Monthly Archives: January 2024

In the weeks following LTNY 2010, I have tried to catch up on the demos and briefings that did not make it into my busy show schedule. I finally managed a look at the new i-Decision automated first pass review from the team at DiscoverReady. It got me thinking about the entire concept of automated relevance designation. Several years back, H5 introduced automated review to the market using their Hi-Q Platform™. Recommind’s Axcelerate, Equivio’s Relevance and now Xerox Litigation Services CategoriX also bring some flavor of automated categorization to the field. Having at least five serious products on the market tells me that customers are paying the relatively high per item or per GB rates to bypass a full manual review.

The long-rumored acquisition of Mimosa Systems by Iron Mountain is now official. This acquisition holds a lot of promise, in theory - boosting Iron Mountain's ability to satisfy expanding records management requirements, giving Iron Mountain both on-premise and hosted archiving capabilities, and complementing Iron Mountain's Stratify division. But, software is new territory for Iron Mountain and while the Mimosa technology is good, the company was not able to establish itself as a truly successful software company. This one will come down to timing and sales execution.

Any organization that ignores information lifecycle management from this point forward is stupid – plain and simple. To argue that eDiscovery is not a concern only categorizes an organization into the ostrich category. It’s time to get the heads out of the sand and start building out an infrastructure that supports finding and collecting potentially relevant information quickly and to manage the process for retaining and preserving this information.

As IT becomes more and more involved in eDiscovery software purchasing, the scalability and performance of tools will be important decision criteria. But, when every vendor claims to be the most scalable on the market, what should buyers do?

Anyone evaluating eDiscovery software is going to have a hard time finding a way to compare tools in an apples-to-apples fashion. And, even if we are to know how many servers these vendors are using to get the numbers they report, we know nothing about the make-up of the data corpus. It’s very different to process a bunch of Word documents than it is to process TBs of PST files.

In Part 1, we defined and looked at how automated document review has entered the eDiscovery market. Attenex and Stratify both encountered the same slow adoption and educational sales cycles when they brought concept clustering analytics to the hosted review market. Being on or over the cutting edge can be rough when you have a relatively conservative customer base. Counsel want strategic advantages without corresponding risks while corporations push for cost containment. In the midst of this pressure cooker, DiscoverReady has launched a new automated first pass review system called i-Decision™.

When we talk about metadata for native ESI, we are usually concerned about the Operating System (OS) fields that are kept in the File Allocation Table (FAT). Different OS formats support a wide variety of fields such as different dates, attributes, permissions and file name formats (long vs. short). These fields are not usually stored within the actual file and so are very vulnerable to alteration or complete loss when items are read or copied. Forensic collection is focused on preserving this ‘envelope’ information so that evidence can be authenticated and the context reconstructed in court. That is only half of the metadata story. Microsoft Office and other programs retain non-displayed information within the header and body of all common file types, especially with the adoption of the XML based Office 2007 file formats.

The legal community is just coming to grips with the implications of native files and their metadata. I like to think of this as the content vs. context of ESI or the letter vs. the envelope in communications. Parties and courts are still arguing about how to handle, track and present multiple copies of the same item collected from different locations. Now we move that content into a dynamic environment with multiple, simultaneous ‘custodians’ that may contain historical versions, associated commentary, workflow and more. It is any wonder that many corporations have tried to define restrictive acceptable usage policies and implement net filters to limit user access to Facebook, Twitter and more from the enterprise?

In Part 1, we explored changing face of internet and intranet collaborative communication platforms and the increased risks posed by outdated policies and technologies. My main concern over these systems is the unreasonable expectation that a typical corporate custodian could preserve relevant ESI stored in Sharepoint or another cloud based system. Despite recent rulings emphasizing written Hold Notification, most users simply do not have the tech savvy, rights or proper tools to either make a complete preservation copy or secure the items in place against expiry or accidents. That shifts the onus back onto Legal to effectively preserve these dynamic data sources.

The first two journal entries on autocoding definitely resonated with the market and generated a lot of on/offline responses. One of those responses was a call and subsequent briefing from my old colleagues at FTI Technology on their latest offering, FTI Acuity. [EDITOR’S NOTICE– Greg worked at Attenex prior to the FTI acquisition.] A quick visit to the FTI site leads one to believe that Acuity is just a packaged services-hosting offering with a fixed per-GB or per-Document pricing model that they term Integrated Document Review. DiscoverReady was one of the first Attenex partners to offer fixed-fee per document review pricing back in 2005. The FTI materials barely mention the new predictive coding and quality control functionality that has been added to the Ringtail-Patterns platform.