Author Archives: Millwright

Millnet adopts kCura’s Relativity

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Millnet announced today that it has adopted Relativity, kCura’s web-based e-discovery software and will market it as a key component of its Smart e-Discovery platform.

James Moeskops, Managing Director of Millnet, commented, “Relativity fits in extremely well with our current solutions portfolio and workflow to provide a comprehensive solution for all stages of the discovery process.”

“We have found Relativity to be extremely easy to use for the novice IT professional, yet it still delivers all the advanced features that our clients expect from a top of the line review tool.  Relativity also fits our ‘appropriate and proportionate solutions’ philosophy in that it is suitable for any case size, starting from the smallest and most simple case up to largest and most complex of cases.”

Read Press Release [PDF]

All in a day’s work

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In the few weeks since its launch, the Millnet Smart Insourcing service has proved to be highly popular. In fact, so popular, that we’ve taken on three new graduate team members to cope with the workload.

The pool of expertise available within the team is growing all the time and with the increase in manpower, we are able to take on more or less the whole spectrum of litigation support work.

A notable example on which the team is currently working, involves a time-sensitive review and summary of in excess of  35,000 documents and inserting an accurate descriptive field as part of an objective coding exercise.

We’ve also taken on a wide variety of work, typically at short notice and with very tight deadlines. Here are a few examples:

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Big bills and short lifespans

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Millnet’s Jonny Woods reflects on the way that life has changed in those formerly  smoke-filled rooms – the snooker hall and the legal support department.

Those of you, who can remember the unhealthy days of the late seventies and early eighties may also recall the snooker star “Big Bill” Werbenuik. 

Werbeniuk was noted for the copious amounts of alcohol he consumed before and during matches – up to 30 pints of lager per day. He generally drank around six pints of lager before a match and then one pint for each frame. He said he did this to counteract familial benign essential tremor. Later in his career he also took propranolol, a beta blocker, to cope with the effects of his alcohol consumption on his heart.

He died of heart failure on 20 January 2003, six days after his 56th birthday.

Nowadays the sport of snooker is a lot less hedonistic and a lot healthier; competitors are non-drinking athletes, well fed with a nutritious diet leading to better play and greater longevity. 

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Hope springs internal

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Millnet’s recent launch of its Smart Insourcing project comes as a morsel of good news amidst the general doom and gloom concerning employment prospects for new law graduates. We asked interns Carolyn Morgan, Chelsea Parkin and Natalia van der Velde for their first hand assessment.

We have heard it said that Legal Practice Course (LPC) students and graduates who have not yet managed to secure a training contract have only themselves to blame; they have been lazy and quite simply not made the effort to find one! We have also heard of individuals making 200 plus applications before successfully finding that elusive training contract. Is it the quality of the individual, lack of training contracts available, or fiercer competition faced by this year’s graduates that has made the process of finding a training contract that much harder in 2010?

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Is there life after outsourcing?

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We’ve heard it said (and we’ve said it ourselves often enough) that the next big thing after outsourcing is going to be… insourcing. It will probably also come as no surprise that our version of it is called smart insourcing.

What is smart insourcing? Simply put, smart insourcing allows law firms to draw upon a pool of local paralegal talent as if it were an extension of their own in-house paralegal team.

Document review, in particular, is one of those requirements that tends to come up at short notice and with a degree of urgency that can place a serious strain on a law firm’s own resources. Millnet Smart Insourcing allows law firms to augment their in-house capability, using local resources, at times of the greatest need.

Why have we done it?

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Linking in to electronic discovery

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As we have recently joined the Electronic Discovery group on LinkedIn (presided over by Ryan Speir), now seems as good a time as any to give the group a plug..

The group’s mission is to create an online knowledge exchange and explore new developments, issues and best practices that relate to the legal discovery of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). 

To  join the group click here.

You’ll be able to search, find, and contact fellow group members in addition to millions of users you can reach through an extended LinkedIn network. You can also limit your searches to fellow group members.

With over 3,500 members, the group is a  great place to join in (or start!) a discussion on the e-Discovery issues of the moment.

Virtual reality

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Despite the attribution in the preceding post, we don’t mention Virtual Data Rooms that often in this blog and it is a known fact that litigation lawyers never talk to their corporate colleagues involved in the sometimes glitzy world of Mergers and Aquisitions.

Nevertheless it seems that VDRs are popping up everywhere these days and their use goes beyond the traditional due diligence exercise – from a kind of collaborative “adviser workspace”, through to a post-deal, online “transaction bible” – as the recent article The Virtual Data Room Evolution by our colleague Francisco Lorca has noted.

And those who do have an interest in such things, could do worse than to follow Francisco’s new Virtual Data Room blog.

I click, therefore I am

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I’m indebted to Franciso Lorca (of EthosData, Millnet’s Virtual Data Room partner) for bringing to my attention a piece in yesterday’s FT [It pays to think before you click, FT.com, 21st July, 2010]*

The article refers to the emails in which Goldman employees variously described the mortgage based security at the centre of the affair as “God, what a shitty deal, God what a piece of crap.”

Nicole Bullock and Telis Demos, the writers of the article comment, “In hindsight, these sometimes snarky and sarcastic missives from the height of the credit bubble looked embarrassing at best and potentially incriminating at worst.”

It is an interesting moral dilemma whether employees should be discouraged from commenting adversely in email (or in thought or anywhere else) on their firm’s dubious and allegedly unethical practices or whether the firm itself should be discouraged from carrying out such allegedly unethical practices in the first place…

Readers will have no doubt have reached their own conclusions on the Goldman affair and the rise in Goldman’s share price on news of the out of court settlement, indicates that the markets certainly have!

The FT article is an interesting read and a cautionary tale nevertheless.

*Free registration with FT.com is required to read this article

Peking to Paris Rally

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On 10th September 2010, Simon Mackenzie Smith and Rupert Marks  will climb into a 1929 Ford Model A and drive over 14,000 kms from Peking to Paris, retracing the steps of the motor car pioneers who raced each over the same route in 1907. The 2010 Peking to Paris Rally is expected to take 5 weeks and will involve driving through the wilds of Mongolia as well as the ‘stans’ and Iran.

Millnet is pleased to sponsor Simon & Rupert in their ripping yarn. Loads of derring do will be done along the way and, if they make it through the ‘stans and all the way to Paris, we will be there to welcome them!

It’s all in a good cause (two good causes)  – all proceeds will go to Debra and the Pioneer Sailing Trust- and you can support their valliant efforts via Just Giving or contact the guys directly via their web site www.pekingparismodela.com

Official Peking Paris website – www.pekingparis.com

Millnet steps up

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Millnet has announced a number of new appointments within its Legal Services team, adding to its already impressive Smart e-Discovery offering.

The new appointments include Stephen Davis as Director of Legal Support Services, Emma Bolsover as Director of Technical Services and Emma Kettleton as Manager, Technical Operations. 

Stephen Davis joins Millnet from Anacomp where  he was Sales Director of its UK Business Process Management business and latterly Managing Director of its Litigation Support Software subsidiary, CaseLogistix.  Prior to that Stephen held senior sales roles in blue chip technology companies in both the UK and New York. Stephen takes on responsibility for client development and new business.

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