Monthly Archives: January 2024

LDiscovery LLC (AlphaLit|FlashData|RenewData|Turnstone) is the latest frankenvendor to announce another acquisition of a regional player, Credence Corporation. We seem to be hitting the tipping point in the market where regional or single shop providers without a unique value proposition (tech, licensing or boutique services) must die on the vine or join one of the national provider Borg’s. ESI processing and hosting prices are steadily dropping as these conglomerates leverage efficiencies of scale on these commoditized services. If you have not conducted an open RFP recently, you should. Mikki and myself are frequently surprised to find legacy pricing and terms in current invoices when we do assessments and strategic planning for new clients. I am no fan of the pricing limbo game, especially when I see buyers resorting to shuttle bidding. “Well, ProviderX will do that for $50/GB. How low can you go?” Volume based, commoditized services devalue quality and keep the market addicted to just-in-time buying models. Corporate buyers should invest in their provider partners with managed service contracts that reward quality and results over short term profits.

Symantec is completely out of the enterprise info management game. In 2004, the software giant acquired Veritas for $13 billion in stock. I joined the product management team in 2006 during the golden years of rapid expansion. A recession and increasingly cloud based market kept the ‘Veritas’ segment revenue flat at roughly $2.6 billion. So Carlyle Group and the Singapore sovereign wealth fund G.I.C. have now paid a roughly 3X multiple for the newly spun off Veritas. Makes you wonder if the Symantec board had this in mind before the spin out. I am sure that major Symantec shareholders will ask those hard questions, probably through their attorneys. I still believe that the enterprise tech unit has the IP and internal talent to bring a real Information Governance solution to the market if they can break through the development log jams that plague most global technology providers. Good luck guys.

Although discovery on ESI sources classified as “The Internet of Things” are generally edge case scenarios, Bill Kellermann’s perspective on the recent Wired stories on hacking car infotainment systems is an excellent read.

My blog on the potential for a battle of the eDiscovery Borgs (consolidated national providers) sparked a fast and rather harsh perspective from Andy Wilson (Logikcull CEO). “When frightened, the herd naively rallies together as one to fend off the thirsty, ferocious, and evolved/mutated predator from plucking each doomed prey from the pack.”As a market innovator counting on disruptive pricing models, I can see why Andy views most vendors as herd animals. Instead of viewing the Borgs as predators, I see them as the last refuge for small and mid-tier vendors too addicted to the sweet profit margins generated by immature $/GB customers. The early EDD vendors had to be rough, feral omnivores to survive in a legal community that did not even acknowledge email as evidence until it was printed. Yes, I can recall arguments with a general counsel who said something like, “We have never produced an electronic file and they are not ‘documents’ on my watch.” Points to any colleagues who can privately name that GC.

I participated in an ACEDES Metro New York Chapter 15 minute podcast by Joseph Bartolo (Kiersted) and Bradley Schaffel (Wilmer Hale) today. I will add a link when it is published to the regional or national ACEDES sites. They are aiming at 15-20 interviews covering ACEDES eDiscovery members, law firm lit support and other subject matter experts like myself. The series is pretty open format with the following topic questions and my answer points below.

More than 100 CaseTrack customers were essentially bought by Mitratech for an undisclosed price. These customers will have “a clear and straightforward path to upgrade to Mitratech’s award-winning enterprise legal and contracts management platforms, eCounsel, TeamConnect, and GettingContractsDone, as determined by each client’s individual needs and preferences” according to the press release. In just a couple of months, Mitratech has shrunk the case management market space and by my calculations has grown their client base from just over 300 to 750 – a 250% jump in 2 months when you include the Bridgeway acquisition. My quick revenue searches found that Mitratech was estimated at roughly $50M, while unconfirmed estimates report Bridgeway was $10-25M and EAG (CaseTrack) was $5-10M. I have to commend the Mitratech management team for not playing coy with CaseTrack’s customers like they have with Bridgeway’s eCounsel’s customers. When you acquire competitive products, only one can survive in the long run. I never understood executives who pretended that they did not already know which product was slated for the dumpster before they decided on the acquisition multiple (cost). When you buy a company, you value it for a number of factors:

Now that I am no longer wearing a market analyst hat or doing formal paid briefings, I love getting feedback from the providers on my blog perspectives. Mitratech management responded promptly to my Pacman analogy blog with this quote, “Mitratech is continuing development on both the eCounsel and TeamConnect platforms as our flagship products for the corporate enterprise and SMB markets, respectively.” So their strategy seems to be TeamConnect for the big enterprise market and eCounsel for the SMB consumers. They also indicated that they have invested in migration tools to eCounsel for both Lawtrac (2014 acquisition) and CaseTrack. Mitratech may indeed have privately communicated their long term plans to phase out Lawtrac to existing customers, but that message in not apparent on Mitratech’s website and they are still advertising recent Lawtrac sales. How many matter management offerings with different code bases can exist in one company? My opinion remains that in the long run, you can only thrive when you have a single platform underlying your offerings to different market segments. That opinion aside, it takes years to migrate and spin down an acquired product without burning customers and your reputation. Mitratech has done a better job of communicating their intentions than the vast majority of providers that I have covered over the years. The important message to prospects and customers seems to be that Mitratech is focusing on TeamConnect and eCounsel development now that they own a much larger share of the matter management micro-market. eDJ will be pulling Lawtrac and CaseTrack off of our RFP materials and hoping that we get some more cloud based start ups to fill those spots soon. We like competition and options for our clients.

I closed and uploaded our 2015 PC-TAR Adoption survey results to the site today. My analytics adoption research last year helped to push the 2014 survey participation (n=136). Even with a smaller participation (n=27) for the 2015 update survey you can see a 100%+ growth rate (graphs below) in participants who had actively used PC-TAR. That is a pretty incredible adoption surge rate. I would posit that this statistical surge is more about consumer awareness than an actual 100%+ increase in matters using analytics. Thanks to everyone who took the 2015 update survey and I have just uploaded a quick two question poll on matter management functions that you can take to get access to all raw survey results. That’s right folks, we don’t obfuscate the results by restricting access to the complete metrics, unlike the majority of ‘analysts’ and ‘education’ providers.

If you are counting, Xerox Litigation Services now offers THREE different review platforms to clients with their announcement. My apology for the LTN link, but the XLS website is so confusing that I could not find the actual press release on an open page. If you have not been following XLS, they started with their proprietary OmniX™ review software and then acquired Viewpoint a few years back for an all-in-one solution option. Now they serve up Relativity, the current eDiscovery golden child brand. So how many review platform options does a provider need to compete?

eDJ’s conversion back to full time consulting essentially took Mikki and myself off the conference circuit last year. Browning Marean’s open conversation format for the Today’s General Counsel Exchange has always been one of my favorites. I am glad that I found the time to make the event. It reminded me why all eDiscovery professionals need to fight for educational time and budget. I respect the event principal of ‘protected anonymity’ too much to attribute quotes, so consider the blurbs below my highlights. Day one kicks off with a round of introductions and ‘what am I looking for’ from ALL attendees. That’s right, you cannot hide in the back in this format. This intro session usually takes an hour and has some of the most interesting content from my perspective. The agenda rolled on and BYOD quickly derailed the IG session. Time for me to refresh my BYOD surveys and research.