eDJ Migrated

Microsoft’s SharePoint has achieved significant market traction over the past decade – various research studies show the level of organizations using SharePoint ranging from 50% - over 90%. Clearly, SharePoint is a force to be reckoned with. The eDiscovery market took notice of SharePoint in the last few years and we’ve seen archiving and collection solutions become available. While SharePoint has appeared in real cases, it has not reached critical mass as an eDiscovery issue just yet.

I had a chance to sit down last week with Johannes Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer at ZyLAB. I’ve followed ZyLAB for years now and was pleased to see the company so focused on the eDiscovery market. Too often, vendors in the information management world try to offer too much and solve too many problems. That leads to confusion on the part of prospects as to exactly what they need to buy. Now, ZyLAB is not abandoning the broader information management market, but the company is focusing its efforts around what it can sell today – eDiscovery applications.

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.

When a major eDiscovery controversy breaks out, the eDJ team usually gets on a call to discuss and designate who should take the lead in response. Barry Murphy did a great job going to the source on the Recommind predictive coding patent announcement. I also enjoyed Herb Roitblat’s analysis of the patent content. At first, I did not figure that I had anything to add that had not been covered. Numerous ongoing discussions with clients, sponsors and contemporaries made me realize that I did have two cents to toss into the whirlwind. Designing and consulting for software companies got me in the habit of digging into the use of open source and potentially patented technologies. I know of many patents held by early innovators that have never been enforced on the market.

A lot of my week has been spent on calls prepping the ‘Using eDiscovery Technologies’ track of the Carmel by the Sea eDiscovery Retreat next week. When Chris LaCour first recruited Barry and I to create focus tracks, I loved the idea of a small, relaxed retreat where attendees could really interact with the speakers. I thought of it as the antithesis of the typical Legal Tech experience; crowded, commercial, chaotic. George Socha, Browning Mareen, Barry Murphy and myself collaborated to come up with four focus tracks, each with four sessions over the three days. I managed to hand over the ‘Defining the eDiscovery Platform’ to Kevin Stehr of Lexis Nexis to develop and moderate, but that still left me three sessions to wrangle with. I am pleased with my panelists and the materials that should be finalized early this week. I know that the retreat is a small venue and it may be hard to convince your management that you really will be learning about eDiscovery rather than hitting the links, but I see this as an excellent west coast opportunity to get quality content and real discussion from experts, judges and your contemporaries.

A couple weeks back I wrote a piece on the Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2) looking at what the U.S. could do to encourage global companies to adopt U.S. based cloud providers. I enjoyed speaking to the international working group on potential eDiscovery concerns with cloud providers. The group is analyzing the issues and creating innovative recommendations for the Obama administration. Their work just got a bit harder as Microsoft’s UK Managing Director Gordon Frazier admitted to ZDNet that EU data stored in Office 365 could be accessed by U.S. government under the U.S. Patriot Act. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has watched the debates over government internet monitoring programs like Carnivore and NarusInsight. It apparently was a surprise to members of the European Parliments who are now demanding answers.

While moderating CLE sessions at the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat this week, I received multiple emails from clients and contemporaries drawing my attention to the breaking scandal around the erroneous web cache forensic reports in the Casey Anthony trial. As it happens, one of my sessions with Herb Roitblat and Jason Velasco was “Validation Testing - Defending Your eDiscovery Process”. I have not been able to get a more detailed analysis of the exact issue with the CacheBack software used by John Bradley (the designer) as yet. The primary problem was that his initial analysis showed that someone on the Anthony residence computer had run searches for “Chloroform” 84 times when it was later determined that this had happened only one time. This is a good example of how even the best intentioned and experienced user can come up with erroneous results in unusual or unanticipated circumstances.

Although none of the principals involved want to speak on the record, I managed to get some detailed information on the technical issues. Consider this a Part 2 to my blog on the discrepancies raised by the defense between the initial police report using Digital Detective’s NetAnalysis of 1 visit and the subsequent SiQuest CacheBack report of 84 visits related to chloroform from the Anthony family computer. The NY Times article does a good job of the event timeline, so I am just going to focus on the deep geek details. All of this centers around the parsing and extraction of Google searches and site visitations from the Firefox 2 browser history. Firefox Versions 1 & 2 used a rather unique and problematic database file coined “Mork” after the quirky TV alien ‘Morky & Mindy’ TV show.

The breaking Casey Anthony forensic story has delayed my recap of the first Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat last week. Luckily, Barry Murphy managed a good post on day one. Chris LaCour, the event organizer, deserves congratulations for breaking the LTNY event mold. He dared to plan a small scale interactive format heavy with experts in a beautiful venue that encouraged open social dialogue. He recruited Browning Marean, George Socha, Barry Murphy and myself to create focus tracks featuring cutting edge topics for the panelists to debate. This was not the typical sponsor driven marketing messages, but real discussion that actively engaged the audience. I moderated three of my CLE sessions and passed the microphone to Kevin Stehr of Lexis Nexis for the “Defining the eDiscovery Platform” session. The participating providers generally limited themselves to sponsoring meals and social events, which kept the event relatively free of the marketing madness that has dominated the big NY show. I hope that this retreat signals that the eDiscovery market is willing to consider alternative academic, market and social events.

Part of my job is to meet with the investment community (venture capital, private equity, investment banking) and talk shop about the state of the eDiscovery market. Lately, the same question keeps coming up over and over: “is the eDiscovery market saturated?” Certainly, I can understand the question; the Symantec acquisition of Clearwell has created renewed interest in our market. Clearwell got a very nice multiple…in case you didn’t know, the term “nice multiple” does not escape the ears of the investment community. But, there seems to be a perception that the market is saturated and there are no ankle biters on the radar or sure winners on the way up. While there are definitely some over-capitalized vendors out there desperate for more cash or an acquisition, I believe this market is not even close to saturated, and I’ll offer an example of why.