Monthly Archives: January 2024

With so many of our global corporate clients moving to Office 365, I follow Microsoft announcements and releases closely. Buried in the SharePoint Server 2016 comments by Bill Baer, senior technical product manager, was the capability to perform “proximity scans” of SharePoint documents for PII, PHI and other query criteria to take actions. This functionality includes 51 “out of the box” templates for SSNs, CC #’s, etc. for Office 365 and on premise SharePoint implementations with the latest release pack. I fought to put this kind of ‘auto categorization’ functionality into enterprise archive products back in my own product management days. We saw little uptake because customers were not ready to ‘own’ classification and taxonomy. Maybe Microsoft has waited long enough for the customers to catch up to the technology. What is fascinating is how MS views this functionality as ‘eDiscovery’ vs. information governance. In the long run I believe that they are indeed one and the same thing, but we are talking decades down the road. MS has some very sharp people tackling eDiscovery in their legal department. That expertise may not have disseminated through the PM or PMM teams as yet. Maybe I am just being too picky. After all, the real solution to eDiscovery burden lies in the ESI lifecycle.

Recommind has always played the brand and marketing game better than many eDiscovery players. What started as a fast (and erroneous) blog based on my search engine serving up a 2012 video interview of Recommind CEO Bob Tennant ended up in the realization that Bob has just handed the reigns over to Zantaz veteran Steve King. A sharp reader caught my date error and blew away my original assumption that Recommind's revenue had been flat since 2012. Or did it? Recommind heavily promoted their rapid revenue growth in the 2009-2012 period taking them from $14.7M up to $70.5M as one of the first predictive coding offerings on the market. The steady stream of press releases giving hard growth and revenue numbers dry up in 2012 and the company took $15M in funding by the end of 2013. My interpretation is that Recommind rode the PC/TAR wave and sales to early adopters (especially government agencies) before losing momentum by investing in the IG market too early. Now they have refocused on a SaaS Go To Market model just as many hosted review companies are floundering with corporate customers demanding an alternative to volume based pricing. Newly crowned CEO Steve King has a solid track record and experience with SaaS. Maybe he can guide Recommind through their conversion. I will be watching and trying hard to not jump to conclusions (especially those based on outdated information).

This headline scrolled through my feeds, “CACI wins $102M contract for litigation services.” So who is CACI and how did they beat out ‘market square leaders’ such as Epiq, DTI, D4, FTI and others with ample analyst budgets? CACI ranks 28th in the 2013 Top 100 Contractors Report, 12 slots below Booz Allen and 9 below HP. These are overall IT-Security service leviathans cruising the market depths for the big government scores while familiar sharks and killer whales battle for corporate and law firm victims. CACI does indeed do investigations and litigation support. They have an accredited forensics lab and their own cloud hosting platform (OMEGA) that stresses Section 508 security compliance for “specific collections” to supplement the usual tools – Relativity, Clearwell, Equivio, iCONECT, Axcelerate and Summation. This announcement is a good reminder that our view of the eDiscovery market can be a bit myopic. We live in the midst of the marketing trees and have to climb a government mountain to see the trees in proportion.

Corporate legal should keep an eye out for new Microsoft releases that may impact data sources on legal hold or native eDiscovery capabilities. Many of my ‘Good Karma’ inquiries start off with something like, “Our IT says that we don’t need ProductX because Microsoft’s latest release now does that functionality.” This may even be true since Microsoft introduced the SharePoint eDiscovery Center depending on your workflow and requirements. After a fast blog based on the early SP2016 release comments, I have spent hours digging through Microsoft and outside materials regarding the new SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview made available recently. ‘IT Preview’ is Microsoft speak for beta release designed for test environments. The full release has been pushed back till next year and there is no upgrade path from this beta to the final version. So what new functionality might have eDiscovery impact for corporate legal and their outside teams?

With the announcement of Roper Industries acquisition of practice management software provider Aderant for $675M, my rough tally of publicly disclosed investments in the eDiscovery/Info Gov market space hit $2.2B with a billion this week. Rob Robinson keeps a good chronological list of M&A activity here. A couple interesting notes for your consideration. 2014 had 34 announcements, but only quantified roughly $92M in press releases. I know that unquantified acquisitions of familiar private players such as Applied Discovery, TeamConnect and Falcon Discovery represent several times that total, but 2015’s higher rate of disclosure demonstrates more mature, outside investment in our market. We all discount HP’s 2011 $11B Autonomy acquisition as an aberration in the market, but 2015 shows that eDiscovery is slowly integrating into the global enterprise technology/services market space. Although Aderant does not publish their revenue, Roper’s bullish projection of $125M in 2016 revenue for Aderant leads me to ballpark their 2015 revenue around $100M. That give this deal a 6-7x multiple, which beats most deals that I analyzed in 2014. Nice to see the multiples creep back up and enough M&A to justify the $15B+ market estimates batted around between the ivory tower analyst shops.

With Relativity Fest in full gear, kCura has given us the first look at the new dynamic dashboards in Relativity 9.3 (GA release next month). Look forward to a full eDJ Brief late next week after the kCura team have recovered from the love fest. For now, here are my quick reactions:

Expect a barrage of press release headlines claiming triumph from Gartner’s new “Critical Capabilities for E-Discovery Software” ranking report. FTI is happy to furnish you a copy in exchange for your contact info rather than pay the $1,995 list price. The eDiscovery market has always been too broad to be realistically covered in one ‘Magic Diagram’ by either of the traditional analyst firms. That is why eDJ Group decided to focus on detailed market analysis of actual buying categories instead of over-simplified scatter graphs from the earliest days. Gartner’s new report ranks qualified providers (read analyst clients) in three eDiscovery usage cases by different weightings of rankings in six ‘critical capabilities’. Surprisingly, Gartner has actually published the raw and calculated scores along with the provider qualification criteria. My time as a ‘market analyst’ made me a serious skeptic of most analyst reports and ranking diagrams. It is nice to see a big firm make small steps towards the ideal of transparent, granular analysis aligned with consumer purchasing requirements.

More than 50% of consumers (N=75) in my 2014 Analytic Adoption survey paid on a volume basis on top of basic processing/hosting charges. Content Analyst’s CAAT analytic engine has dominated the OEM market and generally required these volume based charges to their service provider channel partners. Last December iCONECT customers got to give away CAAT based analytics for pro bono matters. Today they went a step further and eliminated the analytics upcharge for all XERA customers and service channel partners. They are not the first Content Analyst OEM to do this, as Ipro made a similar ‘all in’ pricing announcement for Eclipse customers last December. We have seen clients push for unlimited analytics licensing in RFP engagements selecting preferred providers or managed service contracts, whereas it still seems rare in reactive, ad hoc matters. This has to put pressure on providers locked into volume based OEM license agreements. Does it have anything to do with Content Analyst’s foray into direct-to-customer SaaS sales of Cerebrant? Probably not. But it does confirm my belief that analytics are a requirement for any competitive eDiscovery platform.

I was scanning my search engine feeds and noticed a common theme dominating the usual product press releas, caselaw and Relativity certification announcements. I have always insisted that any sponsored webinars focus on real content, but I am now seeing more formal educational material being generated directly by providers. kCura’s launch of the Relativity Academic Partner Program at Relativityfest really caught my interest. According to the announcement, nearly 50 law schools have already signed up to get access to software, technical infrastructure and instructional materials. There is so much potential benefit and harm for provider driven content being delivered by formal academic institutions that it boggles the mind. I remember early debates at EDRM about these kinds of programs and frustration that we could not get the resources allocated. The more than $2.2 Billion (yes, I capitalize that B) in 2015 investment in the eD/IG market certainly is trickling down to the next generation of law students and technical colleges. California’s new requirements for eDiscovery technical competence and other compliance challenges (EU Data Protection) are raising the bar for counsel and giving marketer’s an audience. Let’s hope that the content is solid and peer reviewed to remove potential bias.

About this time last year I wrapped up research to get insight into real world analytics adoption because I could not find any other objective market data. We ran a short survey (with some flaws) and followed up with roughly 30 interviews across eDJ subscriber groups – corporate, law firm and provider. The 2014 analysis report and survey results were published last November and can be downloaded by members who have participated in a survey within the last month. I ran an update survey (with 5 better questions) in June and published the early results without analysis. When the HALSM group picked analytics as a speaking topic from my list of recent research, I decided that the new survey results deserved another round of interviews to go deeper on the uptick in usage. So I have reopened the survey and will be conducting short interviews up for the next couple of weeks. I don’t expect the trends to change with the additional respondents, but things do move very quickly in eDiscovery, so it will be interesting to see if we can double the data with the interviews.