Monthly Archives: January 2024

With so many professionals newly drafted into the complex, dynamic eDiscovery world, there is an ever-increasing demand for educational resources (OLP, ALSP), conferences (ILTA, ARMA, LTNY, Georgetown Institute), associations and materials from authoritative bodies such as The Sedona Conference and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. Many years ago, George Socha and Tom Gelbmann (EDRM founders) began encouraging the participation of independent, corporate and law firm professionals with alternative membership options. I am happy to report that non-providers make up over half of the 2010 Metrics project when I stepped down as the project co-lead. All of this leads up to this week’s announced shift to an ‘EDRM Anniversary Membership Model’ for single or all project participation. The membership cost for an individual is just $200/year and $1,000/year for organizations with 10 or fewer employees. In consideration of the 2008-9 economic downturn and the consolidation in the eDiscovery market, EDRM will continue to waive the individual membership fees for anyone who has lost their job recently.

At the recent ILTA 2010 conference I managed to get briefed on quite a few new product offerings. I wanted to pass along the highlights quickly to keep them timely. I may follow up some of these snapshots with full deep dives, but I will stick to the high level takeaways. Let’s get right to it.IPRO is finally taking some strides toward integrating products into a single platform that share the Eclipse database backbone. They have released an ‘Early Data Assessment’ application named Allegro built on Windows Presentation Foundation for a dynamic, better interface and a completely new processing engine. IPRO conservatively estimates 250 GB per day on a laptop or up to 750 GB on a workstation, all without exploding or copying email or file containers. IPRO sells software, not appliances, so performance will vary with your hardware. Like many recent performance claims, the devil is in the details of the test collection and hardware. Providers seem to be very concerned with ingestion performance since NUIX broke the 1 TB per day threshold.

In order to keep my ILTA feedback as fresh as possible, I have decided to try a combined post that just pulls the highlights for a number of the providers that briefed me at the conference. I expect to follow up most of these highlights with a more in-depth piece after the full demo. I have pretty much given up on trying to do full product demonstrations at conferences. You just do not have the time to do them justice in the midst of the hustle and bustle. Nextpoint brings a true Saas/cloud offering to the market with their Trial Cloud, Discovery Cloud and Cloud Preservation web products based on Amazon web services. Their $25/GB/month flat pricing definitely challenges the established players and makes an interesting option for small firms or companies with matters below the usual hosting cost/benefit thresholds. My experience with raw internet transfer limitations says that Fedex will be making a lot of money for matters over 5 GB in size, but everyone seems to be used to shipping hard drives these days anyway.

Here is the last batch of takeaways from my briefings at the recent ILTA 2010. I have been able to schedule deep dives on some of the new offerings, so I hope to bring you more details on the new toys.

While pontificating on industry trends at ILTA, I joked that Fedex was the ultimate beneficiary of corporations that take their eDiscovery to the Cloud. Scant weeks later, my good friend Pete Pepiton at Mimecast responded to my ad hoc remark with the headline, “Fedex’s Profit Doubles”. We have had various Secure File Transfer Protocols for years, yet the practical bandwidth limitations of most internet transmissions have taught us not to try sending more than 5 GB of files via the web. In plain language terms, the web was just not designed for the kind of large file burst capacity transfers that typify an eDiscovery collection. There is a good discussion of these limits by Stacey Higginbotham here.

It’s always great to hear about interesting use-cases for eDiscovery technology, especially when those use-cases prove out benefits that go beyond just eDiscovery. During a recent briefing with Index Engines, the company told me that many customers are using the product for tape remediation initiatives. Essentially, these customers know that there is a ton of information sitting on backup tapes somewhere. This information is both costly to store (the tapes have to live somewhere) and risky – there is the risk that the tapes will have to be restored for eDiscovery (also not necessarily cheap).

When eDiscovery first hit the scene, many of us in the analyst community predicted that enterprise content management (ECM) vendors would ultimately be the big solution providers that win out. It seemed like records management would be the right way to proactively manage information for eDiscovery. But, a funny thing happened on the way to forum – ECM hasn’t yet won out. In fact, no one category of solution has yet to emerge as the big eDiscovery winner. But, a recent Greg Buckles comment on my article about eDiscovery technologies being applied to other use-cases really got me thinking about how our market is evolving.

eDiscoveryJournal has noted the consolidation taking place in the eDiscovery market. Altegrity acquired Kroll; AccessData acquired Summation; Autonomy acquired CA’s Information Governance division. Rumors persist that Autonomy will buy OpenText (though these rumors point out that Autonomy has assembled a $1 billion war chest for the acquisition and the OpenTex market capitalization is $2.12 billion…rumors can sometimes be just that – rumors). Often overshadowed by the consolidation hype are the moves that eDiscovery vendors make to extend functionality organically.

The end of summer is bittersweet. Bitter because we move out of relaxation mode and back into high-stress mode. Sweet because business activities really heat up as everyone gears up to have a big fourth quarter. What can we expect in the eDiscovery market this fall? This article lists the things to watch out for over the next four months.

One of the things I hear in vendor briefings more and more is early case assessment (ECA) happening even earlier. This can be referred to as “very early case assessment” or “ECA in the wild” or “in-place ECA.” At the end of the day, it’s all about moving ECA forward to happen in-line with identification and collection so that organizations can save money, make decisions earlier, and simplify the eDiscovery process.