Excel “Last Save Time” Metadata missing

We noticed with some Excel documents of an older version, that this property does not exist (i.e. 97 and earlier versions). Just a note to self…!

LegalTech NYC 2007

I haven’t posted here in quite a while, as its been very busy here!

I thought I’d just say a little about my first visit to LegalTech NYC, at the beginning of February.

 I had heard a lot about LegalTech from many people, most of them noting the ’social’ aspects of the event. Infact before I even got there, I had already had my entire time booked out with meals, cocktail parties and other social events.

The conference itself was well laid out, but I did find it a little confusing at first. However, I will be attending next year and I am sure I will see the same faces again!

DTSearch on multiple computers

With large data sets, it is often necessary to allow the index to be accessed by multiple workstations.

 However, due to the nature of a large data set, it may be made up of many indexes, generally stored in the same location as the data. Registering these indexes can be a chore if there are more than a couple of machines.

If the index is made in Forix, the forensic version of DTSearch, each set of indexes is set up with a library (.lib) file, which contains the names and locations of each portion of the indexes. This helps because you only have to add these library files to DTSearch to register the entire forix index. by mapping the same drive letter to all the machines you need to use, you can use the same library file on each computer.

To speed this process further if you have multiple library files/indexes, you can copy the registry settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER for DTSearch and register these on each machine. This will place the same references to the library files on each machine. Voila! You have multiple machines working from the same data set.

Let me know if you need any help for this. Martin.Nikel@gmail.com

DTSearch MDB files

Following on from the earlier articles about DTSearch, I was also provided with the follwoing solution to the MDB multiple records problem:

> “Deactivate the ODBC file parser for MS Access if possible.  dtSearch
> uses ODBC to index each row of an Access database (*.mdb files) as a
> separate document.  This use of ODBC to traverse Access databases can
> substantially slow indexing.  In applications such as forensic
> applications, indexing MDB files using dtSearch’s Unicode binary
> filtering algorithm is usually sufficient and is much faster.
>
> dtSearch Desktop:  to disable the ODBC file parser, either:  (a) move
> or delete dtv_odbc.dll from the dtSearch bin\viewers folder; or (b)
> use Options > Preferences > File Types to specify the Unicode
> filtering format for *.mdb files.
> dtSearch developer API: To disable the ODBC file parser, move or
> delete dtv_odbc.dll from the dtSearch bin\viewers folder.”
>

IQPC Conference

IPCQ are running a conference on “The Advanced Guide to Conducting Regulatory and Internal Investigations” on November 27 - 28, 2006 at the Swissôtel The Howard, London, UK (see http://www.iqpc.co.uk/cgi-bin/templates/singlecell.html?topic=235&event=11210) The conference agenda looks very interesting and I hope by attending I will learn a few things regarding preparation for regulatory investigations. Topics to be covered include:

• The latest regulatory guidelines, enforcement priorities and penalties
• Preparing and planning for an investigation
• Disclosure management: communicating with the shareholders, regulators and auditors
• How to conduct investigations and when to waive or preserve privilege
• Optimising internal controls and financial reporting to minimise risk
• Conducting multi-jurisdictional investigations
• Effectively dealing with the media before, during and after an investigation

Hope to see you there.

Regards, Martin.

Opticon Viewer image problem

We had a problem reported that some colour Tiff images that we produced were not viewable in Opticon.

After a lot of diagnostics on the images, we found a few JPG Colour Tiff images that had been produced with Motorola (big endian) byte order and not Intel (Little endian) byte order.

 It appears that a lot of viewers can cope with this type of Tiff (including irfanview) but Opticon version 3 does not appear to support it giving the error “Unable to open the following image (11011): [path]” Where the path is correct.

Anyhow, we reproduced the tiffs with intel encoding, and they worked just fine.

Martin.

DTSearch and Long File names

We have built some bespoke apps on DTSearch, and its a smooth engine, but there are a couple of bugbears that we have had to work around.

These are not DTSearch problems, but just data problems.

 1. Long filenames.  We often move the data from a disc to a SAN, under some extra subfolders. This pushes the path length above the maximum. Windows then struggles to recognise these files and DTSearch can’t see them either. Therefore we move them to a higher level. I wondered if there is any application out there that can access and index files that are longer than the maximum length. I know there is a Linux version of DTSearch… does this help?

 2. Data files.
DTSearch indexes the records in MDBs, CSVs etc as individual documents. We now how to stop this, but I wondered what the purpose of this functionality was?

3. Zip files.

On a large data set, there is nothing worse than having to unzip everything first. However, it would be nice if there was a feature to stop DTSearch indexing the files within a zip file as separate entities. Does anyone know how to do this?

4. MSG Files

When extracting resulting files from DT Search, with HTML MSGs it has the annoying habit of exporting as a folder with constituant parts. I don’t know the solution for this problem. We want it to extract the original file! Help!

Martin.

Trial Bundles

Hi all,

I wondered if any of you out there have any opinion on the best way to create a trial bundle (software wise). If we have a lot of multi page tiffs, and counsel are making changes to the bundle, and taking one page of a whole document and including that, then chopping and changing the order of the documents, and using the documents or part of a document to form other bundles, such at witness bundles, is there any software that can manage this process (including moving individual pages of documents around)?

 Any advice on software/approaches most appreciated.

 Martin.

Taxes Management Act Possession or Power

During my research on document disclosure in the UK, I cam across a great article by DLA Piper on the duty to disclose documents under the Taxes Management act. It explains in easy to understand terms, the duty to disclose document in your ‘power’ or ‘possession’.

Please see http://www.legal500.co.uk/devs/uk/cc/ukcc_013.htm .  Similar concepts apply in the CPR rules Part 31.8:

31.8

(1) A party’s duty to disclose documents is limited to documents which are or have been in his control. (2) For this purpose a party has or has had a document in his control if – (a) it is or was in his physical possession; (b) he has or has had a right to possession of it; or (c) he has or has had a right to inspect or take copies of it.

If you’d like further information, just send me an e

Make sure you are at home!

I don’t know what happened to this post. i think it just disappeared into thin air!

This is what it was supposed to say:

During the course of discovery of electronic evidence, typically collection of the data is entrusted to a few key people in conjunction with consultants and attorneys.

Often we find though, that the key IT people, especially those on the ground performing the collection of data, are entrusted to provide the data requested. Trouble is, they are not always aware of the importance of the task entrusted to them, and often a key contact ends up on two weeks holiday or working on bringing the email servers back up, instead of focussing on the tight deadlines of delievery of data.

If you are running through an exercise to provide data, the key people working on finding and extracting that data should be on call during the entire data collection phase, avoiding anyone who i likely to go on holiday. There is nothing worse than the task being passed from person to person with no real understanding of the issues at hand and theexpected dates for delivery of the data.

My recommendation is that the e-discovery consultant be responsible for the collection of data along with one key person that will be available during the discovery phase and responsible for assisting the consultant in finding the relevant information.

Does anyone have any experience of data collection going wrong due to people taking holidays? I know I have!

Martin.

Microsoft to join e-discovery bandwagon?

Just in case any of you had not seen this, it appears that Exchange has new ‘E-discovery’ features attached see : http://www.microsoft.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&Params=%7eCMTYDataSvcParams%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ID%22+Value%3d%221032304395%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ProviderID%22+Value%3d%22A6B43178-497C-4225-BA42-DF595171F04C%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22lang%22+Value%3d%22en%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22cr%22+Value%3d%22US%22%2f%5e%7esParams%5e%7e%2fsParams%5e%7e%2fCMTYDataSvcParams%5e