Monthly Archives: January 2024

If you can get to the ipro Innovations 2016 conference in Phoenix later this month, I will be doing a session on key eDiscovery trends on the 27th. This is one of my favorite user conferences and a great excuse for me to socialize while visiting great clients based in Phoenix. Unlike LTNY and others, admission to the sessions and social events are free. For CLE hungry attorneys out there, ipro has teamed up with the Sedona Conference to present a number of CLE-eligible sessions by several excellent speakers such as M. James Daley, David Shonka and Ken Withers.

Join me and Tammy Doss from Ipro to discuss my research findings on PC/TAR adoption tomorrow. Sorry for the slowdown in perspective recently, but back from my annual dive trip and working on some new blogs. State of the Industry: TAR & Analytics End of Year ReportDec. 10, 2015 at 1:00 p.m. CST

If you missed my webinar today, I believe that the recording will soon be available on the EDRM and Ipro websites. My advance apology for the neighbor’s car alarm that cut off my last interview story at the end of the hour. Those of us who work from home understand that neighbors, construction, mailmen and worse create unexpected background interruptions. Never one to just leave an audience hanging, I thought I would finish the point here.

If you put off registering, you dodged the $50 late penalty that ALM used to bump up early registration this year. It vanished from the event site as the December 1 deadline passed. It will still cost you $99 to access the Exhibit hall and keynotes if you do not register before the show, so don’t procrastinate. Mikki and myself will be escorting clients on shopping missions, briefing with providers and generally catching up with friends old and new at the social events. I am running late this year filling my conference schedule, so shoot me an email if you would like to talk shop.

Enjoy my ad hoc observations and opinions on last year’s market and the trends that I am watching:• Dramatic, transparent M&A activity. >$2.5 B compared to $92M in 2014. Even if you remove $1.6B from acquisitions of Kofax and Aderant as being eDiscovery adjacent, we still had 800-1000% investment growth. • Massive, slow migration from enterprise data centers to outsourced private cloud, Office 365, Google Docs and other SaaS/IaaS solutions. More

Fast congratulations on Babs Deacon being named Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Training & Education for Venio Systems. It is always nice to see former eDJ co-workers and partners doing well in the world.

It has been a busy week of RFP demos and meetings. Yes, I will try to write up my impressions on the finalist demos, but only after the client has a decision. Two things happened yesterday that got me thinking about how easy it is to get technology tunnel vision while dealing with critical cases or clients. A very sharp exec told me something along the lines of, “I don’t know how you keep up with the latest tech. A RFP is outdated before it is filled out.” Classic fox hole syndrome for eDiscovery professionals who are constantly under assault in high pressure cases. They literally do not have the bandwidth to poke their heads out of their safe place and evaluate new offerings on a regular basis. I lived in that same fox hole during my days in the corporate hot seat. As a consultant I have to devote serious time to reading press releases, briefing with providers and conducting my own market research to keep up with the changes. This kind of time is not practical for most lit support managers in Fortune 1000 corporations or AmLaw 200 firms. They are just too busy. This syndrome afflicts providers as well. Sales reps MUST believe in their offerings to be effective. Providers have limited direct contact with competitor products and generally only hear about competitor services when something has gone wrong.

My thanks to all of our participating members who have taken surveys and supported our ongoing efforts to keep up with our dynamic market. I have closed the three question survey on eDiscovery buyer priorities and published the raw survey results. If you have not taken a survey recently, you can get immediate access by taking my new 2016 Multi-matter eDiscovery survey to upgrade your account to participating member for premium access. A couple fast comments on the survey results:

I got a bit side tracked while preparing my deck on 2016 eDiscovery Trends for the upcoming Ipro Innovations. I wanted a good graphic to visualize the customer buying frenzy happening as the service providers consolidate into global powerhouses and niche concierge shops. I maintain spreadsheets tracking eDiscovery/IG M&A activity (based on Rob Robinson’s excellent Complex Discovery list, the Fenwick M&A and my own search engines). So the question was which of the global service providers has acquired the most pieces of the eDiscovery market pie? In the last year, DTI definitely leads the pack with publicly disclosed acquisitions, but if you look back to my earliest market data (2010), Huron consistently absorbed small consulting shops for their talent until it was eaten by Consilio last year. So enjoy the graphic below and I hope to see you in sunny Phoenix later this month for a fun session.

I was glad to see my friend Craig Ball update his EDna Challenge on Friday. For faithful readers that missed the original small scale eDiscovery for Everybody scenario published almost seven years ago, it consisted of 50,000 mixed native electronic documents, scanned images and a $1,000 budget. Craig has raised the bar to 100,000 files occupying 12 GB for $5,000. The renewed challenge coincides with a recent RFP engagement that started as a small volume proactive ECA usage case that I shopped to 19 providers. You might say that I have a good viewpoint on small matter eDiscovery solution options, whether on-premise, hosted or SaaS. The primary difference between the new EDna scenario and my client’s requirements is the potential duration. The mythical Edna only has 90 days to review and produce, whereas my typical clients expect to need live access to collections for at least three years. In my opinion, it is the outdated and unreasonable monthly hosting charges that put eDiscovery out of reach for the majority of the SMB market. We (Mikki and myself) have always considered RFP pricing and specific bids to be confidential, so without explicit permission from my recent bidders I will keep my analysis more general. So what portion of RFP respondents could have met the EDna Challenge? The answer may surprise you.