Vogel Internet, Information Technology, and e-Discovery Blog : Texas Internet, Information Technology, eCommerce, & E-Discovery Lawyer & Attorney Peter S. Vogel : Gardere Wynne Sewell Law Firm : Dallas TX

Last week I posted as a guest blog at on Karl Bayer’s Blog about Dispute Resolution concerning Allison Skinner. Victoria VanBuren who works with Karl has posted a guest blog on this site about the Enron database.

Allison O. Skinner is an attorney and full-time mediator at Sirote & Permutt and written two outstanding articles about resolving eDiscovery disputes as a Mediator to develop a “Mediated Discovery Plan.” What a great way to help parties take advantage of the mediation process to reduce the out of control costs of eDiscovery and at the same time reach an amicable plan to deal with eDiscovery. Allison has setup a great model that will surely be widely adopted.

Allison’s Strategy

In a great article entitled “The Role of the Mediation for ESI (Electronically Stored Information) Disputes” Allison describes a straight-forward roadmap of how mediation can resolve eDiscovery disputes. She lists a number of benefits:

• self-direct workable solutions,
• define scope parameters,
• determine relevancy,
• create timelines for production or “e-depositions,”
• propose confidential compromises,
• create efficiencies with a mutual discovery plan,
• set guidelines for asserting violations of the plan,
• create boundaries for preservation,
• avoid spoliation pitfalls,
• manage protection of privileged information,
• maintain credibility with the court,
• avoid court-imposed sanctions, and
• allocate costs.

“How to Prepare an E-Mediation Statement for Resolving E-Discovery Disputes” will help all lawyers who want to resolve eDiscovery disputes using the mediation process, and allowing Judges to not have to split the baby on ESI which they may not even understand.

eMediation Will Work if the Mediators Understand ESI Disputes

Allison’s great idea is destine to change ESI disputes, but only if the Mediators understand eDiscovery. To be successful with eMediation the Mediator must be able to communicate clearly and simply with the IT folks who manage the ESI, and at the same time Mediator can help educate the lawyers about what makes sense in their case. Before Judges appoint Mediators (and lawyers who volunteer names of Mediators) a determination should be made if the proposed Mediator has sufficient IT technical skills and eDiscovery experience to make eMediation a successful effort. Stay tuned for Allison’s plan to revolutionize eDiscovery!!!

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GUEST BLOG FROM VICTORIA VANBUREN

Before Dave Grant joined Gardere as the Director of e-Discovery, he was responsible for e-Discovery at Enron in the last few years before its total melt down and was responsible for managing more than 1.25 million documents.   While at Enron, Dave responded to more than 100 subpoenas from various states and federal agencies. The Enron database has become a focal point of eDiscovery research.    This Guest Blog about the Enron database is part of a bigger picture regarding academic research for developing efficient tools to improve eDiscovery.

I welcome Victoria VanBuren as the first Guest Blogger with her blog concerning the Enron eMail database. Victoria runs the DISPUTING blog with Karl Bayer in Austin, and has a great knack for posting interesting blogs and finding blogs on important topics. She is also a co-founder and an active participant on theLinkedIn Commercial and Industry Arbitration and Mediation Group. In addition to being a lawyer, Victoria is working on a degree in computer science so and I’m sure we will see Guest Blogs from her in the future.     

GUEST POST: E-DISCOVERY AND THE ENRON E-MAIL DATASET RESEARCH

By Victoria VanBuren  

The U.S. Supreme Court granting of certiorari to former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling dominated the news headlines last week. Interestingly, the Federal Energy Commission (FERC), during its investigation into Enron’s involvement in the energy crisis of 2000-01, made available to the public a large database, called the “Enron Corpus.”  This dataset consists of about half a million e-mail communications from former Enron senior executives and energy traders.

Enron E-mail Dataset Research

Because of its size and public status, the Enron Corpus is a rare and valuable tool for experimenting on text classification methods. After FERC posted it to the web, this dataset has been the subject of research by computer science departments of several universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. The summer of 2009, the team at TREC Legal Track, an organization co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, started conducting research on the Enron Corpus with the purpose of improving large-scale search techniques.  

Our Research – Bayesian Text Classifier

The spring of 2009, computer science students at Texas State University David Villarreal, Thomas McMillen, Andrew Minnick, and I, under the supervision of computer forensic expert Wilbon Davis  utilized  the Enron Corpus to train a Bayes-based algorithm to classify the Enron e-mails into relevant and irrelevant to a given legal issue. This type of algorithm is commonly used by e-mail spam filters.

The Results

The team hoped that this mathematical approach would achieve better accuracy levels than the ~ 20% found using Boolean keyword searching, a method employed by many lawyers. Surprisingly, the Bayesian filter found e-mails to be known relevant at averages ranging between 43% and 66%. And as expected, the irrelevant accuracy results were even higher, averages ranging between 44% and 77%. Texas State University published the Technical Report last week and it can be downloaded for free here.           

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HAPPY 4TH ANNIVERSARY TO DISPUTING!!! – conceived by Karl Bayer and Rob Hargove.  These days Disputing is ably managed by Victoria VanBuren. Victoria recently reached out to me and posted some of my materials and now I am a Guest Blogger for Disputing. This ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) Guest Blog was posted on August 12, 2009.

MY GUEST BLOG ABOUT A MEDIATION CONFERENCE:

Blog by Peter Vogel, posted August 12, 2009.

After receiving a Temporary Restraining Order (”TRO”) the Judge ordered a mediation conference between the plaintiff software licensor and their customer in Alabama. The software in dispute was a specialized tax website that the plaintiff had spent many years developing, and after defendant abruptly terminated the license the plaintiff was shocked that the defendant had a competing website providing specialized tax services somewhat a kin to the plaintiff. So the trial judge had no trouble issuing a TRO. As oftentimes happens the Judge ordered me to mediate the case since I was a programmer and have a masters in computer science. My law practice of more than 30 years has always been limited to representing buyers and sellers of IT and Internet services.

Step One – In Depth Review of Plaintiff’s Technology

Since the defendant was in Alabama I arranged a meeting with the plaintiff licensor’s technical staff at my offices a few days before the mediation conference. Plaintiff’s IT staff demonstrated the construction and schema for their data base, and how the website processed data. This exercise lasted a couple of hours, but provided good insight about their IT solution and web business.

Step Two – Review Defendant’s Technology

When the defendant arrived from Alabama for the mediation conference I immediately requested that they demonstrate their website, database construction, and schema. It did not take a lot to determine that the database structures and implementation were not related to the plaintiff’s at all. Further that there were no clues that defendant developed their systems with the aid of plaintiff’s technology.

Settled at the Mediation

The case settled immediately. As a neutral observer of the databases and websites I was certain that the plaintiff’s and defendant’s tax websites were not related. Although on the surface it seemed obvious to most that how else would the developed their website were it not for access and use of plaintiff’s software.

Without question my IT experiences saved both parties from expensive litigation, and allowed them to move on.

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