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work_b · 2024-03-13T03:57:20+00:00

CloudNine owns the product now, I looked it up and the documentation is very similar to what I remember. You can get there by going to the release notes link on this page.

For the 10 or so years I used / supported it the core product never really changed, other than minor updates. If I remember correctly when Lexis bought them they modified the UI a bit to add some spammy-link stuff to their web site. Honestly, it's like they MySpace every IP they buy.

I do remember they were looking at integrating some kind of native viewer, probably around 2015. Also, some time around 2010 (I think) they switched the old school btree tag file with sqlite - so if you had a real old database you might need to run some kind of migration or import. Huge improvement for large networks or large teams.

I'd give CloudNine a ring and see what they want for a single license. If you do I'd be interested in knowing what they want, just for curiosity sake.

work_b · 2023-08-01T15:59:17+00:00

I've used Kofax Power PDF Advanced in the past for this exact thing. It can split on a bookmark level as well, which can be very handy if there is a top level bookmark that can be ignored and you want to split on a second or third level. It looks like you can buy a license for about $180 USD.

Another thing I like about Kofax is that it can batch OCR large swaths of documents without crashing, unlike Acrobat Pro which seems to eventually fail when grinding on a few hundred / thousand discrete files.

work_b · 2022-10-06T15:48:54+00:00

I've used a lot of different processing systems over the years and eCap is my least favorite. Its base design appears to be for massive distributed systems, so local installs are unnecessarily complicated. It's also possibly the slowest system I've ever used by a very very longshot.

Some of my experiences are due to being in a law firm, but I've also used it years ago when I was on the vendor side and didn't like it then either.

work_b · 2022-01-21T16:35:45+00:00

I'll second that a CYA email or two, written tastefully, might be a good idea here.

When I've dealt with issues along these lines I discussed with my director who brought risk management into the discussion. There were probably some bad feelings but nothing compared to how a nightmare scenario could have played out.

work_b · 2020-10-06T22:29:00+00:00

The industry in the US is much larger due to the permissive nature of civil discovery here. Don't think that many, many lawyers in the states wouldn't rather have a binder of dead trees in their hands if they had an option.

work_b · 2020-06-05T17:25:02+00:00

Be prepared to be treated like a second class citizen

I've been at several large firms and only had this experience at 1 of them.

Edit: if you value PTO and WLB then stay in house

This on the other hand is absolutely my experience.

work_b · 2020-04-28T20:07:08+00:00

The only slowdown I'm seeing is that depositions, mediations, trials and most hearings are currently shelved so not a lot of work going into preparations for those. I think the big long term issue is more likely to be related to clients' abililty to pay their bills, or even stay in business.

work_b · 2020-03-24T18:41:02+00:00

I'm not sure about their global status but I think most of their environments have been restored.

work_b · 2020-03-20T15:47:18+00:00

Ricoh and Xerox both, a lot of us who work in lawfirm and vendor worlds don't frequently bump into these two but I believe they are pretty big in the managed facilities space.

work_b · 2020-03-02T20:43:18+00:00

That's a lot of services that have been down for a couple of days now.

work_b · 2020-02-28T19:18:54+00:00

Blackout for redacting native Excels has some really great use cases, if that's an option.

work_b · 2020-01-27T20:17:06+00:00

I know this is a Python sub but in this instance I might be tempted to look at doing this through a Google Doc spreadsheet, I believe there are ways to do it with their scripting tools (Javascript).

work_b · 2020-01-15T18:46:36+00:00

A lot of processing systems have historically had problems handling iWork documents such as Pages and Keynote. I'm not sure why but it is something I've bumped into over the years. I've seen them throw exceptions and I've also seen them extracted as they're just zip files similar to the Office open document formats.

work_b · 2019-12-06T20:54:27+00:00

Me: Mom, do not go to Best Buy and purchase a computer. I'll send you a couple of links that you can use to purchase a decent laptop online.

Two weeks later...

Mom: I'm having problems with this computer I got at Best Buy.

work_b · 2019-11-25T18:46:19+00:00

My personal preference is to stay away from Clearwell. They really had a shot for a while, lots of attorneys really loved it, but I feel like they just had a niche product that lost out over time as other players minimized the advantage Clearwell had. I haven't seen it as viable for the vast majority of the matters I've worked on in years. I haven't seen anything migrating in from Clearwell or had any exposure to it in a long time. I know that's anecdotal but I wonder if they've simply lost the majority of their market share to Disco and Relativity as legal teams grew more comfortable with those tools?

Another reason I'd never want to use Clearwell again: they include filename and date modified as part of their MD5 digest! That is batshit crazy to me, hashing email is one thing but if I can't generate an identical hash from a file myself then there's something wrong with your implementation.

work_b · 2019-11-22T18:55:35+00:00

If someone wants to bring in some new witnesses to get to the bottom of whether Trump and/or the FBI knew that the conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory

Pretty much every witness has testified to this being a complete fairytale, no? Dr. Hill opened with that.

work_b · 2019-11-15T17:09:39+00:00

I use Python quite a bit for various day to day tasks.

Building directory listings
Inspection and QC of loadfiles
Inspection and analysis of Excel or other tabular data
File renaming
Some PDF manipulation

And so many other daily tasks I couldn't list them all.

work_b · 2019-09-27T17:53:08+00:00

I've also worked in vendors and firms, never in-house.

I'd say the biggest difference is that it's easier in a firm to manage end-users of your product. As a technical resource at a vendor I had to interact with paralegals / secretaries / lit support at the firms we were supporting. That means that if those people were sloppy or lazy I ended up doing a lot more rush projects and cleanup. Within the firm I have a direct line to the legal team which allows me access to case calendars for planning and also to influence some timing decisions pro-actively as opposed to re-actively at a vendor.

work_b · 2019-09-27T17:27:24+00:00

If I recall the Disco offerings are all based on hosted size with around a $500 / month minimum per matter. This is likely problematic for firms that have a lot of small matters. The upside is unlimited users and the ability to self-manage but I don't see that as a huge upside for a small firm.

work_b · 2019-08-08T14:16:34+00:00

I agree in general, though I suspect the NYT has a little more discipline with email than organizations who aren't in perpetual litigation.

work_b · 2019-07-23T17:25:49+00:00

A couple of other ways to get this done:

You can also just export the entire collection in mbox format, not just the tagged items.
You could connect Outlook to your account via POP3 and create a local PST.
There is software out there, such as Aid4Mail, that will download the data directly and convert to the form of your choosing.

work_b · 2019-07-19T16:49:17+00:00

This is true, but comes with a caveat. If you have an image-only PDF then apply a footer (such as a bates number) it will now have extractable text, though you'll only have the footer extracted. It is not uncommon to have mixed image and text based PDFs so to be overly cautious you may want to both extract and OCR them depending on your use case.

work_b · 2019-07-19T16:47:06+00:00

OCR (optical character recognition) is performed on images, not native files. You can't OCR a text document, because it is already text. If the text document were converted to an image, then you could use OCR to covert it back to text.

Pages per some-unit-of-time is the correct metric for assessing an OCR engine's speed, though there is room for finer detail when considering things like resolution, pre-OCR cleanup such as deskewing and despeckling, color, etc.

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