Monthly Archives: January 2024

I found this nice chart that details the file types/extensions that default SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 will index. The “FH” column indicates the important content indexing. If it is not marked as “FH”, then you are limited to searching by the name, location, file type, date or other metadata. Mike Smith’s blog closes with a nice link that details the process for implementing a custom iFilter to index specific file types. From a discovery perspective, I always want to confirm the exact list of iFilters that some helpful admin may have added or removed. Here is a link to the get that list. Too many times I have been debugging a strange search behavior only to find out that the system was ‘tuned’ to optimize performance over search retrieval.

Several years ago a good friend still in law enforcement shared the disturbing trend of international hackers buying used corporate smart phones for their stored credentials. Most of my clients have implemented basic BYOD security requirements that ‘can’ limit the damage from a lost, stolen or sold smart phone packed with customer PII, confidential pricing data or worse. A Buzzfeed story popped up in my search feed that shows the lighter side of unsecured smart phones. It is a warm and fuzzy tale that includes gobs of pictures and stored iCloud credentials that is worth a quick read. After you have recovered from your emotional sugar coma, let’s look at how easily this story could have turned dark and scary.

Following up on the recent press releases, I wanted to get the scoop on the new Cerebrant offering straight from Content Analyst. As a reminder, Cerebrant is Content Analyst’s first direct offering to end consumers instead of adding analytic functionality to one of their many eDiscovery partner solutions. Content Analyst is working hard to hammer home the message that Cerebrant is NOT intended for the eDiscovery market and that they will NOT be competing with their eDiscovery OEM partners. Having now demo’d Cerebrant, I can reassure you that it is not designed for eDiscovery. So what is it? Cerebrant is a hosted SaaS analytic interface enabling conceptual/similarity search and visualizations. That is what it does, but how can it be used? Content Analyst is focusing on supporting Pharma and Talent Management verticals initially, though customers can upload processed text and delimited metadata fields to the standard version. Below are my briefing notes:

I hate to say that it is not surprising that Merrill Corp. decided to sell their legal services group while the international customer base still held significant value. This lets Merrill drop a division that felt like it had lost momentum and market differentiation. As the eDiscovery service market evolves, traditional providers must either grow, innovate or die. DTI has steadily acquired stalled regional providers for their clients and talent, but this is their largest acquisition to date. DTI moved early into outsourced discovery managed services and now I am watching to see if they can convert these acquired litigation customers into long term management subscriptions.

I had almost thought that the venerable Yahoo LitSupport list had finally died when a classic question arrived this morning seeking replacement options for LexisNexis’s LAW. Although the poor poster will now undoubtedly get a wave of sales rep responses, they were probably prepared to deal with the spam. The good news is that there are LOTS of processing/EDA/ECA tools on the market, but most are server based platforms instead of desktop apps. The main difference is the sticker shock you will get looking at ‘modern’ Processing/ECA tools compared to the old school LAW flat purchase price. LAW’s low cost and lack of volume caps/costs is why it is still around. Responding to the request (yes, I still answer posts on the list and direct questions) got me thinking about how the classic small firm or private company solo lit support power user has been caught in the market transition.

I love it when my search engines turn up evidence that the left hand rarely knows what the right is doing. This morning brought me contrasting articles with the HP press release announcing ‘Gartner again names HP Autonomy a leader in eDiscovery software’ and the NY Times blog indicating that HP is ceding the public cloud market to Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Of course, it is very easy to misconstrue even a media-trained executive’s statements instead of just echoing them without a bit of diligence. The first distinction to draw is the difference between HP’s attempts to convert their physical hardware business into a direct competitive offering to Microsoft Azure/Amazon S3 VS. HP Autonomy software-as-a-Service offerings such as cloud backup, HP LiveVault, etc. Not directly competing with Amazon S3 is very different from shutting down their relatively nascent Autonomy-as-a-service offerings. HP’s quick clarifying press release trying to make it clear that ‘not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players’ does not mean that HP is leaving the public cloud market. With HP hardware due to split with Autonomy enterprise software later this year, the HP play in the cloud infrastructure market does not really matter that much to the typical eDiscovery/IG consumer.

A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that Iris Data Services was acquired for a roughly 3.5X multiple ($134M / $38M revenue) to Epiq. That is neither good nor bad for a services business when compared to the rumored 8-10X multiple Microsoft paid for Equivio. Iris certainly jumped early into the managed services market and has kept their marketing focused on that. Epiq has seemingly struggled to break out of the golden ‘big case’ trap into a business model with better growth potential. It will be interesting to see how this culture marriage works out. I see it as ‘bet the company cases’ vs. ‘everything you can eat eDiscovery support’. I will be looking for health reports from current Iris managed services customers in 6-9 months to see if the wheels are still on the cart.

Something occurred to me while working on my upcoming Ipro Innovations session on ‘Who’s Making the Jump to the Cloud & Why?’ The fundamental role of IT was to create and maintain the dynamic technology infrastructure that supported the applications, connectivity and storage required by the business users. Over time, simple server-client applications evolved into customized enterprise platfoms that made strong IT department essential for competitive corporations and firms. Long standing virtualization and centralized storage trends have made these enterprise platforms relatively hardware agnostic, a key requirement for migration to a public Cloud environment. Now that CIO’s everywhere seem to be sending pilot balloons into the Cloud, is there a role for the traditional IT administrator? Many traditional processing/hosting service providers are asking the same question about their future role in the eDiscovery lifecycle. Are they needed when the ESI is created, collected, processed, reviewed and produced in the Cloud? Because that is the direction that companies small and large seem to be headed. It will be a couple years before Microsoft is giving away fully integrated Equivio Zoom functionality to all Office 365 customers, but sharp providers and IT should be looking at that road map and redefining their own roles if they want to stay relevant and employed. I will share some high points from my session or you can participate in person if you happen to be in Phoenix next week. Meanwhile, here is a fun graphic from my deck.

We had a customer question on whether they should/could disable read receipts in corporate email. There was little business value in their vertical for active use of read receipts (i.e. they did not have a large sales division) and a smart attorney on the stakeholder team thought that they posed more risk than reward. Doug Austin’s blog about Fox v. Leland Volunteer Fire/Rescue Department Inc. is a good read on the potential risks of ‘automatically authenticating’ the fact that a custodian saw a specific message, even if I can think of a dozen scenarios where read receipts falsely report custodian awareness. Shutting down read receipt functionality on Exchange or Office 365 is a simple Powershell Cmdlet:

For the last several years, eDJ has conducted surveys that confirmed the accelerating trend of companies moving their messaging, collaboration and other IG systems to the Cloud. This year I am interested in whether consumers are starting to actually conduct discovery in the Cloud as well. My ongoing eDJ poll ‘Where do you conduct eDiscovery’ has yet to turn up anyone who ‘knows’ that their eDiscovery is being conducted in the public Cloud out of the 16 respondents so far. I know that many popular hosted platforms and well known channel providers use the public Cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, etc) for secured servers and storage. This makes me wonder if most customers are either not asking the right questions or if savvy providers have figured out ways to ‘rebrand’ the public Cloud with ‘private instances’. Sounds like I need to add some new features and categories to the eDJ Matrix to separate the apples from oranges.