Aphelion Insider

The focus of the 8th Annual Advanced eDiscovery Institute is “Making the Case: Developing Legally Defensible eDiscovery Best Practices.”  The event is hosted at the Ritz Carlton, Pentagon City, Virginia on November 17th and 18th.  It brings together leading eDiscovery experts from across the country to address a variety of salient issues and includes more judicial speakers than any other eDiscovery CLE program. 

Some of the event topics include: 

• how large companies are strategically planning comprehensive compliance and eDiscovery programs, including making the return on investment case;
• how different states are addressing eDiscovery considerations;
• the challenges presented by investigations before federal agencies and multinational litigation; and
• the application of tested methods like statistical sampling and project management in the eDiscovery context. 

Aphelion is a proud sponsor of this year’s event.  Aphelion’s President, Aaron Lawlor, explained, “[w]e’re really looking forward to discussing our boutique consulting, project management, document review, and legal staffing services.  We’ve been ahead of the curve on a number of issues, including leveraging offshore resources to develop cost effective solutions, and this event is a wonderful opportunity to share our ideas with other thought leaders in the industry.”  He added, “[i]t’s also a great chance to introduce prospective clients to the advantages of working with boutique eDiscovery providers.”

Aphelion Legal Solutions has been certified by Catalyst Repository Systems for training and management of review projects using Catalyst’s propriety solution – Catalyst CR.  Catalyst CR is a hosted search, review and analytics platform for litigation support, regulatory compliance and other document-intensive matters.  CR is designed to support the heart of litigation, making it easy for attorneys and staff members to cull, cluster, review, analyze and produce documents from a single web-based system.

Aphelion’s Certified Catalyst CR Trainer provides training to end users who manage and support various types of litigation and document review projects.  This training provides reviewers and site administrators the knowledge to search, review, and analyze documents quickly and accurately.  Aphelion can also train power users and site administrators how to create review forms and rules, batch and assign documents, and manage overall project workflow. 

Aphelion’s Certified Catalyst CR Project Manager will work closely with Catalyst to ensure your site is setup and documents are uploaded correctly.  In addition, Aphelion’s CR Project Manager will provide overall site administration, ensuring each and every one of your projects run smoothly.

To find out more, call (713) 579-9754 or email sales@aphelionlegal.com.

A spirited crowd gathered at Hillyer Art Space to support City Year Washington, DC’s 2011 Alumni & Friends Fundraiser.  The event raised money for several important initiatives including Camp City Year, City Year service projects, and corps member development.  Leading this year’s sponsors was Aphelion Legal Solutions, whose President Aaron Lawlor, is a City Year Seattle Alumni.  Mr. Lawlor commented, “this [City Year] event, like others, demonstrates the positive energy and change that can be effected by a group of civic-minded idealists.”  “City Year is an amazing organization, and Aphelion is excited to be able to work with and support them in their important mission.”          

About City Year – City Year unites a diverse group of young adults for a year of full-time service, giving them the skills and opportunities to work as tutors, mentors, and role models in city schools.  These young leaders transform schools and communities across the United States.  In DC, for the 2010-2011 service year, there are over 140 young adults working in over 10 DC schools.  During the course of their year of service, they will perform hundreds of thousands of hours of service – tutoring at risk children in reading, math, science, running after school programs, and facilitating spring break camps.

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.

The full white paper is available here.

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 Centers CLE Programs 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 Conference Best 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.

Mr. Geske’s white paper is available here.

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.