Tips for Paralegals and Litigation Support Professionals

Sean O’Shea: Tips for Paralegals and Litigation Support Professionals – April 2021

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4/1/2021: Geofence Warrants
The government may request that a court issue a ‘geofence warrant’. This is a warrant which gives law enforcement authorities the right to obtain data from any cell phones which were in the same vicinity where a crime took place.

4/2/2021: Tag Documents Automatically in SharePoint
It’s possible to bulk code documents in a particular SharePoint directory in any metadata field.  The values will not change when the files are moved to different folders. 

4/3/2021 SharePoint Syntex
Office 365 includes Microsoft SharePoint Syntex, a service which automatically extracts information for the contents of documents uploaded to SharePoint.

4/4/2021: New York’s SHIELD Act
The SHIELD Act specifically directs that electronic media be erased so that data cannot be reconstructed when private data is disposed of.

4/5/2021: Mass Download PowerPoints in Relativity with New Options
PDFs of PowerPoint files can be set to automatically print with comments and speaker notes. 

4/6/2021: Reducing RAM Usage by Switching Browsers
Edge can take up far less memory than Chrome when being used to access the same amount of data online.

4/7/2021: Dutch Issue GDPR Fines for Breach Notice That Came 22 Days Late
The Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Booking.com €475,000 for failing to report a data breach within 72 hours as required by the Article 33 of the GDPR.

4/8/2021: Regular Expression Search for Multiple Words in ALL CAPS
(\b[A-Z]{2,}\s[A-Z]{2,}\b\s[A-Z]{2,}\b\s[A-Z]{2,}\b)

4/9/2021: Copy out only lines containing hits in text file
In NotePad++, to copy out only the lines which have a marked search result go to Search . . . Bookmark . . . Copy Bookmarked Lines.

4/10/2021: Grab Text Off Your Screen
The ABBYY FineReader OCR software includes a great little tool that you can use to quickly grab the text of areas on your screen that aren’t normally selectable.   ABBYY Screenshot Reader will let you select any displayed area, and click and drag to capture a OCR version of the contents. 

4/11/2021: PowerShell Script to get list of links on webpage
You can run a PowerShell script to get the urls linked to on a specified web page.

4/12/2021: PowerShell Script to collect info from user interface
PowerShell’s Read-Host command can help you collect information from a user input.

4/13/2021: Quorum Searching
Quorum searching involves searching for documents which contain at least a given number of the terms in a list you define.
“default agreement bond equity derivative option instrument” /3

4/14/2021: Script to download all images from a webpage
You just need to specify a URL and list a folder to download the files to.

4/15/2021: Easily check out Bluetooth devices in your area
Nirsoft’s free utility will give you a list of all Bluetooth devices in range.

4/16/2021: Avoid Attorneys Fees
Both “attorney’s fees'” and “attorneys’ fees” are acceptable, but many attorneys mistakenly use the phrase “attorneys fees” in court filings.

4/17/2021: Sedona Reasonable Security Test
B₂ – B₁ < (P x H)₁ – (P x H)₂
B represents the burden.   P the probability of harm.  H the magnitude of harm.  The subscript 1 represents the security controls in place before a reasonable standard was implemented, and the subscript 2 is the supplement to security that can be added.

4/18/2021: Conceptual Index Tags
The training set or the excluded documents used for a conceptual index can be used as condition in a saved search.

4/19/2021: Random Sampling in Relativity
This icon in Relativity will allow you to perform random sampling on a document set.   To be clear, the margin of error indicates by how many points a statistical sample may differ from the full set.  The confidence level indicates how often the sample will fall within that margin of error.   So, a statistical sample with a confidence level of 90% and a margin of error of 4% will be within 4% of the values of the full set 90% of time.

4/20/2021: UTC Time is GMT Time, but what is UTC?
UTC time is coordinated universal time, but the acronym doesn’t really stand for anything.  The English-speaking world wanted to use the acronym CUT, but the French wanted to use TUC for temps universel coordonné, so they compromised.

4/21/2021: China’s Courts Are Live Online
China has a remarkable online system to provide live video streams of court trials.  On this website: http://tingshen.court.gov.cn/ , China Court Trial Online, you can readily access the surveillance cameras in courtrooms all over the People’s Republic of China, and watch the proceedings in realtime.

4/22/2021: Teams Are Forever
Don’t miss that you can easily record Microsoft Teams meetings.  If you click on the three-dot menu on the bottom toolbar, you’ll see the option to start recording.

4/23/2021: Teams .vtt files
Teams can generate closed caption text for meetings automatically.  The text is exported in the .vtt format.

4/24/2021: Email thread ID node / indented segment mismatch
When email threading is performed in Relativity, the analytics server can detect more segments than there are blocks in an Email threading ID.  This will be an indication that the latest email matches an earlier segment.  If the ID has more blocks than detected segments, the segments may have been edited or corrupted. 

4/25/2021: Conceptual Index Updates
When new words are added to the list of concept stop words, the index should be deactivated and then rebuilt.

4/26/2021: R2 Certification for Electronic Media Recycling
A R2 certified facility must dispose of magnetic tape by degaussing or incineration, methods which can be used for hard drives. Hard drives can also be shredded with the platters ripped into fragments.

4/27/2021: Enable Proximity Searching in Acrobat
This option will be greyed out until the option in the ‘Return results containing’ menu for ‘Match All of the words’ is selected.

4/28/2021: Degaussing
Tapes and hard drives used for magnetic storage media, record data by using specific magnetic patterns. A read/write head will embed data on spinning platters. The data can be effectively erased through a process called degaussing, which alters the magnetic fields used on the storage device.

4/29/2021: Rootless threads
If an email thread summary report indicates that there are email threads with no root, this will be an indication that there are differences in the extracted text of some emails – emails may contain inline responses or have been maliciously edited. 

4/30/2021: Crime Pays, But Criminals Don’t De-Crypt
The recent Sophos Group State of Ransomware 2021 report includes the telling statistic that ” [O]n average, only 65% of the encrypted data was restored after the ransom was paid.”

Sean O'Shea on Email
Sean O'Shea
Litigation Paralegal
Sean O’Shea began working as a litigation support analyst at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP in 1998, near the dawn of the electronic discovery era. From assisting clients with the implementation of information governance policies, to conducting electronic presentations for attorneys at trials, he has been involved in all aspects of litigation support work. Sean is a Relativity Certified Administrator and an ACEDS Certified E-Discovery Specialist. He’s currently employed as a litigation paralegal in New York City, and continues to advise attorneys on legal technology. Look for a new tip on each night on www.litigationsupporttipofthenight.com.

*The views expressed in this blog are those of the owner and do not reflect the views or opinions of the owner’s employer. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. This policy is subject to change at any time. The owner is not an attorney, and nothing posted on this site should be construed as legal advice. Litigation Support Tip of the Night does not provide confirmation that any e-discovery technique or conduct is compliant with legal, regulatory, contractual or ethical requirements.

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