Mark Lyon

eDiscovery Attorney

Category / Tips

May 22, 2016

Refinancing Student Loans

Piggy Bank by Fabian Blank, via Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/photos/pElSkGRA2NU

Most people who went through law school in recent years are saddled with significant debt. If you’re not, be thankful. If you are, it’s often difficult to discuss how best to handle addressing this massive debt, particularly if making payments is difficult due to sporadic employment or low pay. Even with full time jobs along the …

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February 24, 2016

The Basics of eDiscovery

The team at Exterro has assembled an incredibly helpful group of resources with their “Basics of E-Discovery” website.  They’ve broken the entire process into several chapters and even included a helpful list of external resources (including my site) for additional learning. Each day, numerous attorneys find themselves facing new challenges as they work to address eDiscovery …

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January 4, 2015

Training a Review Team

River Region Health Center Training Room photo courtesy of Jason Wohlford (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wohlford/6450087741/ - CC BY-SA 2.0)

The success of a document review project depends heavily on a successful training day. While the core members of the case team have likely been actively working on the matter for weeks or months, new team members will not start with the same level of knowledge and need to be quickly and efficiently brought up …

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September 30, 2014

Keep Responsive and Privilege Separate

Redaction Image courtesy of Jack Zalium https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaiban/3514043632/ - CC BY-NC 2.0

I’ve encountered a number of reviews recently where combining incompatible tags and enforcing (sometimes with automatic propagation) family coding resulted in mass confusion at production time. For example, responsiveness and privilege are separate logical concepts. Faced with a single-choice field containing Responsive, Non- Responsive, Privileged, Redact, and Unreadable, reviewers are uncertain how to code a …

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May 19, 2014

Hot Terms

In 2010, Anton Valukas at Jenner and Block issued a massive report in his capacity as examiner in the Lehman bankruptcy. The report was an incredibly in-depth review of the business and its failure, but also included a significant amount of detail about his methods and sources. The report disclosed that from three petabytes of available data, approximately …

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November 20, 2013

Asking Questions During Training

This morning, Above The Law posted seven tips for new contract attorneys. Take a moment to look over their list and explanations; generally, it contains some good advice. Their second tip, “Don’t ask hypothetical questions”, is particularly wise. Use the question time after a training to clarify any confusing or conflicting information provided in training. …

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November 19, 2013

Quitting a Doc Review Project Early

Project schedules are always unpredictable. Populations and deadlines change, team members move faster or slower than expected, the database takes a nose dive on the Thursday before a production deadline or (my personal favorite) the day before you’re done, someone “finds” a population of data roughly the same size as what you just finished. When …

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November 18, 2013

Why Can’t I Use My Cell Phone During Doc Review?

New reviewers often express frustration about the number of rules involved in document review. Review attorneys are generally quite intelligent and hardworking people – being told what to wear or what to do seems, for many, insulting. Rules are necessary, though, because not everyone conducts themselves in a way that respects everyone working around them. …

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November 7, 2013

Internet Archive Scanning Center Fire – Donations Needed

The internet provides an amazing ability for immediate change. As new information is available, sites can be updated, documents republished and content refreshed to reflect new information. I first encountered the Internet Archive when I needed to be able to demonstrate what had been removed from a website. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine was ready and …

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July 24, 2013

The Importance of Affirmative Tags

Designing an effective, intuitive coding layout is not always as easy as it seems. Often, the choices made in coding selections will color the ultimate work product, so much care and attention goes into crafting specific issue codes and responsiveness instructions that distill various requests into easily understood components. That list will then circulate through …

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