Tips and tweets and wikileaks

In two recent blog posts at the tail end of last year Vox Stellarum and Waking the Dead and in case notes in our resources section I highlighted the US case of McMillen v Hummingbird Speedway Inc.

To refresh your memory the case decided that log ins and passwords to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace were discoverable in appropriate circumstances and the claimant in that case was ordered to disclose the information to the defendants within 14 days and had to undertake not to alter or delete material on the site(s) for a defined period.

The world of litigation and e-disclosure has not taken long to follow this up at least in the United States. I see from recent press reports that the US Government is suing the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and as part of its case has applied for an order that he and others disclose their Twitter passwords and log ins. I do not know the result of the application but I suspect it may well be successful.

English litigators have been warned!

Predections are almost as commonplace as resolutions at this time of year. I got mine out of the way last year [in Vox Stellarum, 18th Nov 2010] but I liked the thoughts from ZL Technologies ZL Technologies’ top 7 predictions for e-discovery in 2011.

Nothing outrageous there but perhaps of note is the suggestion that in house counsel will concentrate more and more on the left hand side of the EDRM spectrum with emphasis on information management. The quote I like best and which encapsulates my own view is:

the best practice of the in-house lawyer is to find a comprehensive solution that can manage the ESI from creation, preservation, collection and review.  And the corresponding ability to proactively handle e-discovery will separate the prepared companies from unprepared competitors since e-discovery costs are no longer trivial. 

Which brings me to Index Engines. Millnet has offered Index Engines technology for approximately six months now and has found it to be robust and cost effective. Clients have loved it as it revolutionises attitudes to searching back up tapes.

Traditionally the argument has always been that to retrieve and restore the information contained on back up tapes was costly and time consuming and was almost certainly disproportionate. No longer, I suggest. Index Engines is probably the fastest and lowest cost approach to searching back up tapes and /or very large volumes of electronic documents typically held on email / file servers. Effectively we can process in readiness for searching tens of millions of documents within a 24 hour period. As a practical example we can search 5 million emails and deliver results for less than £500.

The National Law Journal  of December 20^th 2010 published an article by Tom O’Connor Searching through backup tapes? No sweat. Tom O’Connor is an attorney and director of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center based in New Orleans and his article contains a number of handy tips about the technology and how counsel should approach the whole issue of information management. I suspect we have not heard the last of this subject and I heartily recommend you read the article.