Workday

When collecting data from clients, keep in mind that companies are increasingly using the SaaS cloud services provider Workday which provides human capital management, and financial data management software.

Workday uses an analytics engine called Prism to use machine learning to make sense of data that an organization collects on its employees and finances.

Workday reports themselves could be an interesting subject of requests for the production of electronic data.

U.K. Practice Direction 31B - Disclosure of Electronic Documents

The Ministry of Justice of the United Kingdom has issued Practice Direction 31B on the Disclosure of Electronic Documents, which addresses the preservation of 'electronic documents'; when a reasonable search has been performed; the disclosure of metadata; and other electronic discovery issues. In some respects, UK's rules will look familiar to America litigators, as they state that clients must be notified of the need to preserve documents as soon as litigation is contemplated.

However, the Practice Directive also goes into some detail which American e-discovery specialists may find interesting. There is a reminder that document management systems may associate metadata with documents that will not be stored in those documents.

Most notably, it includes an Electronic Documents Questionnaire which has 23 points for parties to consider. Some questions are obvious ones, such as asking for a date range and custodians to be specified. Others will prompt counsel to go into detail which may be commonly overlooked by American lawyers. Question # 7 is on 'automated searches' and asks the parties to disclose if they used clustering or concept searching, and discuss the methodology used for such searching.

The form of the Electronic Documents Questionnaire helps parties to organize their discussion:

Faxing is still big in Japan

Facsimile transmissions have all but disappeared from the American workplace over the past decade, but remain very common in Japan. Be sure not to overlook them if you are assigned to assist with an electronic production from a Japanese business. Small businesses compromise a very high percentage of companies in Japan, and a large number of private residences have fax machines. Faxing may have become adopted more widely in Japan because early word processing software did not allow for kanji characters to be entered easily.

The Japanese prefer the personal effect a handwritten communication can convey, and some use faxes as a way to avoid exposing their confidential information on the internet. Japanese business also favor using hanko stamps on paper documents.

Fax machines are found in convenience stores all over Japan. Both lunch orders and bank transactions are still done using faxes. The faxed document is typically reprinted on A4 paper.

Many fax machines run on Windows and can be used to simply scan documents as PDFs or JPEGs.