This is not the time to cut corners on information security

Martin Felsky, Senior Counsel

April 18, 2020

About a month before China notified the World Health Organization about a new coronavirus, I published an article for the Ontario Bar Association encouraging lawyers to migrate their practices to the cloud entitled “ If Judges Can Move to the Cloud, Why Can’t Lawyers? ”

Lawyers are not exactly known for their quick uptake on technology ? for many reasons, among them, valid concerns about security and confidentiality. I pointed out that some courts across Canada were moving to the cloud. They have been doing so in a methodical and careful way, following the Blueprint for the Security of Judicial information and the Guidelines for Migration of Judicial Information to a Cloud Service Provider.… Read More

Leveraging Concept Clustering in eDiscovery

Candice Chan-Glasgow, Director, Review Services and Counsel, and Catia Amorim, Associate

March 4, 2019

Even after de-duplication and some initial culling, it’s not unusual to still be faced with a significant number of electronic records in a given litigation matter.

Tools that help lawyers to “make sense” of a plethora of data and that assist in identifying key records are thus increasingly crucial to efficient and effective eDiscovery. Fortunately, it’s possible to organize your electronic data into smaller buckets of conceptually similar documents. One of the analytic tools that makes this possible is called “concept clustering”.

The concept clustering tool leverages “concepts” by assessing the meaning and context of terms contained within documents and by looking for relationships. … Read More

The Limitations of Keywords

Candice Chan-Glasgow

Director, Review Services and Counsel

February 5, 2019

A high-profile case making headlines again this week illustrates the frailties of relying on keyword searching alone when searching for relevant documents in any document review project.

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman was charged last year with breach of trust for allegedly leaking government secrets, and his legal team sought a court direction to obtain thousands of previously undisclosed government documents needed to defend him.

According to an article published by the Globe and Mail, Norman’s lawyers presented the court with evidence that his case was referred to by officials within the Department of National Defence using various codenames. … Read More

No Matter is Too Small – the Case for Email Threading

Wendy Cole

Director, Project Management and Counsel

November 5, 2018

Consider for a moment the last time you had to review email messages for discovery, or pay counsel to do so on your behalf. The endless toil of slogging through random fragments of email threads that appear to be in no particular order. After a while it starts to feel like a terrible case of déjà vu. Haven’t I seen this email before? Why am I looking at this again and how did I code it when I saw it an hour ago? Did this part of the thread come before or after the portion that I viewed yesterday? … Read More

Technical document production struggles will not excuse undue delay

Wendy Cole

Director, Project Management and Counsel

October 1, 2018

The October 2017 decision of Master Graham in 683153 Ontario Limited et al. v. The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company et al. , 2017 ONSC 6024 (CanLII) serves as a cautionary tale for both counsel and clients who are unfamiliar with the complexities of producing discovery documents in electronic format.

Although this was an extreme case of delay, it stands for the broader principle that litigants cannot rely on complexity, costs and eDiscovery problems to excuse them from pursuing the case in an expeditious manner and in compliance with the timelines set out under the rules, particularly when those problems are the result of inexperience of counsel in managing large electronic productions.… Read More