Six Articles on Electronic - Craig Ball

Craig Ball © 2007
Dear Santa,
Santa@NorthPole.com
By Craig Ball
[Originally published in Law Technology News, December 2006]
I’ve been a good boy this year. I spent all my time helping lawyers and judges with electronic
discovery and studying really, really hard about ESI, data harvest, spoliation, de-duplication,
meet-and-confer, search tools, forms of production and computer forensics. I didn’t use the
word “solution” in a single column.
Please leave these presents under my tree:
1. I want a container file format for electronically stored information (ESI). We are
gathering all this discoverable data but corrupting its metadata in the process. Plus,
it’s so hard to authenticate and track ESI. The container would safely hold the
evidence as we harvest, search and produce it. It would include hash verification of
all its parts, a place to store both an image of the document and its native content and
even a special pocket to hold an overlay of all that helpful stuff we used to stamp onto
paper documents, like Bates numbers and confidentiality warnings. And Santa--this is
really important--it needs to be open sourced so no one has to pay to use it and
extensible so we can keep using it for a very long time.
2. I want integrally write-protected external hard drives with removable electronic keys.
Producing ESI on optical disks is nice because they’re read-only media and you can’t
intentionally or inadvertently corrupt their contents. But nowadays, there’s just too
much ESI to hand over on optical disks. I want external hard drives designed for e-
discovery such that a producing party can fill them with information then remove a
USB key or snap off a tab to insure that nothing else can be written to or changed on
the drive. If it hashed its contents and burned that hash value to an onboard writeonce
chip, that would be pretty cool, too.
3. May I have information technology training courses designed expressly for lawyers
and litigation support, offering real depth and serious accountability for mastering the
subject matter? Lawyers and their staff are waking up to the need to learn this stuff,
but the traditional CLE and CPE paths don’t offer or demand enough. We don’t need
another 10,000-foot “certification” course. We need Parris Island.
4. While we’re at it big guy, how about making electronic discovery and digital evidence
a discrete part of law school curriculum? I understand that teaching the practice of
law is looked down upon at the best schools, but the assumption that young lawyers
who grew up with computers automatically “get it” is misguided.
5. Could there also be licensure for computer forensic examiners geared to insuring
genuine expertise and experience? Putting computer forensic examiners under the
jurisdiction of the state boards that regulate private investigators and security guards
is like putting the football coach in charge of the Physics Department. Weeding out
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