Comments on: Archival, e-Discovery and Compliance

By: Nikhil

Nikhil — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:00:20 +0000

Capital legal solution’s eZReview provides all necesaary solution like Kewords analytics, Case clustering,Dynamic clustering and email threading in their softwares
Data collection and Data culling techniques used by this firm has really brought the cost to its minimum

By: The E-Discovery Crisis: An Immediate Challenge to our Nation’s Law Schools « e-Discovery Team

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:31:46 +0000

[...] in over 700 viable companies and the vendor market has increased to what is estimated will be a $4 billion industry in 2009. E-Discovery vendors have swamped the annual Legal Tech conference which is bursting at its [...]

By: kathy limmex

kathy limmex — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:44:08 +0000

Ceralon’s Acumen complements Postini in its ability to provide the work flow/audit trail along with the remaining blocks of the EDRM modeletc for an end to end electronic discovery application. Acumen provides the pre-processing, processing, analytics, native file review, tagging, redacting, production and export all with granular security and permissions along with workflow management and audit trail for each document and event through the life cycle of the document.

By: navin

navin — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:07:33 +0000

Rajesh, that is exactly right. Google’s Postini is a significant competitor in this space. Specifically, the fact that it is a hosted solution (i.e. the customer does not have to install and administer any hardware locally) is an important reason why smaller businesses are attracted to it. Its main drawback however, is that it does not really have the sophisticated analytics and workflows required to do eDiscovery well.

If Google manages to fix that, it should be able to cause significant problems to the leaders in this market.

By: rajesh moorjani

rajesh moorjani — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:53:41 +0000

more e-discovery capabilities is probably the reason why google acquired postini last year.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2007/tc2007079_062411.htm

By: Ankur P

Ankur P — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:47:29 +0000

The over-arching themes here are retention and discovery. The two need not necessarily be linked, but it helps if they are. And so, archival is a tool that enables retention, compliance is sold as a side-effect of the archival process and e-discovery is typically sold as an add-on (on top of the archival systems). This is typically so because the archival system vendors want it that way – it helps them sell their products and also helps customer in making consolidated buying decisions.

But, it all need not be so. In fact, the market (and user-base also?) for non-archival based e-discovery is much much bigger than archival-based e-discovery software.

Archival, compliance and e-discovery, or retention and discovery, could be done in isolation. For example, according to an e-discovery standard (EDRM), one step in e-discovery is “data collection” – but it doesn’t specify exactly how the data should be collected. Archival is just one way to do it. Other ways are crawling, document/record management systems, etc. Take the example of Kazeon, which sells e-discovery solutions using its enterprise crawler appliance. Is it legally complete? Maybe not. But for a focussed discovery scenario (litigation or internal inquiry), it should suffice. There are more such examples (Guidance, Index Engines). Or, just look at what EMC is doing with Documentum, EmailXtender and e-discovery. Or, consider e-discovery software like Clearwell or Attenex, which claim to work with a variety of document repositories.

This is a very complex domain and from what I’ve read and heard, its still a consultant’s and lawyer’s market. They dominate it and are way way ahead of software numbers. Retention is a space where they can’t play much, but can still affect it in some ways. And discovery is where they make hay – its a semi-automatic process (especially “document review”) and, as you said, they charge as much as $4 per email.

Software (and LPO , squeezes-in into discovery by way of claiming to bring that $4 to $2 or even $1. It can effectively automate “data collection” (e.g. archival, crawling), make “data processing” (format conversions, basic filtering, de-dupe, etc.) faster, semi-automate “data review” (using techniques like indexing, concept extraction, threading, clustering, entity extraction, summarization and so on), standardize “data production” and help in “discovery planning”. I don’t know how much software has been able to help and bring down costs in reality, but I know everybody is sure that it can or will. It would be difficult (impossible I guess) to get rid of the human angle, but the goal is to bring it minimum necessary. Otherwise, a lot of our friends in LPO community will start starving .

By: Benjamin Wright

Benjamin Wright — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:56:43 +0000

Navin: E-discovery reflects the natural collision of technology and legal practice. As an enterprise creates an ever-growing mountain of records, adversaries of course want access to it. Knowing that litigation and e-discovery are inevitable, an enterprise can use technology proactively to make records more benign. What do you think? --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/nix-smoking-gun-e-discovery.html