Monthly Archives: January 2024

Downsizing eDJ from a market analyst firm back to boutique strategic consulting pretty much took Mikki and I off the speaker’s circuit for 2014. So besides escorting key clients through the LTNY maze back in March, this has been my longest hiatus from conferences in a long time. At last week’s Ipro Innovations event, I did a short 20 minute session on who is moving to the Cloud on the main stage and then a fun session on my key 2015 eDiscovery trends. Both slide decks have been uploaded to the eDJ Group site for members who have taken a survey in the last 30 days.

Not sure if you heard about all the rain and flooding down here in Houston, but that is just one reason for my recent hiatus from blogging. Once life takes you away from your routine, it is hard to get back in the saddle, but press releases like this one from OLP give me all the incentive I need to write. Now you know that I hate to pick on any one vendor when my real concern is a broader trend that I want to call your attention to. In this case, it is the way that some for-profit providers effectively cloak their true nature and revenue source by presenting themselves as ‘organizations’, ‘associations’, ‘reference models’, ‘institutes’ or other labels intended to convey academic authority. eDiscovery is such a young and cross-functional discipline that many new practitioners indiscriminately consume ‘best practices’, certificates and purchasing guidance without understanding how the source of that self-proclaimed authority makes money. I happily include myself in that ‘self-proclaimed’ group, because in my opinion there were and are no classic non-profit or academic standards bodies out there to grant anyone eDiscovery authority. Others can and will disagree with me, but all I am asking you is to ask the question, “Show me the money!” before you allocate educational time or budget.

If you are a legacy Summation iBlaze, LAW or even more esoteric desktop processing user, you should check out ipro’s limited time offer for 50% off of your first copy of their new Eclipse SE. The word on the street had a single user annual subscription starting around $750, so this offer brings it low enough for most to just expense it. As always, I am not a paid marketer and I have not done any analyst days for ipro since we shut down the market analyst group early last year. I just know that there are a LOT of old Summation iBlaze customers out there looking for a replacement and this might meet your requirements. Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

Many market analysts covering enterprise search, archiving or other Info Gov technologies may have mixed feelings about search specialist Stephen E. Arnold and his completely unfiltered blog, Beyond Search. Mr. Arnold seems to have a positive disdain for the products and opinions published by what he calls the ‘azure chip’ consulting-analyst firms. Luckily for eDJ Group, we were too young and focused on the eDiscovery market segment during our tilt at those same institutional windmills to attract his attention and frequently caustic commentary with our research reports and perspective. Secretly, I always admired his style, even when I did not agree with Mr. Arnold’s conclusions. His blog rehashing Gartner’s 2014 “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search” is positively peppered with pithy counterpoints and observations. Retroactive criticism of a firm’s mystical square or wave is kind of like watching early reruns of the Daily Show, amusing but dated and out of context. These ranking visualizations are a good indicator of the competitors who have the funds and/or maturity to pay for a sufficient block of ‘analyst days’ to market their tailored messages to the captive analysts. Dig through the suits by ZL Technologies or NetScout for fun background. In the end, analysts publish opinions and I still believe that they are entitled to them, however arbitrary or biased they may be. It is the consumers’ responsibility to winnow the wheat from the chaff. I hope that you enjoy Mr. Arnold’s blog as much as I did. His unfiltered perspective helps remind me why we left the ‘market analyst’ field to resume full time consulting.

kCura’s Relativity has dominated the hosted review market. But when EVERYONE has Relativity, how can service providers differentiate themselves beyond the race to the lowest $/GB? Think back just a couple years to when Clearwell seemed to own the channel market. Clearwell seized the consumer brand recognition and national service providers quickly had certified Clearwell PMs running searches and supporting small reviews. kCura captured that same brand recognition with a new level of scalability and review usability that gave legal process outsourcing (LPO) providers like DTI a non-proprietary platform to host large, multi-party reviews. DTI has invested heavily in Relativity (creating a custom redaction tool and being a Relativity Best in Service Orange partner). I am sure that DTI is not walking away from that investment and all those hosted cases. However, DTI is expanding their ipro partnership to offer PC/TAR review hosted on ipro Eclipse. Why would DTI offer TWO review platforms with CAAT powered TAR? I am guessing that ipro’s ‘all in’ pricing and new workflow automation are a strong motivation. Customers are tired of the analytic sticker shock (and yes, I am still seeing $200/GB fees for CAAT analytics). They want predictable costs and ‘one click’ processing. It will be interesting to watch the other big national players to see if they too expand their review platform options.

Australian Vound software is offering a version of their Intella ECA/investigation tool with a 10 GB/case volume cap for $99. If their Solution Comparison Chart feels a bit redundant, it is. The only real difference that I could see in versions is about whether it is a solo desktop or a shared discovery platform with multiuser access. All the other versions are just volume caps and packages. So what does Intella do? Process, search and investigative review of collected ESI. Sounds a lot like where Nuix started out, an Australian forensic tool built for volume and speed. Maybe my friend Craig Ball spotted other up-and-coming Australian eDiscovery tools suitable for his EDna Challenge while he was down there recently. In the US market, we seem to have lost affordable desktop ECA tools in favor of enterprise class processing platforms with hefty price tags. The low entry Ipro Eclipse SE offer took me back to the old Summation iBlaze suite that allowed my clients to run small matters without a dongle or having to worry about billing back $/GB charges. The big boys may have the marketing money to buy their way into an analyst’s mystical diagram, but more nimble players are starting to bring right sized solutions to the SMB market for affordable and reasonable eDiscovery functionality. Keep’em coming and I will keep telling it as I see it.

Palantir has been on my radar for a couple years after spending an hour at their LTNY booth. They have neat toys and a much higher level of sophistication regarding the practical applications of their visualizations and analytics than most start-ups. They throw around customer success stories from well known pharma and financial names along with ‘un-named’ government agencies. Their market valuations have shot through the roof since 2009, hitting $9B (yep, BILLION) at the end of 2013, $15B at the end of 2014 and now $20B in just seven months. If they are that successful, why are they still taking rounds of funding? If they want to play in the eDiscovery space, why not just buy up key IP from small players and produce a COTS eDiscovery platform that actually works in a large enterprise environment with their petty cash? The hype and tech mystique around Palantir remind me of Autonomy in their hayday. My only hope is that all those “failure is not an option” secret customers provide the Palantir team the motivation and funding to actually deliver on all the eye candy. The market has been hungry for a practical analytic platform that can tackle the diversity and scale of today’s corporate ESI.

As my 2014 analytics research demonstrated, analytics has become a marketing buzz word like ‘smart’, ‘intelligent’ or ‘predictive’ to imply new technology to make something easier or better. Press releases like “Mitratech Launches Certified Legal Analytics Partner Program; HBR Consulting Earns First Certification” make me ask hard questions like: “What does this actually mean?” – “What is legal analytics in Mitratech speak?” – “What does certification mean to customer? Guarantees? Standards?” I think you get the idea. My take after digging through the release and Mitratech’s public material is that Mitratech has a consulting partnership with HBR to help customers use their dashboard and reports. I get this and frankly Mikki and I do a lot of similar technology enablement projects following up on solution design and RFP engagements. Good for Mitratech, HBR and their customers. But it is not ‘Certified Legal Analytics’ in my book (based on public materials). Everyone wants to work smarter and needs analytic tools to visualize relationships, trends, clusters, differentials, averages, etc. Providers will insist that dynamic reports and dashboards featuring charts and graphs check this functional box. Maybe they are right. But we have checked that same box using Excel, Access and customer SQL apps for decades. Show me something new.

With all the VC money flowing into the eDiscovery market right now, why are providers, companies and firms cutting experienced practitioners? The combination of a large professional network, accessibility and independence puts me high on many people’s call list when they land on the Reduction In Force (RIF) list. The last month has had my Inbox bombarded with a wave of long term friends hitting the job market at the same time as I am seeing $400+ million in investor capital injected into our market. I get the energy company legal departments downsizing to show theoretical savings, even when I bet that they are spending MORE on outside services from case budgets to cover the lost headcount. I do not mind the time to mentor, make connections and review resumes. Others have helped me when I made my many transitions between law enforcement, law firm, provider, corporate, analyst and back to consultant. We should all remember those who found even one opportunity when it counted and pay it forward. As for the eDiscovery market, I believe we are experiencing a long delayed maturity catharsis in providers and consumers. Firm partners and corporate counsel have demonstrated a remarkable recalcitrance in the face of new methods, technologies and billing models. Many have clung to treating ESI review like 1980’s paper discovery. While outside investors see the maturation of eDiscovery as proof that it is time to get in the game, adaption to a mature, efficient business process requires massive reorganization for both providers and their clients. That puts good professionals on the street looking for their next employer. If you have found yourself suddenly unemployed, use that free time to catch up on market and send me a blog. I am happy to publish it and get your name out there IF it is genuine, relevant and entertaining – like I try to be. And if you are looking for an experienced eDiscovery professional who has worked with me at some point in my 25+ year journey, shoot me the job description. eDJ is not a placement agency and I don’t give recommendations/connections to folks unless I have worked with them.

Stephen E. Arnold caught this early (2007) Palantir blog entry attempting to explain what Palantir does (or did from a systems engineer’s perspective) to interview candidates. Although this is incredibly dated, the explanation of the functional components of ‘analysis’ and the human role in them still has merit in light of our eDiscovery relevance challenge. Worth a fast read. Here is my extracted interpretations:Three core disciplines for large data set analysis: