Monthly Archives: January 2024

One of my old clients asked my opinion on where she should spend her hard fought 2015 eDiscovery education budget while we were catching up at LTNY. A few minutes into the conversation and I realized that those talented marketing spin doctors had done a fabulous job of confusing consumers about the realities of eDiscovery certifications, standards bodies, continuing education and actual higher education courses. Since the arrival of the 2006 FRCP amendments, eDiscovery practitioners have struggled along without any governing standards body handing down practical methodologies, practices or any kind of formal educational path for neophytes to get up to speed. Most industries have non-profit 'Standards Developing Organizations' that bring together diverse process participants in a transparent, formal system to publish definitions and guidelines by consensus. In my opinion, provider product marketing has funded and driven the vast majority eDiscovery education that is available today. The Sedona Conference gives attorneys 10,000 foot level principals, but never intended to teach the litigation support tech how to process email from a PST. In 2005, a bright group of folks put together the Electronic Discovery Reference Model as a visual model of the typical workflow from that time period. Although I contributed to the subsequently formed EDRM working groups for many years, I was disappointed to read the notice at the bottom of the December EDRM Update:

I enjoy your feedback, especially when my readers can point out something I may have missed. My thanks to both Shelley Podolny from H5 and Brandon Leatha from IDS for drawing my attention to the international standards giving an overview of the eDiscovery process that have been under development for some time. As you can see from the ISO.org page, the standards are still in the working draft stage. The full title is ISO/IEC CD 27050-1 and it has been put under the Security techniques (27050) classification. I remember the fanfare and discussion around this project back in 2013, but it had slipped from my radar without any subsequent public releases or project insight. At least this initiative is part of the established, formal international standards system. Even if this Part 1 standard does nothing more that codify definitions and re-affirm existing concepts, it will be a step in the right direction. Here is some draft introductory language that was so kindly provided to me:

It feels like the Microsoft acquisition of Equivio rang the dinner bell and has VC investors salivating at the chance to pump cash into the eDiscovery market. We have seen $400+ million flow into our little market in the last quarter alone. Clearview’s acquisition of mid-tier service provider Xact Data Discovery for an unspecified amount is just the latest announcement. Here are a few examples:

Two press releases from Content Analyst caught my attention and generated discussion with CAAT OEM partners. Last week, Content Analyst announced the release of Cerebrant, a direct SaaS analytic software “designed to enable subject matter experts to create an online workbench with large collections of content from disparate sources, and navigate and explore their content sets in a matter of hours.” Digging into the details, it appears that customers will upload zipped collections of native files that will be processed/stored in AWS for triage and analysis. I did not find the term ‘review’ on any Cerebrant materials, so Content Analyst appears to be avoiding the lucrative relevance review/PC/TAR market. Although Content Analyts may not want to directly complete with their OEM partner network (which includes kCura, IPRO, iConect, Mindseye and many more), I cannot see how their partners could view this any other way. The cloud based review platform market segment in under incredible pressure to lock in customers before Microsoft can integrate Equivio and give away in-place analytics.

It has been almost a year since Andy Wilson, Logikcull’s CEO/Founder. I have to confess that we spent more time talking about the evolving eDiscovery market than digging into the SaaS platforms new features. Andy’s team has done a pretty good job of keeping their eDJ Matrix profile up to date, so I guess that the real news is how their public pricing subscription model has taken off. Sometimes the consumption model is a more important differentiator than the latest, greatest machine learning black box. Here are my briefing bullet points:

Just a fast note to alert readers that I have been trying to get recent and historical survey data loaded to the eDJ Research Report page. Please excuse the slow login and page display speed. We are working on some database cleanup, but you can get access to all reports (ignore the old purchase prices) by logging in and answering five quick questions on where you conduct your eDiscovery. We have made a lot of changes in the last year and it is worth a quick recap. Now that we have phased out our analyst and subscription divisions, eDJ Group has returned to focusing on strategic consulting and client driven research. We continue to blog and publish research on the eDJ Group site, but have converted to a participation model. To access the eDJ Matrix, research reports, survey results and more, just log in with a validated account and take a quick survey to get 30 days access to all premium content. The 2015 Evidence vs. Collection Survey has some interesting metrics and a good distribution of respondents (n=53). Previously, we only published raw survey results inside of eDJ Research papers, so I am slowly pulling survey data from 2011-2013 period to give you full access as we run 2015 updates.

I keep an eye out for eDiscovery announcements/events that partner with core infrastructure or IG players. The upcoming webinar by Zapproved and Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Cloud E-Discovery caught my attention. Zapproved’s recent round of funding ($15M), acquisition of eCloud Collect (rebranded to Data Collect Pro) and hiring spree all signal their intent to push the ‘cloud only’ SaaS solution. Only a few players (X1 Rapid Discovery) have made the technological/business investment to make their offerings available directly from the AWS store. This webinar makes me wonder if Zapproved is headed in the same direction. What does that mean to a consumer? Imagine spinning up your own private, encrypted discovery service in Amazon with just a corporate credit card to cover the subscription and AWS costs. Most customers are not there yet, but with large Microsoft Office 365 migrations cloud SaaS eDiscovery makes sense. Take my survey on eDiscovery in the Cloud to get access to the raw survey results.

A fast update to my recent briefing on this pure play SaaS eDiscovery provider to the SMB market. While chatting about the $370M+ in recent VC investment into the eDiscovery market, Andy Wilson hinted at an upcoming announcement. Little did I know that Nick Mehta of Gainsight (my prior boss and favorite startup entrepreneur) was participating in the investment. Understandably, Andy was seriously jazzed about getting Jason Lemkin of Storm Ventures on his board. If $4M in capital feels tiny compared to kCura’s $125M round of funding, then just put their customer markets in perspective. kCura and the vast majority of eDiscovery technology/service providers are all fighting over the tip of the iceberg, namely the corporate and large enterprise defendants. A relatively few providers like Logikcull provide scalable, low overhead cloud service solutions for the SMB parties lurking under the surface. You can bet that I will be watching Logikcull closely now that Nick Mehta has put his toe back in the eDiscovery market.

Having run a lot of these annual surveys, I can understand how the market focus evolves over time into something that does not quite resemble the title. That does not diminish the value of the response metrics. So my take from the excerpts of IDG’s “2015 Big Data and Analytics” survey is that ‘data driven initiatives’ are more about smart migrations and legacy clean up than ‘Big Data’ IT makeovers. One interesting note is the increased confidence in enterprise security. Security concerns were perceived as one of the largest hurdles for cloud data initiatives in our 2013 eDJ surveys. This feels like progress as on-premise and cloud infrastructure and systems become more mature.

Back in December I wrote a blog about my opinion on monthly hosting charges in this age of cloud storage. Safe to say that I think that the typical market rates of $10-15/GB/month for hosting your collection in a review platform is highway robbery. Many providers have shed their private ‘data centers’ and moved their servers and/or storage to the public (encrypted) cloud (Amazon or Azure). Some regulated or highly litigious customers need the illusion of security provided by provider ‘data centers’. Why do I keep putting ‘data centers’ in quotes? Because a locked room with redundant power and HVAC in a strip mall is NOT more secure than encrypted cloud storage. A small subset of providers have invested millions into the very infrastructure and certifications that most CIO’s are trying to jettison, the rest make up the difference in marketing. When I received Evolve Discovery’s latest promotional email (below), I assumed that they could safely make this half price offer based on moving to cloud vs. privately hosted infrastructure. Oops. I work hard to verify assumptions before they make a ‘you-know-what’ out of me. Evolve is proud of their SSAE 16 certified private data center. So either they have negotiated a serious Relativity hosting discount from kCura (unlikely) or they are feeling the pricing pressure and want to lock in as many of the whales (big customers) as possible, even if means paying the transfer costs to their competitors. Fun times to watch the price of Relativity hosting plummet.