Today in content management

Rutrell Yasin reporting for Government Computer News:

The Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information is looking to deploy cloud-based customer relationship and project management software over the next six weeks to its Regional Extension Centers.

The Labor Department is making similar moves.

How to migrate your blog to SharePoint.

Lora Bentley of IT Business Edge interviews Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing for information management solutions at HP.


Welcome to the Real Story Group; also on Twitter.

All from Presto Vivace's Google News: Content Management Systems.

New to me local tech blogs

On Queue, from agencyQ
Bethbeck's Blog
Alliance Interactive
Co-OpTek
Community IT Innovators
Aptify CEO Blog
Spider Bytes, from Spider Systems: an informal mix of whatever is on our minds. We write about all kinds of things, ranging from new product features for our customers to technical tips for other software developers.
QSM, The Intelligence Before Successful Software Projects
Inventory & AIDC Software Blog
Attensity Company Blog
Inside Intellectual Property, from Legal Advantage
Franconnect
Enterprise Content Management - the Indigo Arc Viewpoint: Discussion about Content Management strategies, tools and issues; the overlap between Enterprise Architecture and Content Management.
CYNCZ, your contacts anytime anydevice

The Organization of Legal Professionals

Via Gabe and David, we learn about the Organization for Legal Professionals.

We had naively assumed that there was already an organization that certified legal support standards. Not so it seems. This then is a welcome development.

Electronic records that self-destruct and other records management news

'Vanish' Encryption Raises Serious E-Discovery Concerns

Last week I spoke to Adam Landa, a Greenberg Traurig shareholder who co-chairs the law firm's e-retention and e-discovery practice group about the Vanish encryption technology that, in essence, allows electronic documents to "self destruct" after a period of time.

e-Discovery Policy Could Have Stopped Steroid Leaks

Facebook Trifecta: "Serious Privacy Gaps"

Will the PACER paywall come (slowly) tumbling down?

Is There an E-Discovery Bubble?

e-Discovery miscellany

Gabe says that you should probably do what the judge orders.

DiscoverReady first to announce recession over, in North Carolina

Social Media: Electronic Discovery’s New New Thing?

Legal staffing firm ads e-Discovery to its services.

Untimely objections doom motions to compel

Analysis of Zubulake v. UBS Warburg.

The crushing burden of e-Discovery; it is an IT responsibility.

Presentation to the Arkansas Bar Association.

Why you need a lawyer who will tell you unpleasant truths.

E-Discovery is Low Tech

A lot of the work we do is low tech in nature. It's funny because the college graduates we hire have been raised in a Web 2.0 world and are shocked to find their time copying & counting files, tying out exceptions, recovering passwords, converting files from one format to another, etc. What's worse is that we'll hire experienced technologists who end up doing similar low grade work. The lucky ones get to run SQL queries. Whoopee! That's considered advanced.

Electronic Evidence and Discovery; What Every Lawyer Should Know Now

Analytics and e-Discovery

ITLA white paper on best practices for legal holds

Recovering data from a corrupt hard drive

Great moments in damage control

It seems that Merck has been having problems with the Vioxx brand after some doctors became critical. A lawsuit in Australia has revealed some very damaging emails:

The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as "neutralise", "neutralised" and "discredit" next to the names of various doctors.

"We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up. Institutions might think about whether they wish to receive money from a company like that in future. Worse still, is the revelation that Merck paid the publisher Elsevier to produce a publication.

At some point corporations should entertain the possibility that their critics have a point and fix the problem.

New to me local litigation support blog

The Power of Proof, Surety is recognized as a premiere trusted third-party timestamp authority. Our flagship service AbsoluteProof® “digitally seals” electronic documents —including email, scanned images, scientific device readings, audio, video, CAD diagrams, spreadsheets and audit logs — and legally proves, independent of your people, processes and systems that they have never been altered.

e-Discovery; not just for email anymore!

The Big Picture has been following the House Committee on Government Oversight and unearths this little Instant Messaging gem from S&P analysts:

Rahul Dilip Shah: btw: that deal is ridiculous

Shannon Mooney: I know right ... model def does not capture half of the risk

Rahul Dilip Shah: we should not be rating it

Shannon Mooney: we rate every deal

Shannon Mooney: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

Instant Messaging and social media are going to add a whole new element to records management and e-discovery.

The coming boom in criminal justice IT

Cash crunch could result in more corruption cases

“We’ve seen the high-water mark for [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] cases,” said Steven Tyrrell, chief of the Justice Department’s fraud section, speaking at a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference today. “[But] I believe we have yet to reach the crest of the wave.”

While the current credit crisis, and the lawsuits and prosecutions related to it, may produce a crop of additional FCPA cases, Mr. Tyrrell noted the recent boom of sovereign wealth funds is an area of particular interest to the Justice Department, though it has not yet garnered any definitive cases.

Desperate men will do desperate things.

The public relations of high profile litigation

This blog has been on record for years that the growth sectors of our profession will be those which cope with the aftermath of the misconduct, political and financial, of the past eight years.

While this blogger has no personal experience in legal public relations, some things are clear. The ideal is to fight your case in court; the reality is that what happens in the courthouse is greatly affected by the larger debate. Indeed, which controversies explode into full scale legal investigations, and which deflate will, in part, be driven by public relations. No one should think that aggressive PR can fend off potential prosecution, but it can avert fishing expeditions. In the event of investigations, or high profile congressional inquiries, good PR can minimize the damage. Console yourself with the thought that there will be so many controversies in the future that yours may be relegated to sideshow status.

First, do an internal review. What part of your present operation is likely to attract unwelcome attention? Those of the things that need to change before Henry Waxman hauls you before the cameras to berate you. Review your records management policy and be sure it can cope with the revised rules of civil procedure. It is probably advisable that you set up a meeting with your internal PR spokesman, corporate council, and CIO.

Make your friends before you need them. This blogger assumes you have a PR effort that is cultivating the reporters in your field; be sure to include a social media component to that. I recommend encouraging your employees to blog, Tweet, or participate in whatever social media attracts them. The role of house PR should be to monitor social media along with the traditional media to spot relevant trends and discussion lines.

In the event of controversy your first job is to get the facts out as soon as is consistent with accuracy. Your corporate website has a news section doesn’t it? You do post your press releases in HTML as opposed to PDF right? You do have an RSS feed on the news section of your corporate website? All these things will be critical in the event of a high profile controversy.

In the event of litigation, consider establishing an online library of the public documents connected to the case. If you choose this route you must include all the public documents in the case as a carefully edited selection will invite ridicule. A comprehensive collection of the documents tells the general public that you consider the facts to support your company.

Litigation support: growth sector of IT

Via Gabe's Guide:
Subprime mess sends number of fraud lawsuits higher

Investors sued 110 companies for alleged stock fraud in the first half of this year, up from 107 in the previous six months, according to a study released Tuesday by the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse and Cornerstone Research. About half of the suits included claims related to subprime and other credit losses, the authors of the study said.

Subprime fiasco keeping class action lawyers busy

SEC to Examine Subprime Accounting

Accounting software and criminal justice IT should also see substantial growth.

Sigh.

Note - Gabe's Guide and Kevin LaCroix take a similar view.

Email, it always comes back to email

MORTGAGE MELTDOWN

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

It's a great time to be in e-discovery and litigation support.

SEC begins to investigate hedge funds

SEC demands records from hedge funds

The Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered more than two dozen hedge funds to turn over trading records and e-mail communications made between Sept. 1-19, The Wall Street Journal reported today

The object is to determine whether traders spread rumors to manipulate shares.

Sock puppets are not just immoral, in the case of hedge funds they are illegal.

Cloud computing and chain of custody

Cloud Computing Reality Check

There are a range of IT governance issues, not the least of which is e-discovery. Some questions that came up: How do you run e-discovery against hosted e-mail? And what privacy protections are in place so that your company's legal experts can access what's needed, but not the cloud service provider? Another way of looking at this is the "chain of custody" of your corporate data in the cloud.

The era of e-Discovery and evidence recovery has begun

F.B.I. Looks Into 4 Firms at Center of the Economic Turmoil

F.B.I. officials said Tuesday that the total number of corporate fraud investigations at the bureau was 26, an increase from the 24 open cases cited just a week ago by Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I. That number stood at 21 as recently as July, but the bureau has not named most of the targets.

Mr. Mueller told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the major corporate investigations are aimed at companies that “may have engaged in misstatements in the course of what transpired during this financial crisis.”

He added that “the F.B.I. will pursue these cases as far up the corporate chain as is necessary to ensure that those responsible receive the justice they deserve.”

In addition to the major corporate cases, the bureau said it had about 1,400 open investigations into smaller companies and individuals suspected of mortgage fraud.

e-Discovery and litigation support software companies are going to do very well indeed.

Free legal and litigation software reviews

The eDiscovery Paradigm Shift

With the potential changes to The Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey, I started to research alternatives for substanttive research on litigation technology. I am pleased to report that I have found LitiReview by Lexebe.com.

Launched in August of 2008, LitiReviews boasts the largest collection of free legal and litigation software reviews on the web. All reviews (100+) are full-text, and have been published in legal magazines, journals, websites and blogs. LitiReview links to copies of reviews available on the internet, or hosted by us at the author's request.

Litigation support is going to be a growth industry.

Tweetake and records management

The Buzz Bin has a nice write up of Tweetake, a service that backs up your tweets. Marinel Mones gives some good reasons for backing up your social media, but fails to include possible litigation. It is just a question of time before social media is included in legal discovery. This is something PR practitioners are going to have to discuss with clients.

Did the Central District Court of CA just leagalize industrial espionage?

E-Mail Hacking Case Could Redefine Online Privacy

The case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America, involves a hacker who in 2005 broke into a file-sharing company's server and obtained copies of company e-mails as they were being transmitted. He then e-mailed 34 pages of the documents to an MPAA executive, who paid the hacker $15,000 for the job, according to court documents.

The issue boils down to the judicial definition of an intercept in the electronic age, in which packets of data move from server to server, alighting for milliseconds before speeding onward. The ruling applies only to the 9th District, which includes California and other Western states, but could influence other courts around the country.

In August 2007, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, in the Central District of California, ruled that the alleged hacker, Rob Anderson, had not intercepted the e-mails in violation of the 1968 Wiretap Act because they were technically in storage, if only for a few instants, instead of in transmission.

"Anderson did not stop or seize any of the messages that were forwarded to him," Cooper said in her decision, which was appealed by Valence Media, a company incorporated in the Caribbean island of Nevis but whose officers live in California. "Anderson's actions did not halt the transmission of the messages to their intended recipients. As such, under well-settled case law, as well as a reading of the statute and the ordinary meaning of the word 'intercept,' Anderson's acquisitions of the e-mails did not violate the Wiretap Act."

Anderson was a former business associate of an officer for Valence Media, which developed TorrentSpy, a search engine that helped users find "torrents," or special data files on the Internet that can be used to help download free audio, software, video and text. According to court documents, Anderson configured the "copy and forward" function of Valence Media's server so that he could receive copies of company e-mail in his Google mail account. He then forwarded a subset to an MPAA executive.

The documents sent to the MPAA included financial statements and spreadsheets, according to court papers. "The information was obtained in a legal manner from a confidential informant who we believe obtained the information legally," MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman said.

Valence Media alleged that the MPAA wanted those documents to gain an advantage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company and its officers.

"The case is alarming because its implications will reach far beyond a single civil case," wrote Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Friday. If upheld, the foundation argued, "law enforcement officers could engage in the contemporaneous acquisition of e-mails just as Anderson did, without having to comply with the Wiretap Act's requirements." Those requirements are strict, including a warrant based on probable cause as well as high-level government approvals and proof alternatives would not work.

If I am reading this correctly, anyone with the technical know how can set up shop as the secret police. I would love to know what e-discovery experts think of this ruling.

The coming boom market in crisis commiunications and litigation support

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power

July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

There is a specialty within crisis communications PR that trains clients for testifying before congress. Those people are going to be very rich.

We are going to spend the next twenty years examining the misconduct of the Bush administration. Look for major advances in content management, enterprise search, litigation support, e-discovery, and evidence recovery.

Great moments in records management policies

Using a File Erasure Tool Considered Suspicious

By a California court:

The designer, Carter Bryant, has been accused by Mattel of using Evidence Eliminator on his laptop computer just two days before investigators were due to copy its hard drive.

Carter hasn't denied that the program was run on his computer, but he said it wasn't to destroy evidence. He said he had legitimate reasons to use the software.

Schneier goes on to say:

I have often recommended that people use file erasure tools regularly, especially when crossing international borders with their computers. Now we have one more reason to use them regularly: plausible deniability if you're accused of erasing data to keep it from the police.

Not sure about that, might want to check with the revised rules for civil procedure.