Tag Archives: legal

ISACA Monthly Meet: Q and A on Information Technology Law in India

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The Pune Chapter of ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association) presents their monthly meeting, in which they have a Questions and Answers session with Pavan Duggal, Chairman ASSOCHAM Cyberlaw Committee, an advocate of the Supreme Court of India, and President of Cyberlaws.net.

What: Q&A session with Pavan Duggal
When: Saturday, 10th October, 6pm-8:30pm
Where: SICSR, 4th floor
Registration and Fees: Free for all to attend. No registration required

Pavan has been associated with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India on Cyberlaw and Electronic Governance legal issues. While a practicing Advocate, Supreme Court of India, Pavan Duggal has made an immense impact with an international reputation as an expert and authority on Cyberlaw and E-Commerce law.

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Do you understand copyrights and patents? Take this quiz

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On 19th September, the Pune Open Coffee Club will host a presentation on copyrights and patents. The focus will be on clearing up common misconceptions POCC members have about copyrights and patents.

Do you have any misconceptions? Our survey so far indicates that most people have some really major blind spots. Try the quiz below – the answers will be discussed during the meeting tomorrow and will be published on PuneTech next week.

If you don’t see a form above, then click here to view the form in a browser window.

Please fill out the form – your answers will help us get a better understanding which parts people are most unsure about, so we can tailor the presentations accordingly. The correct answers will be discussed during the presentation on Saturday, and then published on punetech.com

Editorial Policy

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Click on the logo to get all PuneTech articles about PuneTech
Click on the logo to get all PuneTech articles about PuneTech

PuneTech is a for-the-community, non-commercial site, with an intention to keep technology professionals in Pune informed of interesting technologies, events, companies, user groups, organizations, mailing lists, and people in, or related to Pune. A lot of the content that is put up on PuneTech actually comes from other sources, and is often a cut-n-paste job, if not a direct copy (with permission). Thus, a lot of the value that PuneTech provides is in the selection of the content, and the editorial opinions and biases that we introduce in the process.

This note lays out our editorial policy to help the community understand what goes up on the site, and why:

  • PuneTech does not accept any payments or favors (monetary or otherwise) from any body, for any reason. All content on PuneTech is there because we feel that it needs to be there, and is in keeping with the purpose and the spirit of the site.
  • PuneTech strives hard to be free of vested interests. With precisely that in mind, right from the first day, we’ve always made it clear that PuneTech is not monetized in any way, and it does not provide any direct revenues, or indeed any direct monetary benefit to anybody associated with PuneTech. (For example, we don’t promote our own companies, and before promoting, or featuring our friends or their companies, we try very hard to ensure that we use the same criteria for judging them as we use for everybody else. And thankfully, our friends all respect this fact.)
  • However, PuneTech is not objective. We believe in evaluating the world around us and making our opinions known. We strongly believe that our opinions have value, and that our readers value our opinions. All PuneTech posts will always reflect the opinions of the authors (at least those opinions that we feel are worth publicizing to the rest of the world).
  • PuneTech often has posts that promote a certain company, event or person. In fact, it can be argued that all the posts on PuneTech are promoting something or someone. When we write about a company, we are essentially promoting it, and implicitly saying that the company is good enough to feature on PuneTech. When we write about an upcoming event, we are promoting the event, and essentially saying that we feel this event will be good, and worth attending. When we interview a person, or otherwise write about him/her, we are promoting that person, and saying here is a person that you should know.
  • We welcome and encourage opposing points of view in the comments. We usually approve all such comments, as long as they are in keeping with the PuneTech comments policy. Occasionally, we do delete comments that violate our policy, so please read the comments policy carefully to get an idea of what is not allowed.

Note: the PuneTech wiki is an open wiki that anybody can add to, and edit. Any content that anybody puts up there will usually be left there, as long as it is relevant to Pune, and relevant to technology, and is not illegal in some way. Note, however, that we, or someone else, might edit the content to make it more useful and usable.

In contrast, all content goes up on the the PuneTech blog (i.e. content which goes up on the front page, and to all PuneTech subscribers) is controlled by the PuneTech editor (currently Navin Kabra, with help from Amit Paranjape, and also some other friends of PuneTech). These are the rough guidelines currently used in determining what is appropriate for the front page:

  • Company profiles for interesting companies. Service companies are boring – unless the service happens to be something unique. Product companies are more interesting, especially if the product is technologically interesting, or has some aspect that is innovative. Or the product or service is itself useful for the tech community Pune.
  • Interviews of interesting tech people. Guidelines here are similar to that for company profiles – the person must be working on something that is technologically interesting, or innovative, or unique in some way, or useful to the tech community in Pune.
  • Events: The event must be in Pune,  and should be related to technology. By and large, we try to focus on events that are free, or have a nominal fee. In general, we will not feature commercial events (i.e. those which have a hefty registration fee), unless we feel that the content is especially interesting, and the price especially reasonable. We usually don’t feature information about paid training programs. These days, there are so many tech events in Pune, that we have started being selective about featuring only the more interesting events on our front page – all other events that fit our criteria are posted on the PuneTech calendar.  Note: the PuneTech calendar, like the PuneTech wiki, is a by-the-community calendar. Anyone is free to add events to the calendar.
  • PuneTech does not post job requirements. We are constantly asked about unpaid or paid job postings, but we feel that having job postings on PuneTech would distract from the primary purpose of the site. Note, however: if somebody writes a long, detailed and interesting article for PuneTech about the technology domain that their company is working in, one that would be of wider general interest to the readers of PuneTech, then, at the end of the article, we allow a short pitch about the company, and that can include a description of the kind of people they’re looking to hire. We feel that is a fair trade-off.

A few things to note:

  • These editorial guidelines have evolved over time, and will continue to evolve. Thus, it is possible that some article that featured on the PuneTech front page in the page violates one of these guidelines. The most likely reason would be that that guideline did not exist a the time the article was posted.
  • It is also possible that we make mistakes and violate our own guidelines. When you feel that such a mistake has happened, please point it out to us publicly (as a comment on the post). That will give us a chance to explain our choice to you and to everyone else, or to apologize, and learn from the mistakes.
  • If you can think of additions/modifications to the guidelines, please let us know.

Key Legal Issues in InfoTech – Seminar, July 28

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seap-logo-inWhat: Seminar on key legal issues in InfoTech – key clauses, law, enforcement, jurisdiction in tech agreements, and IP issues
When: 2pm to 5pm, Tuesday, 28th July
Where: Bhageerath, Persistent Systems, S.B. Road
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Send mail to tanvi@nishithdesai.com if you’re interested.

Details:
Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) and Nishith Desai Associates will hold a seminar on various legal issues an infotech business needs to worry about. The workshop aims to address issues related to intellectual property, trade secrets, usage of open source along with insights on key clauses pertaining to technology agreements from a legal as well as a commercial perspective. The workshop would also provide insights on enforcement and jurisdiction issues which are commonly faced in cross border technology agreements.

Agenda:

  • Protection of Intellectual Property, Confidential Information, Trade Secrets – Usage of Third Party IP and Open Source. Gowree Gokhale (Partner, Nishith Desai Associates)
  • Key Clauses in Technology Agreements along with negotiating tactics. Bharat Mehta (Vice President-Legal, Oracle Financial Services Software Limited)
  • Governing Law, Enforcement and Jurisdiction Issues in Technology Agreements. Shafaq Uraizee-Sapre (Senior Associate, Nishith Desai Associates)

About the Speakers

Gowree Gokhale

Ms. Gowree Gokhale heads the IP, technology, media and entertainment law practice of the multi-skilled, research-based international law firm, Nishith Desai Associates. Her specializations also include litigation and dispute resolution, franchising, pharma and life sciences laws, commercial laws, HR laws. Ms. Gokhale has led several IP, technology and HR litigations. She has been involved in negotiations of large BPO and technology contracts. She is involved in patent oppositions and devising patent litigation strategies for clients. She has assisted international media and productions houses and pharmaceutical companies in structuring of their India operations, including IP structuring, and advice on regulatory issues. She specializes in structuring of cross border outsourcing and franchising arrangements and has negotiated several transactions both for Indian and MNC clients. Ms. Gokhale is a Solicitor and a registered Patent & Trade Mark attorney and has been practicing for the last 13 years. She is a visiting faculty at Institute of Intellectual Property Law Studies at Mumbai. She has authored research reports and articles on variety of subjects and has presented at various national and international seminars and conferences on IP, pharmaceutical, media and technology laws. She has is a regular speaker at NASSCOM TLF seminars on technology contracts, CII on enforcement of IP in India.

Bharat Mehta

Vice President – Legal at Oracle Financial Services Software Limited is an experienced professional in legal and commercial matters related to IP and IT industry worldwide. Bharat has the opportunity of interacting, negotiating and concluding business deals globally with experience spanning across functions including mergers & acquisitions, intellectual property, customers, partners, vendors and employee related matters, corporate affairs, group integration, business practices, risk management and compliance. Bharat enjoys the continuous challenge and rewarding experience of working with professionals of different worldviews. He is actively involved as a speaker at various forums in spreading awareness about intellectual property, technology contracts and compliance. He is also one of the founding members of the Technology Law Forum (TLF). He graduated out of Mumbai University and has a Degree in Law.

Shafaq Uraizee-Sapre

Ms. Shafaq Uraizee Sapre is a senior member of the Technology, Litigation & Dispute Resolution, Fund Investment and Real Estate Practice Groups at the firm. Ms. Sapre received a Bachelors and Masters degree in law from the University of Bombay. Ms. Sapre’s practice focuses on cutting edge complex cross-border litigations and international commercial arbitrations. Ms. Sapre is a leading attorney in assisting clients to reach creative and pragmatic solutions and effective dispute resolution strategies. In addition to in-house representation, Ms. Sapre represents clients in Supreme Court, High Court and respective Tribunals in a wide-range of sectors including corporate, media, entertainment, franchising and oil & gas. Ms. Sapre’s practice includes a variety of transactions with both domestic and international venture capital and private equity funds. Ms. Sapre has advised and assisted clients on issues concerning the legal aspects of structuring and restructuring investments in India and globally, documentation, private equity investments and mergers and acquisitions across a multitude of sectors. Ms. Sapre has led several legal due diligence teams and often renders opinions on issues concerning litigation, arbitration, Indian labor laws and contract law.

Ms. Sapre has spoken at the Confederation of Indian Industry and actively writes for publications such as the Indian Venture Capital Journal. Ms. Sapre is a member of the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa and has been practicing as a litigator at the Bombay High Court since 2000.

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MCCIA workshop: Intellectual property Right awarness, acquisition and commercialization – 24 April

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mccia-pune-logoWhat: Workshop on ‘Intellectual property Right awarness, acquisition and commercialization’ arranged by MCCIA on the occasion of World Intellectual Property Day
When: 3pm, Friday, 24 April
Where: Hall no. 6, 5th Floor, Wing A, MCCIA Trade Tower, S.B. Road
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Details:
On the occasion of World Intellectual Property Day, MCCIA is organizing a workshop on ‘Intellectual property Right awarness, acquisition and commercialization”. The workshop aims to provide an interface between the Industry and IP professionals so that the participants can leverage IP as a better business tool in their Corporate Wealth Creation. The topics of discussion will include cost effective way to protect IP, IP as a successful business tool, licensing stratergies, IP valuation doring public issues, IPR policy acquisition, invention disclosure etc.

The three hour workshop will commence at 3pm on Friday, April 24 at Hall No. 6, 5th Floor, A Wing, MCCIA, Senapati Bapat Road, Pune 16. There will be no participation fees for this workshop.

For more information about other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech Calendar.

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PuneTech Comment Policy

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PuneTech is a for-the-community, by-the-community site, and comments by our readers play an important part of the content. However, to ensure that the discussion always stays healthy, constructive and safe, we occasionally have to delete some of the comments. This note lays out our comments policy to help the community understand what kinds of comments we delete, and why.

PuneTech comment policy – Short version

  if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;

In select cases, we might allow a comment in spite of violating one of the above rules, if it has other redeeming qualities. Also, if we delete a comment, and you really, really want your voice heard, we suggest a workaround that will allow the world to still see the comment.

PuneTech comment policy – Long version

Relevance

Our primary objective is to provide PuneTech readers with focused, relevant articles and discussions. Anything that distracts from this reduces the value of PuneTech for our readers. Hence, any comment that has nothing to do with the article (and trust me, we get a bunch of these), will be deleted (unless we find it very interesting in its own right). If you want a job, please post your resume on naukri.com – don’t post a comment here. If you find yourself compelled to beg for jobs on PuneTech, seriously consider changing careers.

Personal Attacks

We are trying to build a community here, not poison it. Something about the internet makes people more rude than they would be in real life. Please resist the temptation. We love a good argument, we are after all argumentative Indians. But please argue the issues. You might be surprised to discover that it can be done without attacking the character of the other person.

Abusive Language

If it is worth saying, it can be said in polite language. If you have abusive language in a boring comment, we’ll delete it. If you have abusive language in an interesting comment, we will, at our discretion, remove the offending words, or sentences. If you don’t want your comment mangled like this by us, use polite language.

Defamation

PuneTech is a non-commercial website that is run by us on a part-time basis. We make no money from PuneTech. Which means that we have neither the time, nor the money to get involved in legal issues. We cannot afford to retain lawyers to get accurate legal advice. In the absense of that, we have to make a guess based on our understanding of the law. And anything that we think exposes us to legal liability, will be deleted.

Here is our limited understanding of the law:

If something can hurt the reputation of another person or company, legally, we can publish it if and only if it is true.  This is tricky because we need to be sure of the truth before we feel safe. Just because it is on wikipedia, does not make it true. Just because Times of India published it, does not make it necessarily true. And we can be sued even if we are simply relaying info published by someone else.

Even if the damaging statements are contained in a comment made by a third-party commenter (i.e. somebody other than us) we are still obligated to remove the comment. Otherwise PuneTech can be held liable.

So it boils down to this: if we cannot verify the truth of a damaging claim in a comment, we will delete the comment.

Please note, just because it is true, does not necessarily mean that we will allow a comment. The earlier filters of relevance, rudeness, etc. still apply. If we are unsure about the “public good” of a true but damaging statement, we will delete the comment.

Other Objectionable Content

Other reasons why comments might fall afoul of the laws are: obscenity; hurting religious sentiments; promoting violence; against security of the state; or infringing of someone’s right to privacy. In most cases, these will get deleted for violating one of our earlier policies (e.g. irrelevance, personal attack, etc.) . In the rare case that the comment somehow manages to not violate any of the earlier policies, it can still get deleted for being against the law.

Workaround

When we delete one of your comments, we are not really preventing you from expressing yourself. Please feel free to go ahead and post it on your own blog. If for some reason, you are ashamed of putting your own comment on your own blog, go ahead and create a brand new blog on blogger.com just for holding this one comment. It’s easy, it’s free, and anybody can do it. Then post a link in the comments on PuneTech. If it is relevant to the post, we’ll probably allow the link to remain.

Suggestions

If you have any feedback for us, please leave a comment below, or send us an email. The comment is subject to the same policies (ha! ha!) unless we decide to change the policy based on your suggestion. In any case, we promise to read everything, even if we delete it.

Moderation

Comments on PuneTech are moderated. Which means that one of us might have to take a look and approve the comment before it appears on the site. Sometimes, it takes us a while to get around to doing this. Please be patient. Don’t post the comment multiple times. If you are unsure of whether your comment has reached our moderation queue, send us an email.

Further Reading

What I’ve learned from Hacker News by Paul Graham. A good introduction to the issues to be considered when deciding why and how to moderate comments on a site.

Free to blog but accountable you are. The Supreme Court of India weighs in on blogging and online expression. – Dhananjay Nene

Of blogs, bloggers and freedom of expression – Mutiny.in

Bloggers Legal Guide from EFF – Note this applies to US law, but still worth reading, as it does a great job of explaining the issues.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dhananjay Nene, Rohit Srivastwa, Amit Kumar Singh, Unmesh Mayekar, Manas Garg, Rohas Nagpal, and Debasis Nayak for discussions that helped us clarify our thinking and craft this policy. Note: this comment policy does not necessarily reflect the views of these people – it is just that they helped us while we were struggling to figure out what the comment policy should be.

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POCC meeting: What should I create: sole proprietorship, partnership, pvt. ltd., LLP?

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Proposed new logo of the Pune OpenCoffee Club by Sahil Khan
Proposed new logo of the Pune OpenCoffee Club by Sahil Khan. Please give your feedback at http://sahilkhan.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/pocc-logo/ (click on the photo)

What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting to discuss company formation, registrations, tax planning and other related issues as they pertain to early stage startups.
When: Saturday, 7th February, 4:30pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, 7th Floor, Atur Centre, Gokhale Cross Road Model Colony. Map
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

Details:
There are a number of things about company formation, registrations, taxation, accounting and finanace, which are very confusing to young startups. It is not clear which experts to go to for advice, and the costs vary widely, and the expenses are quite significant for new startups. To tackle these questions and give everyone an overview of this area, the Pune OpenCoffee Club will have a session with three experts who will help us understand these issues and answer our questions.

We have invited the following people:

Jayesh Baheti is a partner at CA firm Baheti & Somani http://bandsindia.com
Prakash Shah, is a partner at a well known CA firm in Pune, started by his father.
Pawan Chandak is a practicing Company Secretary. He also handles corporate legal matters. http://chandakcs.com/proprietor.html

We will try to cover topics like:
1. Differences between sole proprietorship / partnership / pvt. ltd. and the new LLP. Which is appropriate in which circumstances. Licenses, costs, tax implications.
2. Understanding issues a young startup might face like: FBT, STPI registration, depreciation, PF, equity distribution
3. Tax planning, expenses and deduction.

Jayesh will give a presentation giving the basics of the above topics, so that everybody has an overview of the area, then we will have a discussion session where we can get our questions answered by Prakash, Pawan and Jayesh.

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Archival, e-Discovery and Compliance

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Archival of e-mails and other electronic documents, and the use of such archives in legal discovery is an emerging and exciting new field in enterprise data management. There are a number of players in this area in Pune, and it is, in general, a very interesting and challenging area. This article gives a basic background. Hopefully, this is just the first in a series of articles and future posts will delve into more details.

Background

In the US, and many other countries, when a company files a lawsuit against another, before the actual trial takes place, there is a pre-trial phase called “discovery”. In this phase, each side asks the other side to produce documents and other evidence relating to specific aspects of the case. The other side is, of course, not allowed to refuse and must produce the evidence as requested. This discovery also applies to electronic documents – most notably, e-mail. Now unlike other documents, electronic documents are very easy to delete. And when companies were asked to produce certain e-mails in court as part of discovery, more and more of them began claiming that relevant e-mails had already been deleted, or they were unable to find the e-mails in their backups. The courts are not really stupid, and quickly decided that the companies were lying in order to avoid producing incriminating evidence. This gave rise to a number of laws in recent times which specify, essentially, that relevant electronic documents cannot be deleted for a certain number of years, and that they should be stored in an easily searchable archive, and that failure to produce these documents in a reasonable amount of time is a punishable offense. This is terrible news for most companies, because now, all “important” emails (for a very loose definition of “important”) must be stored for many years. Existing backup systems are not good enough, because those are not really searchable by content. And the archives cannot be stored on cheap tapes either, because those are not searchable. Hence, they have to be on disk. This is a huge expense. And a management nightmare. But failure to comply is even worse. There have been actual instances of huge fines (millions of dollars, and in once case, a billion dollars) imposed by courts on companies that were unable to produce relevant emails in court. In some cases, the company executives were slapped with personal fines (in addition to fines on the company). On the other hand, this is excellent news for companies that sell archival software that helps you store electronic documents for the legally sufficient number of years in a searchable repository. The demand for this software, driven by draconian legal requirments, is HUGE, and an entire industry has burgeoned to service this market. Just e-mail archival soon be a billion dollar market. (Update: Actually it appears that in 2008, archival software alone is expected to touch 2 billion dollars with a growth rate of 47% per year, and e-discovery and litigation support software market will be 4 billion growing at 27%. And this doesn’t count the e-discovery services market which is much much larger.) There are three major chunks to this market:

  • Archival – Ability to store (older) documents for a long time on cheaper disks in a searchable repository
  • Compliance – Ensuring that the archival store complies with all the relevant laws. For example, the archive must be tamperproof.
  • e-Discovery – The archive should have the required search and analysis tools to ensure that it is easy to find all the relevant documents required in discovery

Archival

Archival software started its life before the advent of these compliance laws. Basic email archival is simply a way to move all your older emails out of your expensive MS exchange database, into cheaper, slower disks. And shortcuts are left in the main Exchange database so that if the user ever wants to access one of these older emails, it is fetched on demand from the slower archival disks. This is very much like a page fault in virtual memory. The net effect is that for most practical purposes, you’ve increased the sizes of peoples’ mailboxes without a major increase in price, without a decrease in performance for recent emails, and some decrease in performance for older emails. Unfortunately, these guys had only middling success. Think about it – if your IT department is given a choice between spending money on an archival software that will allow them to increase your mailbox size, or simply telling all you users to learn to live with small mailbox sizes, what would they choose? Right. So the archival software companies saw only moderate growth. All of this changed when the e-discovery laws came into effect. Suddenly, archival became a legal requirement instead of a good-to-have bonus feature. Sales exploded. Startups started. And it also added a bunch of new requirements, described in the next two sections.

Compliance

Before I start, I should note that “IT Compliance” in general is really a huge area and includes all kinds of software and services required by IT to comply with any number of laws (like Sarbanes Oxley for accounting, HIPAA for medical records, etc.) That is not the compliance I am referring to in this article. Here we only deal with compliance as it pertains to archival software. The major compliance requirement is that for different types of e-mails and electronic documents, the laws prescribe the minimum number of years for which they must be retained by the company. And, no company wants to really keep any of these documents a day more than is minimally required by the law. Hence, for each document, the archival software must maintain the date until which the document must be retained, and on that day, it must automatically delete that document. Except, if the document is “relevant” to a case that is currently running. Then the document cannot be deleted until the case is over. This allows us to introduce the concept of a legal hold (or a deletion hold) that is placed on a document or a set of documents as soon as it is determined that it is relevant to a current case. The archival software ensures that documents with a deletion hold are not deleted even if their retention period expires. The deletion hold is only removed after the case is over. The archival software needs to ensure that the archive is tamperproof. Even if the CEO of the company walks up to the system one day in the middle of the night, he should not be able to delete or modify anything. Another major compliance requirement is that the archival software must make it possible to find “relevant” documents in a “reasonable” amount of time. The courts have some definition of what “relevant” and “reasonable” mean in this context, but we’ll not get into that. What it really means for the developers, is that there should be a fairly sophisticated search facility that allows searches by keywords, by regular expressions, and by various fields of the metadata (e.g., find me all documents authored by Basant Rajan from March to September 2008).

e-Discovery

Sadly, just having a compliant archive is no longer good enough. Consider a typical e-discovery scenario. A company is required to produce all emails authored by Basant Rajan pertaining to the volume manager technology in the period March to September 2008. Now just producing all the documents by Basant for that period which contain the words “volume manager” is not good enough. Because he might have referred to it as “VM“. Or he might have just talked about space optimized snapshots without mentioning the words volume manager. So, what happens is that all emails written by Basant in that period are retreived, and a human has to go through each email, to determine if it is relevant to volume manager or not. And this human must be a lawyer. Who charges $4 per email because he has to pay off his law school debt. For a largish company, a typical lawsuit might involve millions of documents. Literally. Now you know why there is so much money in this market. Just producing all documents by Basant and dumping them on the opposing lawyers is not an option. Because the company does not want to disclose to the opposing side anything more than is absolutely necessary. Who knows what other smoking guns are present in Basant’s email? Thus, a way for different archival software vendors to differentiate themselves is the sophistication they can bring to this process. The ability to search for concepts like “volume management” as opposed to the actual keywords. The ability to group/cluster a set of emails by concepts. The ability to allow teams of people to collaboratively work on this job. The ability to search for “all emails which contain a paragraph similar to this paragraph“. If you know how to do this last part, I know a few companies that would be desperate to hire you.

What next?

In Pune, there are at least two companies Symantec, and Mimosa Systems, working in this area. (Mimosa’s President and CEO, T.M. Ravi, is currently in town and will give the keynote for CSI-Pune’s ILM Seminar this Thursday. Might be worth attending if you are interested in this area.) I also believe that CT Summation’s CaseVault system also has a development team here, but I am unable to find any information about that – if you have a contact there, please let me know. For some (possibly outdated) details of the other (worldwide) players in this market, see this report from last year. If you are from one of these companies, and can write an article on what exactly your software does in this field, and how it is better than the others, please let me know. I also had a very interesting discussion with Paul C. Easton of True Legal Partners, an e-Discovery outsourcing firm, where we talked about how they use archiving and e-discovery software, but more generally we also talked about how legal outsourcing to India, suitability of Pune for the same, competition from China, etc. I will write an article on that sometime soon – stay tuned (by subscribing to the PuneTech by email or via RSS)