eDJ Migrated

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.

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.

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.

A new eDiscovery malpractice lawsuit was filed this week, J-M Manufacturing v. McDermott Will & Emery. The central issue is the production of 3,900 privileged documents in a 250,000 document qui-tam investigation. Nate Raymond at Law.com/LTN gives a good summary here. This case was definitely the hot topic at last night’s Houston b-Discovery social meeting. In reading the complaint, a couple things jumped out at me.

Twice in the last month, I have monitored client enterprise system issues that were caused by ever-expanding back-up time. Now generally I am not down in the pits with the admins wrestling to keep massive communication, archiving, etc systems stable any more. However, I have recently been asked to serve as the corporate 30(b)(6) witness on enterprise systems. That means I need to understand their history, architecture and to monitor their ongoing health. Back-up windows have always been a necessary evil for enterprise systems that constantly ingest new documents. There are many replication and live fail-over systems that avoid taking systems off-line, but old fashioned tape back-up seems to dominate my client base. This means that legal searches, placing holds and retrievals are effectively stopped 4+ hours per day. The impact of a 15-25% productivity loss becomes all too clear when trying to give clients a realistic estimation for large PST migrations, archive conversions, legal hold initiatives and even critical case productions. Imagine telling the U.S. Attorney that their data will be another couple weeks just because we have to back up the system every night.

I recently had the opportunity and privilege to give my perspective to the international working group of the Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2). The commission has a three month mandate to provide the Obama Administration with recommendations to support our growing cloud industry. Many of my global corporate clients have struggled to reconcile their eDiscovery, regulatory and storage requirements across their diverse business units in various countries. Preparing for my presentation brought me the realization that we really are moving to the cloud, dragging the luddites along kicking and screaming. I gave a bit of background on the challenges I saw facing global corporations and moved on to why even large enterprises are exploring migrating their systems and data to cloud or hosted services.

As I was walking through Planet Data’s latest hosted offering, I was struck by the freedom that web based applications have to assemble key features to support specialized workflows. After all, if you have all the basic functions, it is merely a matter of presenting them in a clean set of web pages. We tend to forget that eDiscovery is still relatively new and the vast majority of our actual software users are still just getting up to speed on the technology. Litigation support staff, service providers and consultants live and breathe all this, so we know the context and can navigate a crowded graphical user interface (GUI) full of mysterious icons and mouse-over terms of art like dedup, fuzzy, family, etc. The effort to create stand-alone traditional software that had to function in diverse environments and support a wide variety of usage scenarios produced highly complicated, crowded feature toolboxes such as Summation. Exego Early Cost Assessment is a good example of how cloud development can create a streamlined workflow to meet a specific set of requirements.

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.

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.

No sooner did Recommind announce that it had patented predictive coding was there an article in law.com about the unhappy reaction of Recommind’s competitors. With the blogosphere chirping, I thought it a good idea to weigh in on this news. I read the Recommind press release, which states that the patent covers “systems and methods for iterative computer-assisted document analysis and review. This patent gives Recommind, its customers and its partners exclusive rights to use, host and sell systems and processes for iterative, computer-expedited document review.” It is not hard to see why competitors are reacting defensively to this release – it would appear at first glance that Recommind would be the only company allowed to provide predictive coding software.