The final result was an initial list of 543 sites that met my fairly strict requirements. That means that almost 95% of sites were only vaguely related to our industry or practice. No wonder webinars, conferences and training organizations are getting decent attendance. If you do not already know what you are looking for, your odds of finding it are pretty slim or you are in for a lot of surfing.
“What positive impact?” you ask. It seems that when times get tough, good companies get busy and the others go out of business. Every booth that I visited trotted out new features, licensing options and a better overall understanding of the customer’s needs. The economic pressure cooker seems to have sounded the wake up call to service and technology providers alike. What impressed me the most was that everyone was able to express a consistent value proposition message. Many still have technology flaws and poor usability, but they are becoming aware of the user’s context and can present their offerings within some kind of usage scenario.
Barry Murphy called out 2010 as “the year of ECA”. Certainly those three letters were found on almost every booth, even if the exhibitors did not exactly agree on what that entails. The majority of the processing players seem to consider canned reports and inventory functionality to provide ECA support. But the important trend is that everyone is looking to provide upstream decision support.
One of the hot topics at LegalTech 2010 was cloud computing. “The cloud,” as we like to refer to it, promises to offer cost savings and other efficiencies – in an economy obsessed with cost reduction, the buzz around the cloud is not surprising.
This year I tried an experiment in my continual quest to gather as much information from the Discovery Maze (LNTY Exhibit Halls) as possible. The experiment was a bust, but there were lessons in why and how it failed. The idea was to recruit corporate and firm managers and specialists with 5+ years experience to be ‘Secret Shoppers’ on the Exhibit Hall. This way I could try to reach more of the floor and everyone in the network would share their feedback on a set of secured web pages.
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-02-16 09:00:27 As corporate legal departments struggle to control costs, they are often shocked at the lack of transparency and standardization in eDiscovery software and service purchasing. Public corporations have long since created structured procurement processes managed by IT departments and business units. Because the legal service industry evolved from the copy and scanning providers selling [...]
While utility computing holds much promise, there are also examples of SaaS being used effectively in the eDiscovery market. EDD processors offer a web-based interface to case data. These interfaces provide varying levels of review functionality. When you think about it, hosted review has long been a staple of this market and the review platforms of vendors like CaseCentral, Kroll Ontrack, and Iron Mountain / Stratify are really SaaS applications.
One of the topics bouncing around LTNY was the new SaaS pricing of $100/GB/year for processing, hosting and review by Houston based Sfile Technology Corporation. In this world of hidden pricing, NDA wrapped RFPs and other hide-the-ball licensing games, Sfile is publishing their upfront pricing and undercutting the current market average of $300-500/GB by a huge margin. Aside from the usual belly-aching from other processing-hosting providers, I expected that most of my corporate and firm clients would be excited about the potential downward price pressure.
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.
Several recent blog posts and discussions on various industry listservs have raised interesting issues about the potential problems and benefits of consultants working for and with software and service providers. See John Heckman’s post ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway?’ as well as Seth Rowland’s ‘Sales vs Consulting – The Cost of Independence’ for some well developed criticisms of consultant’s who are compensated by the seller instead of the buyers. Steve Miller’s ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway? My Two Cents’ provides some counterpoints supporting vendor relationships for consultants. These opinions seem to originate from the software sales area instead of actual consulting on cases.