Much has happened since our last Newsletter was published. On the leisure front, the Cubs are battling for first place, the Sox have tanked and da Bears training camp is open for business. On the business front, BlueStar has expanded our local document and data processing facility again, forcing the business development and client relations staff to move to new digs in the Loop opposite the Daley Center - no one's arm had to be twisted on that move.

The focus of this Newsletter is on increasing awareness of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and the new world of Audio eDiscovery. Additionally, with great pride we are announcing the selection of one of our founding principals to join the Legal Program staff at Wright College.

Tom Gelbmann, founder of Gelbmann & Associates, and George Socha, Principal of Socha Consulting LLC, conducted their Socha-Gelbmann E-Discovery Survey in 2003 and 2004 that confirmed that vendors, and consumers alike, harbored concerns about the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market. In the role of facilitators, in 2005 they formed a project team of leading experts in the various components of electronic discovery from law firms, corporations and providers of services and software to develop the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) to address this problem.

In the project team's own words: "The completed reference model provides a common, flexible and extensible framework for the development, selection, evaluation and use of electronic discovery products and services." The project team's completed model was placed in the public domain in May 2006. The project is akin to a living organism gaining knowledge and energy from the infusion of new ideas and information on a daily basis via their Website (www.edrm.net) related blogs and conferences.

The EDRM breaks down the electronic discovery process objective to produce only relevant documents and data from vast volumes of electronically stored information (ESI). The components (nodes) of the EDRM include Records Management, Identification, Preservation, Collection, Processing, Review, Analysis, Production and Presentation. The model interprets the relationship and data flow between the nodes and attempts to define best practices for each node.

With the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) effective date of December 1, 2006, and the amendments focus on ESI, the timing of the EDRM could not have been better. The amended rules have precipitated modifications, refinements and extensions to the original model, with more to come as jurists hand down opinions, judgments and sanctions relating to the amended rules and their related interpretation. What we do know is that timelines are shorter, and ignorance and non- compliance will precipitate sanctions

Let us stipulate that: 1) As critical as it is, there is no short-term solution to Records Management; 2) We all know, or should know, the importance of the Preservation of potentially relevant documents and data, and how to initiate and enforce a litigation hold; and 3) The dominant solutions in the market, including Concordance, Summation, Ringtail, Sanction, and comparable platforms, do a reasonable job with Processing, Review, Analysis, Production and Presentation. However, a new "sub-node" has evolved - Pre-Processing, that joins Identification and Collection as having the greatest impact on time, costs and mitigation of risk relative to sanctions or adverse judgments.

Vendors and industry consultants are consistent with their claims that ninety-five percent of our documents today are in electronic form. A statistic seldom articulated, is that we are generating five (5) times the number of documents that we produced only four years ago due to the relative ease of generating electronic documents and the proliferation of email, especially non-business and forwarded emails. It is not uncommon for an 80GB collection of documents, including emails and attachments, to contain less than 10GB of relevant content. There is a new generation of Pre-Processing tools available to cull- down a large collection to a significantly smaller relevant dataset in minutes or hours, instead of weeks or months.

Obviously, before one can begin to Pre-Process a document collection, the collection needs to have been identified and harvested. The identification challenge is determining the location of the documents in addition to the document types and custodians due to the increase in the quantity of potential repositories - including servers, workstations, thumb drives, laptops, PDAs, network attached storage and connected home computers. Again, what might appear to be an impossible task has been addressed by technology, and solutions exist to identify and collect data from a seemingly endless expanse of repositories in a timely fashion.

The two most robust platforms that I would recommend to address your Identification, Collection and Pre-Processing requirements have been developed by Clearwell Systems, Inc. and DeepDive Technologies, Inc. . Please contact me, personally, with any questions or comments about this article, or to request a demonstration of the recommended solutions. © 2007 BlueStar Computer Solutions, Inc. - All Rights Reserved

The rules of discovery have changed since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) went into effect December 1, 2006. With their focus on electronically stored information (ESI), law firms and their clients must get a handle on incorporating ESI into their litigation related processes. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority think of ESI in terms of electronic documents and emails, totally ignoring the fact that the amended rules are very specific regarding the importance of audio. Rule 34(b) specifically states that sound recordings are fully discoverable.

Voicemail has been around for years. Like email, no one could have anticipated the recent exponential increases in the volume of voicemails we now experience. Likewise, as technology continues to create a digital world, recordings of individual telephone conversations, conference calls, call center transactions, customer service calls and other recorded voice transactions are commonplace. However, as with emails, the majority of recorded voice transactions are as useless as email SPAM messages. There is a clear need to quickly, and easily, cull-down the original audio collection to relevant transactions without listening to every one - a time and cost-prohibitive alternative.

Technology now exists to take most audio voice files and index the words on the files using phonics - focusing on the sound of the words and relating it to phonetic spelling algorithms. Remember the rage toy of the 70's Speak & Spell (ET could not have called home without it) or teaching aid of the 80's Hooked On Phonics? This is the core technology behind the current leaders in audio search solutions but, obviously, much more sophisticated. However, the functionality is simple. The software indexes your audio files, you type in the words you want found and it finds them highlighting their location on a timeline. Instead of listening to hundreds, or thousands of hours of recordings, you only have to listen to the spoken words in the immediate proximity of the words you are searching for to determine if that particular conversation segment is relevant or responsive.

Therefore, as with other ESI, you can now easily locate, preserve, search, review and produce relevant audio files regardless of your current review and production platform including Concordance and, Summation. Audio transactions that are found to be responsive can then be converted into text files and/or formatted documents - electronic or paper. However, this is the one weak link in the current process. The conversion to text is a manual process involving transcription professionals. One needs to approach this process with care and understanding as this represents the most labor intensive and costly part of the process.

To set realistic expectations, many factors must be considered. You need to determine the number of "audio hours" to be transcribed and what the audio contains. There is a major difference between transcribing simple dictation from an individual vs. transcribing the recording of a conference call involving a dozen or more people. Many other factors also contribute to the level of effort and costs of transcription services including the quality of the audio, the compression ratio(s) of the audio files, the applicable accents and articulation of the speakers and the format of the transcribed data desired.

Your costs for transcribing the audio will widely vary - depending upon, the vendor, where the work is performed, the influencing factors mentioned above and the output(s) you request. Some vendors will charge a flat rate per audio hour - often factoring the hours with a 2X or 3X multiplier depending upon the complexity of the task (e.g. individual vs. conference call). Other vendors will charge by the page, line or character. There are also vendors who charge for each process required - hourly to put the content into a data base, a per page fee for the actual transcription and an hourly consulting fee for creating load files for your internal platform. As for the work being performed onshore or offshore, once you address firm and client policy issues, know that onshore transcription costs, on average, will be at least double that of offshore.

Bottom line, audio is discoverable and it is not a question of if, but rather a question of when it will come into play for you and your firm. Audio eDiscovery is not as cut-and-dried as with electronic documents, and not all vendors understand the nuances that might exist between different matters. As an independent solutions provider, BlueStar offers both expertise and choices. Please do not hesitate to contact me, personally, with any questions or comments about this article. © 2007 BlueStar Computer Solutions, Inc. - All Rights Reserved

BlueStar Principal Invited to Join Legal Programs Staff at Wright College

Jeremy Schaper, one of the principals and founders of BlueStar Computer Solutions, has been invited to join the Legal Programs staff at Wright College - one of the City Colleges of Chicago. Jeremy, a certified Concordance and Summation trainer, will be teaching courses in End User and Administrator training for both platforms as part of Wright College's new Litigation Support section. In this section, Wright College offers courses that feature hands-on training in today's leading software used by Litigation Support professionals - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Concordance and Summation. Students will learn what they need, including the latest tips and tricks, to be more proficient in their current role, or to kick-start a career change as part of the Wright's specialized Legal Secretary and Paralegal programs. Wright College's accelerated hands-on seminars get participants up to speed faster than other methods. All Litigation Support section courses are offered at the Wright College campus or, if you have a conference room and four or more employees who require training, the instructor can bring laptops and the training directly to your offices. Fees are slightly higher for these customized classes, and there is a material charge. For further information, visit Wright College's website www.classesforall.com.