Yesterday, there was an interesting tweet from Joey Roulette (Space Reporter from the Verge) about the Blue Origin suit:
https://twitter.com/joroulette/status/1431299991142809602
If you haven’t been following this little drama (https://www.space.com/nasa-halts-spacex-moon-lander-blue-origin-lawsuit), essentially Blue Origin (Bezos’ space rocket company) is bringing suit against NASA for awarding the HLS (Human Lander System – to send people back to the moon by 2024) to SpaceX (Musk’s space rocket company), alleging that the Basically, the issue comes down to the fact that there are about 7 GBs of data (presumably mostly PDF files) produced by Blue Origin (Bezos’ space rocket company). The DOJ was apparently attempting to review and manipulate all these files in Adobe Acrobat. Now, for anyone working within the Legal Tech industry, that would immediately raise a red flag. Adobe Acrobat isn’t exactly known for being able to handle that kind of volume, even if it’s all PDF files (ironically).
This issue actually reminds me of a case I worked on back in 2004, a certain popular and secretive technology company insisted on producing their documents in color PDFs, and it was indeed a nightmare to deal with. There weren’t many document review systems that could handle PDF files, trying to view and manipulate them in either Concordance or Summation would often result in crashes, reprinting them to add redactions or bates numbers would result in corrupt files, basically just a very painful process. But…that was in 2004, more than 15 years ago. Things have gotten a lot better and viewing and stamping PDF files isn’t the pain that it used to be. Relativity, Reveal, Disco, etc., they can all handle PDFs fairly well, and honestly, in this litigious age, 7 GBs of data doesn’t even warrant an eyebrow raise.
My initial reflex (like many others responding to the tweet) was “holy crap, exactly as expected of a government agency to be so far behind in processes and technology.” But, to be fair, we are dealing with space rockets here, so chances are high that the PDF files are all blueprints and very technical documents. This is probably not your usual lawsuit where you can just have an army of temps flipping through e-mails or Word documents. So, even if the data were to be hosted in a proper review platform, it would still be fairly slow going for the NASA engineers to review (and they would have to do so without the benefits of the usual analytics). Furthermore, within the pleadings attached to the tweet, the DOJ makes a good point that the very filing of some of these documents through the CM/ECF system is in itself a pain. Despite the “upgrade” of the system these past few years, electronic case filings still have too many limitations on filing formats and sizes.
So, while I do think that the “issue” can be fixed with the proper platform, workflow, and (more importantly) knowledge, it’s probably still not a straightforward case. I hope whoever is in charge of legal tech on the government’s side has a strong Rolodex, they are going to need their service provider’s help to institute a proper workflow for this data since these 7 GBs are probably just the start.
