eDiscovery Daily Blog
This Year’s Legaltech is (Word) Cloudy: eDiscovery Trends
It’s the annual travel day before Legaltech New York (LTNY) – unless you’re attending LegalWeek events today. So, what’s being discussed at this year’s LTNY conference? The topics are cloudy – in other words, they’re displayed in a word cloud here.
Last year, we covered InsideLegal’s word cloud and they’ve been creating a word cloud every year since 2011, which is the first year that eDiscovery Daily started covering the show. As of last Friday, they hadn’t done one yet this year, so we decided to create our own word cloud, using our CloudNine software platform (InsideLegal did eventually create one over the weekend, which you can check out here – it’s very pretty!). Nonetheless, we’ll talk about the one we created.
To create my initial attempt at it, I decided to go to the LTNY agenda page and expand tracks (this year, for the first time, the entire agenda is on a single page), then save the page as an MHTML format file (MIME HTML), which is an archive format for the web pages saved with internet explorer by default. I then uploaded that file with CloudNine’s Discovery Client (we just announced a new preservation and collection for the Discovery Client, by the way) into its own project. That file was processed and loaded and standard analytics was performed, which includes a list of the top 100 keywords in the collection, along with a word cloud.
That first attempt didn’t turn out very good – the top terms in the file were “content”, http”, “legalweekshow”, “uploads” and “function”. Not very informative, and when you look at the page, you can see there’s a lot of extraneous information, including a list of all of the speakers at the bottom.
So, I decided to try again, but this time I copied and pasted the session titles and descriptions into a Word document. No speaker names, no “Sponsored By”, no repeats – just unique session titles and descriptions and descriptions of each educational track (but only once per track). I saved the results and loaded that into a brand new project with the CloudNine Discovery Client.
This time, the result was much better and more indicative of the content of the sessions. Some quick observations:
- Obviously, for a legal technology show, you would expect the terms “legal” and “technology” to be up there and they were first and third in total hits, with 116 and 54 respectively (“technologies” adds another 17 hits). The term “data” is second in total hits with 113. The term “information” is fourth with 34 hits, followed by “session” with 32
- The term “ediscovery” or “e-discovery” appears 30 times, so (as always in recent years), eDiscovery is a popular theme for this year’s show (keep in mind that doesn’t include any speaker titles). The term “discovery” adds another 23
- The term “cloud” is up there, with 25 hits, so topics related to “the cloud” are popular once again.
- Probably the most uniquely new term in this year’s word cloud is “gdpr”, with 20 occurrences of this term in the session descriptions. So, Europe’s impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is clearly a hot topic as it goes into effect in less than four months. Here’s an upcoming webcast we have on the topic.
- Also, the terms “artificial” and intelligence” both have 17. So, apparently, there is no “intelligence” in this year’s agenda, except for the “artificial” kind. :o)
Regardless, you can look at the word cloud above and make your own observations. Starting tomorrow, for the eighth year in a row, we will point out sessions related to eDiscovery (and Information Governance), so you can plan on which sessions to attend.
So, what do you think? Are you attending Legaltech this week? If so, please feel free to stop by our booth (#533)! And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.