Monthly Archives: January 2024

In my last opinion piece, I wondered if the eDiscovery news/marketing outlets would ever cover the fight between our largest global service borgs, DTI/Epiq and Kroll/Ldiscovery. I was happy to see the relatively unfiltered Above the Law article by Kelly Twigger yesterday. Ms. Twigger did not whitewash or bury any of the rather lurid accusations. Indeed, she highlighted the irony of top eDiscovery professionals using DTI issued devices to allegedly negotiate their quartet’s $24 million bounty for taking DTI trade secrets and customers to LDiscovery. Bravo. I wonder if this will cost them any DTI or KrolLDiscovery marketing dollars?

I have always thought of Lighthouse eDiscovery as a stealth player in the eDiscovery market. In fact, I believe this is their first public merger/acquisition since Spire’s $30 million investment back in 2015. We never really covered them as market analysts in that 2008-2015 time period. Maybe their focus on developing corporate dedicated service relationship over chasing the big cases kept them under the radar. Now that they have won a couple of recent RFP’s for my own corporate clients, I have a much better appreciation for their capabilities and GTO strategy. Discovia seems to have a more traditional focus on matters and law firms. They are both Relativity shops, though Discovia seems to have partnered with some kCura alternatives such as IPRO and Brainspace. So how could this impact their existing customers?

My recent research on the impact of merger and acquisitions in the eDiscovery market hit a nerve with many of you. One of the more interesting rumors that surfaced was that LexisNexis was “not taking new Concordance contracts” and not offering any alternatives. Two years ago I blogged on how successful technology like LAW seemed to languish after being acquired by global technology companies such as LexisNexis. I followed up that rumor by putting in an online purchase request. In past RFPs, I have gotten a call from a sales rep within a day at the most. This time no response. I asked around at the Ingenious Retreat last week and found at least one peer who had heard the same rumor from a friend working at LexisNexis. None of this is credible or confirmed news, but it reinforces the need to monitor your technology and service providers. Active tech companies should be releasing new versions or features on a regular basis to stay competitive. No matter how many copies of the old Summation iBlaze are still running in firms, it is no longer a supported product. Keeping client data or work content on it is like an airline running critical flight operations on a Windows 98 server vulnerable to WannaCry. I have no doubt that the LexisNexis team have some kinds of plan for Concordance desktop customers. The whole company seems to be phasing out software in favor of cloud services, so I am recommending that my clients keep that in mind when deciding if they are going to renew Concordance support or look at migration costs.

I got a call from a peer asking me whether Microsoft had improved the export performance or functionality in the latest release. Any excuse to test new toys is a good excuse. When Microsoft first released the eDiscovery Center to meet demands for search and export of Exchange and SharePoint (2010) content, I performed both performance and validation testing. Corporate clients have always needed defensible, practical preservation and collection functionality for their primary unstructured ESI platforms. Forensic collection tools required training and technical skills, especially with the changes in ESI formats, APIs and versions. Most corporations just used the Exchange Administration Console (EAC) to dump entire mailboxes down to PST files and manually downloaded document libraries from SharePoint. The original eDiscovery Center was replaced in the 2013/2016 releases for the current Security & Compliance Center. Office 365 Enterprise E3 ($20/month) customers can search, hold in place, export and E5 ($35/month) customers even use the Advanced eDiscovery functionality based on Equivio for analytics and review of moderately sized collections. So what did my fast tests find?

Sorry for slacking off on blogs while I have been wrestling with tricky matters and systems. I am stealing a moment to carefully report some potential search and export issues with the new Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. Normally I would not write about any potential eDiscovery system issue until I fully understood the behavior and gave the provider time to debug the problem. Because the vast majority of my clients and readers are already experimenting with the new Compliance Center for holds, searches and collections, I felt compelled to at least raise a yellow warning flag of caution. Reasonable quality control steps in your eDiscovery workflow may catch the export issues we encountered, but they would not catch the inconsistent search results in our scenario without validation level confirmation tests. Before I detail the anonymized scenarios, it is important to reaffirm that circumstances have prevented us from more than minimal testing or even opening a Microsoft support ticket yet, though that is in progress. I was not able to reproduce this behavior in my own test O365 environment. All of this means that the issues may be related to corrupt data or other unique client variable – i.e. not relevant to your environment. Scenarios and behavior:

For industry insiders who have been following the fight over four top Epiq sales reps recruited by LDiscovery, the various matters were consolidated to the southern US district court of New York, which issued a motion denying DTI’s motion for injunctive relief. To ‘mansplain’ from my own non-attorney perspective, Judge Rakoff’s 30 page opinion seems to drop the hammer on the legal basis of many of DTI’s claims, while confirming the basic sequence of events. All of us in eDiscovery should know that things are rarely black and white when large amounts of money are at stake. Here are a couple of my favorite take aways (remember, these are perspective from a non-attorney):

Life as a consultant means following client trends and hot topics. This year has pushed me to get more hands on with client provider and invoice management systems as some of my favorite clients work their way down the eDiscovery lifecycle. Provider billing practices and the lack of supervision by retained counsel never cease to astound me. Clients negotiate hard for competitive processing and hosting rates only to discover that their PM and miscellaneous tech charges had gone through the roof. They saved money on the data, but lost the budget as both provider and firm burned hours planning, managing and training the review. I am the last person to discount the value of a sharp PM and lead paralegal guiding contract reviewers through complex relevance and issue coding. But is it ethical for providers and counsel to bill for their personnel to learn the technology before using it? Too many times I have dug into large bills only to determine that personnel had been put in the position to ‘learn on the job’. Even before the bills, I get red flags when key players start to push back on proposed tech for more ‘traditional’ systems. Our industry makes it hard for professionals to admit that they don’t know every new system. No one wants to tell the attorneys ‘no’ or I don’t know. If you are an expert in one collection or review platform, you can probably figure out how to run the competitive packages. While this is true, is it ethical to bill your client for the time you wasted digging through manuals and watching downloaded training videos?

LegalTech New York came first. It dominated the software/marketing development cycle. The vast majority of major version releases were timed for maximum impact at the show. My clients scheduled their budgets and RFP projects around LegalTech. My eDJ Matrix was created to categorize and track providers at LTNY to support my insane briefing and demo schedule in those early years. But has ILTACON become more relevant to consumers and providers? I have been tracking LTNY exhibitor and sponsor numbers since 2008. Although I have been a regular speaker at ILTA and ARMA, I neglected to track their exhibitor/sponsor numbers as they gained momentum. My return to solo consulting gigs has pretty much taken me off the speaker circuit. My first briefing requests for ILTACON 2017 rolled in and peaked my curiosity as to how sponsorship compared to LTNY. Wow.

Seconds into a provider briefing, I got hit with, “Did you see that Microsoft is ending legal holds?” based on a blog by Tony Redmond in Petri IT Knowledgebase. I work hard to keep up with my feeds and search engines, but this one slipped by me. A bit of digging made it clear that Microsoft is just deprovisioning the legal search and hold capability in the Exchange Administrative Center (EAC) and the SharePoint Admin Center to push Office 365 tenants to the new Security and Compliance Center portal. Your existing holds and incremental searches will continue to be effective, but you will not be able to create new searches in these portals. The disappointing news is that as of this date Microsoft does not seem to be providing a migration mechanism for early adopter corporate legal departments with extensive holds or active compliance searches. Migrations are always tricky and I am betting that I will have to QC and sign off on some in the next year.

The consolidation of the eDiscovery niche market continues and venture capital money seems to be gushing. If you back track some of recent acquisitions (Discovia by Lighthouse eDiscovery and inData by Ipro), you will notice that they both took VC money shortly before the announcements. OpenText has a long history of acquiring software with a strongly established customer base. In this case OpenText put down $240M for Guidance. That is a roughly 2X multiple of Guidance’s $115M expected revenue (operating at a net loss). That is well below the target 4-6X revenue multiple that most technology firms seek, but Guidance Software is not your typical startup.