John Benson dot com

  The other day I received an email out of the blue from an outfit called Schmap who produces interactive travel guides for cities around the world informing me that my photo (see above) had been short listed to be a part of their guide to Tampa.   Considering how easy it would be to just gank the image without my permission, I thought that it was pretty nice that they let me know.They’ve obviously been doing some digging considering that the image only has seven total views since being posted last spring but it is a heck of a shot and makes for some cool wallpaper despite being taken on a point and shoot camera.

I’ve been working with the Getting Things Done method for organization for a while, but the system never really kicked into high gear until I fully embraced the Weekly Review.When reading David Allen’s book and listening to his lectures the Weekly Review is touted as the most important component and the hardest to adopt. It seemed strange to me that this would be the hardest part to stick to when getting started, but within a couple weeks it just didn’t occur to me to revisit everything that was going on in my life when it was placed into such a bulletproof system.When I started my job at the Firm, I learned that I’d be sending in a weekly report to the Director every Friday. While some people probably would view this as a painful task considering how busy things tend to get, a feeling of joy washed over me. Now I would be personally accountable on some level for completing the most important GTD component.My weekly review includes shutting my door (it’s an open door Firm so this is rare during the week), putting on my good headphones and listening to Miles while spreading my Hipster PDA all over my desk. I’m able to write down all my open projects on a legal pad first. This pad will then be transcribed to a text file which I send in. After getting everything current down, I ponder any other projects which I’d like to fully commit to and begin.The next step entails taking everything from the legal pad and old Hipster PDA cards and creating fresh ones. While seeing so many tasks crossed off is nice for gaining a sense of accomplishment, having to flip the context cards (@office, @mac, @calls, @email, etc) over tends to be a pain and makes the system less bulletproof.Even if you aren’t accountable on a weekly basis to someone, I’m guessing that it would be a great habit to develop. Not only are you accountable but it can be great for reminding the other people you work with that you are waiting on something when you know they may have forgotten.

For the past couple months I’ve been shopping around for a CMS (Content Management System) to use for the next version of my website. When I first started using Joomla, it had some real promise. Adapting my designs to its PHP framework was relatively straightforward, their IRC channel was helpful and they had a new release on its way.

More than a year later their next version still hadn’t reached stability and the previous version was showing dust and security vulnerabilities. Considering how security conscious I am, the idea of getting owned by a trivial XSS exploit was unacceptable.

I tried Drupal (again) and while the installation process has improved, the documentation is still more obtuse than Farnsworth on Contracts. Drupal developers are in high demand right now and as much as I would love to join their ranks, the amount of time and effort that would be involved just isn’t acceptable considering I’m a busy guy.

It was about this time that I came across ModX, another open source CMS. Let me say that it is by far the best option for a designer/developer with a similar background as myself. Quite simply I want to be able to take a mockup, adapt it to HTML/CSS and drop in some simple calls for content areas.

Working with ModX was such a nice experience that I was actually looking forward to the usual day of pain that is the final adaptation of my markup to the content management system.

This was about the time when I asked myself, “How do I promote this article to the front page and create the RSS feed?” This is where ModX seems to wander into the land of Drupal with what appears to me to be a fork into a “snippet” called Ditto.

So there I sat on Sunday morning…already in somewhat of a foul mood knowing that the Chiefs were destined to be embarrassed by the Donkeys (which of course happened) realizing that even though all my markup was done I was in for a long few nights of reading documentation and using trial and error to put the final product together.

It was at this point that I had a moment of clarity. One of the reasons that I don’t produce enough content is because the CMS doesn’t play along and it can be a real pain in the ass to write more. Knowing that producing quality writing was a higher priority than placing another design in my portfolio I downloaded Wordpress again.

The install on my local network was so smooth that I didn’t even drop all my content in locally before exporting and uploading.

My content was migrated to Wordpress by the early evening and I was finished with plenty of time to relax before finally having a full week in the office.

So what is my outlook for a full redesign? I’ll work through one of the many Wordpress design tutorials to adapt my design to Wordpress and use ModX for other content areas such as my design portfolio. This way I’ll be able to pump out as much direly needed e-discovery analysis and opinion as I can without spending costly hours trying to learn how someone else thinks.

One of the things I’ve learned over the past few weeks of intense e-discovery research is that there are lots of vendors peddling lots of “enterprise level solutions” for organizations who are concerned with e-discovery.  These vendors target firms and companies alike and are definitely taking advantage of the uncertainty about what future litigations will be like.   
I don’t want to come down too hard on these vendors considering my level of experience at this point, but it has been quite a shock to the system to hear some of the prices for products which they provide.  E-discovery is currently a very expensive process…one which is driving up costs of litigation which will cause many ill prepared organizations to simply write checks instead of fighting an issue out in court.  
This article from BusinessWire is pretty over the top and I fear that it will be used to scare organizations into buying into products that they may not need. 
The headline practically jumps off the page and drives home that e-discovery is changing the legal landscape in a major way.  1 in 5 businesses has settled because they feared the e-discovery process?  That number seemed very high and raised some significant questions in my mind. What is the driving force here?  Difficulty in conducting the collection?  Costs of conducting the collection?  Loser cases to begin with?  Attorneys that were more comfortable telling the client that it’s better to settle than even conduct the litigaiton in this rapidly changing environment? These are all questions which I’m sure to be asking myself for months and years to come.  But I digress.. The real FUD kicks in with the following paragraph: 

Based on the results, nearly half (47 percent) of respondents do not agree that their legal team can effectively review relevant email in the 99-day window before the meet and confer session. To address this, 51 percent say they have implemented, or are planning to implement technology that allows them to easily search and review email. Similarly, more than one-third of businesses (36.7 percent) are already enforcing a formal retention policy for email, while another 40 percent are currently in the planning stage to enforce a formal policy. Think for a second about what this is saying.   

The Federal Rules set the meet and confer meeting early in the process so that the background issues of how evidence will be produced can be addressed before the litigation gets heated.   At the point of the meet and confer the attorneys merely need to have a grasp on what kind of data exists and how it is best utilized to get to the root issue of the suit.  There is no reason for a full review to be completed by then.    This may be hard for some to believe, but clients and attorneys can speak to each other regarding the issues without having to read a single email.  Through collaboration attorneys and clients can identify one or two individuals who hold relevant email and the relevant dates without unleashing GREP on an entire machine.  The point where relevance gives way to responsiveness and the data dump begins on the adversary comes after the meet and confer.  After reading the methodology of the survey I remained skeptical, especially after reading that this was a vendor press release.  Some quick checking revealed that in the middle of the survey period, the vendor was openly soliciting people to fill out their survey in the hopes of receiving a cash prize for their time.  I’m no statistician, but this carrot and stick method of conducting a survey along with my suspicion that many of their potential customers were encouraged to fill out one of these surveys leaves me completely dismissing many of the statistics presented. E-discovery preparedness is as low as it will ever be, but the driving forces behind developing plans of attack need to come from those with the best interests of the company in mind…not vendors producing data to use on sales calls.