eDJ Migrated

The smartest person that I’ve ever known was my mentor when I was living and working in Europe in the 1980’s. I learned a great deal from him about differences in personal management styles and how to build collaborative workgroups in technical environments. Of all of the people that I have known, he is the only one that truly had infinite patience while attacking key issues. Our strategic operating plans would literally stretch over years and as the headstrong ex-pat American executive, I would chafe at what I considered to be the glacial rate of progress. Each time that he saw I was getting frustrated, he would smile slyly and say, “You’re thinking about this as a business process. Remember - It’s not business, we’re creating art. Art takes time.”

For the first time in many years I am missing the EDRM Kickoff Meeting in St. Paul. Kevin Esposito is covering the project updates, goals and progress for us, but it still feels strange to not be anchoring a project meeting, even if I will continue to co-lead the new Testing project. Instead, I delivered the keynote to the 2011 LiveOffice user conference this morning. LiveOffice is the leading cloud email archiving company (Gartner 2010) and has had pretty incredible growth throughout the recent economic downturn. They asked me to speak to the attendees about the impact of eDiscovery on IT in 2011. This meshed well with their roll out of their new version of Discovery Archive. In polling the attendees, every single one had carried out discovery requests within the last year. Fifty percent were executing requests for Legal, while the rest allowed Legal to execute their own searches. Only a small portion were actively reviewing matters on the live data, but I could see the heads nodding as we discussed the prospect, it is definitely on the horizon for many of them. To organize my thoughts, I wrote a condensed speech (below) covering the primary points that I wanted to hit. The reality is that I can never resist opportunities to answer questions and transform a monologue into a dialogue.

The market has been awaiting word on where the assets of Iron Mountain Digital would end up. Previously, we speculated who the potential buyers might be and what the future might hold for Iron Mountain Digital. We now know the answer – Autonomy is purchasing the assets for $380 million. That’s not a huge multiple on the revenues of Iron Mountain Digital, but it’s still a big acquisition number in our space. Now we must wonder if this is good news, bad news, or something in between.

This has been the year for corporations shifting to eDiscovery readiness. We have seen few big announcements from the AmLaw firms regarding large technology investments, hiring industry personalities or building out eDiscovery practice areas. Today’s articles from The AmLaw Daily and Law.com put law firm eDiscovery back on my radar. David R. Cohen, leader of K&L Gates eDiscovery practice group has moved to Reed Smith’s Pittsburgh office and taken 14 attorneys and staffers with him. The K&L Gates eDiscovery Analysis and Technology (e-DAT) Group currently lists 42 professionals, but I am guess that the 30% actually represens the core of dedicated, experienced personnel. Going back in time to the big Microsoft anti-trust cases, this practice group reflected Preston, Gates & Ellis’s (original firm as I knew them) dedication to never lose a case based on technology or eDiscovery process. The groundbreaking analytic review interface by Attenex (acquired by FTI) was founded by the firm and leveraged by the e-DAT group to review huge collections. This background should help you understand the impact of the jump to Reed Smith.

Various reports state that the famous writer/director Woody Allen once said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. What wasn’t mentioned, however, is that to be truly successful, the other twenty percent consists of working your butt off once you’re there. I reported last week that I was participating at the EDRM Annual Kickoff Meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a very productive week with over 75 people participating in the various work streams. As mentioned previously, many people view EDRM as some sort of static entity – possibly due to the widespread use of the EDRM diagram – but EDRM is anything but static.

Slowly, but surely, for a source here and a source there, the seeds of a rumor were planted into my brain over the past few weeks. People kept asking whether it was true that Symantec was about to buy Clearwell Systems. I know better than to answer those questions; sure, I could ask my contacts at either company, but they wouldn’t be able to comment. And, having been an analyst over a decade now, I know better than to believe every acquisition rumor I hear. In the past year, I’ve had folks practically confirm that Autonomy is buying Open Text and that Oracle is buying Autonomy. I don’t believe the rumors until I see the announcement. And so it is – Symantec buys Clearwell Systems for $390 million.

Expanding on Barry’s fast reaction, what will Symantec’s acquisition of Clearwell for $390 million mean to the existing Symantec/Clearwell eDiscovery customer base? Many companies with Enterprise Vault and Discovery Accelerator already utilize the Clearwell appliance for processing, ECA and review, whether on site or through a hosted provider. For them, it may mean breaking the volume based (per GB) licensing model that has dominated our market for far too long. The Symantec Information Management Group (in which I was a Product Manager) has dominated the email archiving market and recently added the Discovery Collector appliance to enable corporations to search, preserve and collect directly from unstructured ESI sources not being actively archived. Clearwell was the earliest partner to leverage the Discovery Accelerator API to import archive search results directly into a processing and review platform back when I was the Product Manager. So there is a long standing synergy between the product suites, although there is also functional overlap that will need to be clarified for prospective customers.

I spoke at a session of the AccessData user conference in Las Vegas recently. The trip was great, with the exception of losing $500 at the craps table. I love going to user conferences because I get a chance to chat with real folks practicing real corporate eDiscovery. Most can’t talk on the record, but I get a chance to hear the things they are really trying to do – real-life stuff. I was able to have some good chats after my session on eDiscovery trends. Interestingly, I heard some very similar themes from some very diverse users.

One of the first questions from Jason Velasco, the new eDJ CEO, was, “Any particular reason that eDJ is still on POP3/IMAP for email?” This may sound like techno-jargon, but he was asking why we were still thinking like solo practitioners in this age of cloud based solutions. Traditionally, running a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino server has not been worth the time and expense for most small businesses when most web hosting companies will route your email for free. As an old developer with half a dozen domains still hanging around, this free email routing via POP3 or IMAP protocol made sense. For a growing business with geographically remote users, it does not support our requirements for shared calendars and other collaboration tools. More importantly, my recent hardware loss was a personal wake up call to the fact that even solo practitioners should consider moving to synchronized cloud storage to enable universal search, access and security. I cannot count the times that I have had to send damaged attorney drives to Kroll or a friend with a clean room.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-06-07 09:30:24  Well it’s a fine day for me. I’ve started a new role at a new and growing company.  There is great technology and a changing legal landscape.  It’s still the same story that we’ve been saying for years.  But now I get to look at the industry from a different perspective.Yes, I admit it.  I’ve been [...]