Mike Geske, Aphelion’s COO, has prepared a white paper about a lawsuit pending in India alleging that 31 of the most well known western law firms and a separate LPO company are illegally practicing law throughout India. The petition seeks an order from the High Court in Tamil Nadu requiring various agencies of the government of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the Bar Councils of India and Tamil Nadu to stop the named (and all other foreign) firms’ practices immediately under the Advocates Act of 1961 and, as an interim measure, an injunction prohibiting the firms from practicing law in India while the case is pending.
Aphelion Vice President Aaron Lawlor and Sensei Enterprises President Sharon Nelson have authored an article entitled, “Do It Yourself ESI Collection - Risky Business for Clients and Counsel.” The article is featured on MyLegal.com and addresses how the advice and oversight of outside experts can result in cost savings and a more defensible collection process. Click here to read the article in-house and outside counsel are talking about.
Aphelion Legal Solutions announces a webinar on December 17, 2009 at 5:00pm EST. Patrick Oot of the Electronic Discovery Institute, Anne Kershaw of A. Kershaw, P.C.//Attorneys & Consultants, and Aphelion’s Michael Geske will be discussing methods to assist litigants and their counsel on solutions that meet FRCP 26’s reasonableness requirements. In particular, the distinguished panel will be discussing the views of various jurists and the implications of a newly published study by the Electronic Discovery Institute and the Text Retrieval Conference. There is no charge for attendance.
To register for the webinar, please call (713) 579-9756 or click here. Additional information on the webinar and the panelists is available here.
Aphelion Legal Solutions is sponsoring an Electronic Discovery Institute event at the Newseum in Washington, DC the evening of November 12, 2009. This will be the 5th annual “After Party” held in conjunction with the Georgetown University Law Center’s CLE Program’s yearly Advanced eDiscovery Institute.
The After Party is a fundraiser for the eDiscovery Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to resolving electronic discovery challenges. Aphelion’s sponsorship and support will help the eDiscovery Institute continue to conduct studies of litigation processes that incorporate modern technologies, measure the relative merits of new discovery technologies and methods, and share the results of its studies with the public free of charge.
Michael Geske, Aphelion’s COO, is participating as a Topic Authority in TREC Legal Track 2009. TREC is the Text Retrieval Conference, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, in cooperation with the Department of Defense. Each year’s program presents a set of tasks to vendors of litigation document searching products and evaluates their performance. The exercise is intended to develop industry best practices and articulate standards for evaluating search and retrieval methods. The tasks are modeled on real life circumstances that arise when litigants face the task of collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing large amounts of electronically stored information, taking into account The Sedona ConferenceBest Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery. The project’s significance has been judicially recognized:
[T]here is room for optimism that as search and information retrieval methodologies are studied and tested, this will result in identifying those that are most effective and least expensive to employ for a variety of ESI discovery tasks. Such a study has been underway since 2006, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, embarked on a cooperative endeavor with the Department of Defense to evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of search methodologies. This project, known as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), evolved into the Trec LegalTrack, a research effort aimed at studying the e-discovery review process to evaluate the effectiveness of a wide array of search methodologies. This evaluative process is open to participation by academics, law firms, corporate counsel and companies providing ESI discovery services…. The goal of the project is to create industry best practices for use in electronic discovery. This project can be expected to identify both cost effective and reliable search and information retrieval methodologies and best practice recommendations, which, if adhered to, certainly would support an argument that the party employing them performed a reasonable ESI search, whether for privilege review or other purposes.
Victor Stanley Inc. v. Creative Pipe, 250 F.R.D. 251, 260 n.10 (D. Md. 2008). Additional information on TREC Legal Track is available here.
Michael Geske, COO of Aphelion Legal Solutions, has prepared a white paper addressing recent developments to the rules governing the attorney-client privilege and work product. Mr. Geske’s paper focuses specifically on the impact of the 2006 amendments to Rule 26 and subsequent case law addressing electronically stored information (”ESI”). Attempts to address the expansion of ESI have altered the scope of the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine as applied to pretrial discovery matters. Two changes have narrowed the scope of those protections compared to the breadth with which they were asserted when discovery was dominated by hard copy productions. The other change provides litigants additional means by which they can attempt to protect their privilege claims while maintaining some limit on the costs of ESI discovery. By understanding the extent of these changes, practitioners can anticipate their impact on clients, advise them appropriately, and maximize the chances that important communications remain confidential and protected from discovery.
On February 24, 2009, Aphelion’s CEO Hiren Patel will be presenting at the LPO Summit conference held in New York City. Hiren’s presentation will focus on specific challenges to executing an India-based legal offshoring strategy. Specific topics of Hiren’s presentation will include:
An overview of research that utilizes quantitative methods and provides valuable insight on salient cross-cultural differences;
The similarities and differences between IT / business process offshoring and legal offshoring;
Managing expectations when executing a legal offshoring strategy;
Determining the type of work appropriate for offshoring to India; and
Vendor selection and management.
The LPO Summit is held by the American Conference Institute and will take place February 23 - 24, 2009 in New York City. Please visit the American Conference Institute online to register or contact me for more information.
Aphelion’s COO Michael Geske will be a panelist on part 2 of The Knowledge Congress’s live CLE webinar entitled “Strategic E-Discovery: Taking Steps to Avoid Litigation’s Black Hole.“ Mike will be speaking on February 18, 2009 and will be addressing issues related to outsourcing e-discovery work with a particular focus on offshoring. Specific topics of Mike’s presentation will include:
Current market trends;
Building relationships with vendors, both onshore and offshore;
Incorporating consultants into an e-discovery strategy;
Ethical requirements for in-house and outside counsel; and
Defense of e-discovery processes and document reviews.
The webinar is expected to last from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time on February 18, 2009. Please visit Knowledge Congress online to register or contact me for more information about Mike’s presentation.
A prosecutor friend of mine recently forwarded me a blog post from Mark Bennett, a Houston, Texas criminal defense lawyer, entitled, “Yeah, Um, I Think We’ll Pass on This One.” In response to an email solicitation offering LPO services from New Delhi based law firm G.P. Law Solutions, Bennett writes:
If I were in some area of the law in which the outcome didn’t matter, I might let you summarize a deposition just for grins. As it is, though, I would not allow you to touch one of my clients’ cases if you were the last “advoate” on Earth.
It’s not simply your cavalier attitude toward indefinite articles, nor your charming omission of verbs connecting subjects and objects, nor your Generation-Y approach to spelling and grammar generally. It is, rather, that your tolerance for “quality issues” is clearly much higher than my clients (whose futures are on the line) would consent to have applied to their cases.
It might be surprising to Bennett and others who have received similar solicitations that I agree with the underlying substance of Bennett’s reaction to G.P. Law Solutions. And I certainly find his writing to be quite entertaining. Continue reading ‘Separate the Wheat from the Chaff’ »
The recent LPO Summit conference in New York featured a number of presentations focused on structuring relationships with LPO (legal process outsourcing) vendors. Corporate legal departments looking to offshore legal work face a number of challenges in establishing an LPO arrangement. Only a careful and reasoned approach will result in a working relationship that ultimately preserves or enhances work quality while reducing cost. Given the nascent LPO industry and the increasing number of providers, it is undoubtedly a good idea for corporate legal departments to solicit the advice of outsourcing consultants and outside law firms with “outsourcing practices.” At the LPO Summit, a number of these outsourcing consultants and outsourcing lawyers provided several good pointers about how to select an LPO and how to structure an outsourcing deal with an LPO.
But it may be risky to rely exclusively on the advice of outsourcing consultants and lawyers. The danger stems from an overarching question that is not easy to resolve: is LPO more “legal” or more “outsourcing?” To put it another way, is working with an LPO more like working with an IT outsourcing (“ITO”) or business process outsourcing (“BPO”) company, or is it more like working with outside counsel or a contract attorney staffing agency? Continue reading ‘Forcing a Square Peg Into a Round Hole’ »
