eDJ Migrated

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The new eDJ Tech Matrix has been gaining steam, which has required lots of deep product dive sessions and new features to categorize. I thought that I should call out some interesting highlights:TotalDiscovery from BIA is now offering a subscription pricing for legal hold notification at $1/Custodian/Month. Yet another sign that eDiscovery is moving towards true cloud subscription licensing.Mitratech’s TeamConnect is also available on a Saas subscription model. It has been a while since I got to dig into their offerings and I was impressed by the customizable dashboards and sharp J2EE-based platform. I was pleased to see that they had already added the new L600 series UTMBS eDiscovery code set that was ratified by the LEDES Oversight Committee on July 13, 2011. The ongoing project is drafting expanded eDiscovery activity and expense codes, so I hope to hear of more legal billing systems incorporating the new codes.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-10-07 10:51:40  I was lucky enough to attend the Law Tech Texas conference on Wednesday (October 5) in Dallas put on by Texas Lawyer (an ALM publication). For my Twitter friends, the feed is #lawtechtx.The keynote was led by John Ansbach, the Chief Legal Officer at M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) who focused on technology in the legal [...]

For quite some time, I’ve seen the eDiscovery market as an entry channel for broader information management solutions. Many of the expertise location and knowledge management applications of the early 2000’s found a home in the social network analysis function that can help in early case assessment and review. Machine learning and predictive analytics are helping make predictive coding and tagging a reality. And, we’re starting to evolve beyond just eDiscovery. Our recent information governance survey results showed that a majority of respondents believe that auto-classification is the future of information governance. Such solutions can help organizations with defensible disposition and storage management.

EDJ's report, "Analyzing HP's Acquisition of Autonomy" is now available. On August 18, 2011, H-P agreed to buy U.K. software firm Autonomy Corp. for just over $10 billion, a multiple of more than 10x Autonomy’s estimated revenue for next year. Those kinds of numbers grab attention – and they raise the inevitable scrutiny of all affected by the acquisition: customers, competitors, employees, former employees, and shareholders.

Big Data was a top theme in StoredIQ’s Industry Advisory Board last week. The StoreIQ team believe in the ongoing transformation of enterprise digital landfills from trash to the treasure trove promised by business analytic mining of “Big Data”. The fundamental idea is that immature repositories of unstructured ESI are a liability, while a mature content lifecycle environment (people, process and technology) makes that wealth of information work for the benefit of the company. Let’s face it, storage is relatively cheap compared to 10 years ago. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the key factors to calculating the ‘true cost of ownership’ for a mythical gigabyte of Office files, but the cloud market has already given us a solid baseline cost. Amazon S3 and their competitors can make a profit at 6-14¢/GB/month, so that pretty much confirms that actual storage is cheap.

Earlier this fall, eDJ conducted a survey on the usage of software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in eDiscovery. We reported that almost 70% of respondents are leaning toward using the cloud or a hybrid cloud/on-premise solution for eDiscovery. When we sliced this data a bit further, however, we found that only about 35% of corporate respondents are leaning toward cloud solutions for eDiscovery. Part of the explanation for this could be the fact that law firms have relied on hosted review for years now and are comfortable with cloud-based solutions. Corporations, on the other hand, tend to be very concerned with security and privacy issues and therefore want to exercise more control over data. eDJ has launched a new survey to dig deeper into the issues around the Cloud and eDiscovery.

Earlier this month, I had a chance to participate in the panel, “Cloud, SharePoint, and Social Media: Discovery on the Next Data Frontier” at the LitCon 2011 show. My fellow panelists were Larry Briggi of FTI Consulting, Leigh Isaacs of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and James Zucker, Esq. of Hogan Lovells. We’ve done this panel several times at conferences and on webinars and I learn something new every time. At the LitCon show, it was clear that social media is quickly becoming one of the biggest issues in eDiscovery. Mr. Zucker’s list of cases where social media is involved keeps growing.

I had a great session with one of the top eDiscovery law firms this week. We spend time on their pain points and discussing the ownership ESI collections as they progress through the firm. One of the things that hit me was the realization that as eDiscovery has consumed more and more of the actual discovery lifecycle, we may be unintentionally taking the traditional gatekeepers out of the loop. When I reflect on the print/copy days of discovery, paralegals always owned the boxes. When a partner went looking for a critical document, the paralegal knew exactly where it hid and could reconstruct how it got into evidence. Paralegals still coordinate with the corporate clients on collections and overall management of deadlines, but it feels like initial collections now vanish into litsupport or service provider shops to emerge transformed into review sets. The problem is that this metamorphosis is generally a black box process (yes, I like the phrase because it evokes the abracadabra moment).

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the EDRM Mid Year Meeting in St.Paul, Minnesota. The midyear meeting is a great opportunity for all of the individual project groups to come together and evaluate the progress made on key projects for the year. Although a midyear review may be standard operating procedure for large corporations, few industry groups that I’ve been exposed to have the discipline to insist on such a midyear checkpoint.

That there is a dearth of standardized best practices for eDiscovery is an understatement. The corporate world is still fairly immature in its approach to information governance and eDiscovery. Thus, it is refreshing to see the recently published New York State Bar Association’s “Best Practices in eDiscovery in New York State and Federal Courts.” This publication is not necessarily the eDiscovery bible, but it does present some common sense, easy-to-follow guidelines for beginning to get one’s eDiscovery house in order.