The Limitations of Keywords

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

O’Donnell speaks at Ontario e-Discovery Institute

Crystal O’Donnell, Heuristica’s Chief Executive Officer and Senior Counsel, spoke at the e-Discovery Institute 2018 at The Advocates’ Society Education Centre in downtown Toronto earlier this week.

Now in its 8th year, this highly anticipated full day program provides attendees with the practical information and insights they need to effectively manage electronically stored information in all types of cases. Attendees:

Heard from the experts about how to efficiently manage all phases of the e-Discovery process, managing electronic data from discovery through to trial.
Attended demonstrations of the latest e-Discovery technology.
Learned how to help their clients protect against and respond to cyber hacks.

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

We won … thank you!

We are honoured to have been awarded the 2018 Canadian Lawyer Readers’ Choice Award for Legal Process Outsourcing and Document Review.

For the fourth consecutive year Canadian Lawyer has run their Readers’ Choice Awards which is designed to give a voice to their readers to identify which vendors and suppliers are the best at what they do.

Earlier this summer more than 2,000 lawyers and legal professionals cast 89,000 votes for their preferred suppliers in over 38 categories.

Crystal O’Donnell, Heuristica’s Founder and CEO, said she is “thrilled to be recognized by clients and peers for the work we do” and credits “the amazing document review team we have for this award”.… 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