel Maura Grossman implored their panel audience to apply math to their electronic litigation processes.

"Statistical sampling is a method to estimate a characteristic of a large population by examining only a subset of it," Grossman explained. "Estimate" may sound like a dangerous word to attorneys and judges, but the goal is "a reasonably precise mathematical measurement," she explained.

The results of sampling, in technical terms, aim to calculate the recall, precision, and confidence level of a search result obtained from a set of documents. "There's a big trade-off among all of these things [precision, recall, and confidence]," Cormack said. "You can get any two of them, and the third is going to vary. You can't get all three," Grossman added. Statistics won't get you out of trouble if your document review is missing relevant data, but taking the time for a sampling process will help show clients and judges that your process was reasonable, the panels noted.

It can also be used in early case assessment to determine that privileged documents aren't included, they agreed. Grossman advised her audience that humans are not more accurate than computers, but that software will never achieve perfection. "If you go out on the [exhibit] floor and someone tells you they're going to find 95, 98 percent of the documents, I'd run," she joked. "That's not possible."

Cormack and Grossman are both involved in the U.S. government's annual Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track, known simply as TREC in the e-discovery field. TREC ran each year from 2006 through 2011, but was cancelled in 2012 because a new data set was not ready in time and because 2011 results were delayed. The 2013 edition is also cancelled because of ongoing unspecified problems with the data set, Cormack said after the panel.

LAW FIRM SECURITY AWARENESS

As is becoming the new normal, an afternoon session on law firm security at the annual industry gathering brought a packed house.

Lathrop and Gage's Carlos Rodriguez, and Rogers Townsend & Thomas' Mark Brophy — both of whom lead their security operations at their firms — explained to their audience that risk awareness training, not technical security training itself, is the best way to get through to attorneys who handle valuable client data.

Rodriguez said he and two others run security for the 320-attorney firm. Brophy handles that task alone for his 64 attorneys. "The ultimate goal is to modify their behavior and create a culture for learning," Rodriguez said.

Both experts gave a variety of advice for security awareness training. Rodriguez's attorneys get continuing legal education credit for attending awareness training, although he tends not to call it training, for fear of scaring users away. It's important that all information technology employees at a firm deliver the same message, he added. "We're trying to move from just having a compliance checkmark into transforming our organization," he said.

Brophy noted that his firm's clients, many of whom are in the financial industry, demand security audits. "They are holding our feet to the fire. You have to have an awareness program and you have to provide materials about what you are teaching," he said. "You may have a partner who's a rainmaker and generates $1 million for the firm, but if he causes a breach, that's a $7.2 million liability."

Brophy also said it's not just a matter of protecting the firm revenue — it's a matter of each attorney's professional responsibility. American Bar Association Model Rules 1.1 and 1.6 require attorneys to understand technology and to keep data confidential, he observed. "Golf outings and business lunches won't help when a bean counter says no" [to hiring your firm], he stated.

Complicating the matter, Brophy said, is that cybercrooks aren't even sending their best talent to break into law firms. "The law firms are the soft underbelly to our clients," he said.

Rodriguez, who is among the leaders of the International Legal Technology Association's LegalSEC committee, said the committee is having a one-day law firm security conference this summer. That's scheduled for June 13 in Chicago, he said.

Behind the scenes, law firms are learning from the financial industry's best practices, he added. Several major New York firms met with Goldman Sachs earlier this month to learn additional security techniques, he said. Such meetings will probably recur on a regular basis, he said.

Audience member Nicole O'Brien, IT director of client services at Rochester, N.Y.-based Woods Oviatt Gilman, said her firm has 80 attorneys and has been attacked — fortunately without success. "It was beneficial in the way that it raised awareness of the reality," she said, of the incident. Now, O'Brien will bring the concept of awareness training, rather than security instruction, back to her firm's leaders for their own annual sessions which are later this quarter, she said.

THE SUPREME COURT

The day's keynote speaker was former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, now a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Olson provided an entertaining and insightful history of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, noting that the current high court is less experienced but more diverse than ever. The 2013 court docket could see cases relevant to technology in areas such as electronic surveillance, he said.

Evan Koblentz is a reporter for Law Technology News. Send email or follow him on Twitter.