Robert Pirsig spent a good deal of time on his motorcycle in the 1970s contemplating the metaphysics of quality. In my own way, I’ve been on a similar quixotic mission for at least the past eight years — in search of “quality” in the e-discovery search space. This particular quest for the Holy Grail has involved seeking out the perfect search where one finds “just” highly relevant documents in response to a FRCP 34 document request,  or, as a matter of early case assessment, “just” the hot documents one needs to win the case. I’ve searched the world over for answers, and along the way decided that I had been asking the wrong question.
At one time, I thought I knew what the problem was, and what the information retrieval “task” should be to overcome the problem. The problem, I thought, was simply the naïve use of keywords. Or at least, the way lawyers naively think about keywords when going about the task of searching for electronic evidence. I think many lawyers still practice with the assumption that using simple keywords, without more, to find responsive ESI is sufficient to get them through the day in dealing with their e-discovery obligations. While this remains a problem, it is not in my view the problem. And the task is not simply to try to “beat Boolean” with other search methods.

e-Discovery Team - In Search of Quality: Is It Time for E-Discovery Search Process Quality Standards?

But even allowing for our natural tendency towards anarchy, this statement stood right out from the other stuff in the presentation. It’s an odd statistic. How is that data measured? 90% of all documents? 90% of stored bytes? When they said “ever again” did they mean explicitly retrieved by name, or should we include free text searches in that statistic? How long an interval needs to pass before some piece of data is clearly identified as belonging to the 90%, so that steps can be taken to reflect its reduced importance? These questions are just the starting point for an issue that demands quite a lot of thinking. It’s a fascinating finding to be offered to you by a vendor of servers, given that so few of the devices they try to sell to smaller organisations actually reflect this “fact” in their hardware and software specification.”

PC Pro – Dell: 90% of data is never read again

Luckily we have discovered a lifesaver, called PrintConductor. This nifty little tool helps in batch printing multiple document types. According to the developer, it supports 16 document types, which includes, PDF, DOC, WRI, WPS, RTF, TXT, XLS, PPT, PPS, POT, VSD, DWG, DXF, SNP, HTM, and HTML. While testing, I found that it also supports the latest DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats, making the total supported file types to 19.

It uses the COM/DDE interfaces of the official applications in order to print, which means that it will first detect the installed document readers and editors before allowing user to add the documents for batch printing. This has one downside, i.e, you cannot add PDF files for printing unless you have Adobe Acrobat installed, the same problem arises with other formats where the original program must be installed.”

Addictivetips – Batch Print 19 Different Document Types Together

The e-discovery realm is rife with cautionary tales of organizations tripped up by backup tapes. For instance, in 2009 a judge fined a defendant more than $1 million for failing to retrieve information stored on backup tapes. In the same year, the government’s Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight was compelled by a court to search its off-site disaster recovery backups for ESI, a search that ended up costing the agency $6 million–a jaw-dropping amount for a single discovery exercise. What’s even scarier is that the agency wasn’t even a party in the lawsuit; it had simply been subpoenaed for documents in litigation involving Fannie Mae.

This article examines the challenges that backup tapes pose. It also discusses strategies organizations can use to reduce the number of tapes that get stockpiled, and it outlines technologies and services that help reduce the cost and time it takes to retrieve ESI from tape.”

Information Week – E-Discovery: How To Avoid Death By Backup

Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank or IT department — time to reset those codes, for safety’s sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you’ve concocted won’t last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year’s batch? Who can remember?).

Now, a study has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended.

“Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit trade-off to users,” wrote its author, Cormac Herley, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research…”

The Boston Globe: Please do not change your password

If the lawyers at your firm are clamoring for iPhone support, look no further than Christopher’s invaluable advice.”

TechnoLawyer Blog: How to deploy and support the iPhone in a law firm

”A lot of the effort involved in establishing a secure computing environment focuses on technological solutions, from providing warnings about phishing attacks to blocking the propagation of botnets. But, as previous research has shown, security involves a significant human component. Nowhere is that more true than the item at the heart of basic security: the humble password. Here, our best practices—something that’s not in the dictionary or written down, differs for every account, etc.—ignores basic research, which shows that humans have a limited capacity to associate random text with, well, just about anything. A new survey of institutional IT users provides a glimpse into just how bad the password situation is, with less than five percent of users managing to use best practices.

What is perhaps most striking about the new study, which is being published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, is its background section, which details just how long we’ve been aware of the password problem. It cites a study of Unix passwords from 1979, which showed that about 30 percent of the passwords were four characters or less, and about 15 percent being words that appear in the dictionary. Fast forward to 2006, when a separate survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were ‘password1′, ‘abc123′, ‘myspace1′, and ‘password’.”

Click to read full article:  ARS Technica: 30 Years of Failure: The username/password combination