It has been a while since I caught up with my friend Joe Bartolo. Knovos has evolved from their service provider roots (Capital Novus) into a broad, diverse legal technology company. Despite Relativity’s dominance of the large matter review market, mid-market players like Knovos seem to be gaining traction with usable, focused products that meet specific customer requirements. eDiscovery functionality, performance and innovation can [...]
The majority of corporate professional knowledge workers shifted to remote or hybrid working in 2020. Working from home has challenged many HR, legal and compliance departments to adapt their policies and acceptable use guidelines. Video online meetings and continuous chat channels are essential tools to keep internal/external teams virtually connected. Prior to the pandemic, most of my clients viewed meeting recordings and multi-party chat [...]
2020 was a write off for many in the eDiscovery market. Client initiatives held or cancelled outright while the judiciary granted mass continuances as they struggled with the transition to remote hearings. Many of my long-term clients issued work stoppages that lasted more than six months. 2021 arrived carrying all those backlogged matters and projects. After a few quarters scrambling to catch up and [...]
Fluid Office files are Microsoft’s next generation of dynamic collaboration documents for Teams Chat and other communication channels. Multiple users will be able to simultaneously edit tables, agendas and task lists within M365 online mailbox, SharePoint sites and Teams chats. “Google Docs on steroids” indeed. Thankfully, the default OneDrive and SharePoint storage locations mean that existing preservation functionality covers new .Fluid files created by [...]
When my old friend Michael Lappin took a role at Ligl (formerly Vertical Discovery) I knew that I needed to see what had lured him there. Ligl is providing what they call an ‘orchestration hub’ for corporate and firm eDiscovery teams. Despite MSFT’s efforts and the ongoing eDiscovery market consolidation, most of these teams are still cobbling together ‘Frankentech’ to track and manage their [...]
A.I. driven review platforms seem to be a hot trend. First Reveal Data, followed by Relativity’s acquisition of Text IQ and now Exterro releasing a new review offering based on ‘deep learning’. I always want to understand the tech and mythologies underlying solutions. Ajith Samuel and Bill Piwonka at Exterro were kind enough to walk me through Exterro’s investments in A.I. going back to [...]
I believe that Silver Lake’s reported $3.6B pre-IPO minority investment in Relativity means that every analyst firm sizing of the core eDiscovery market is and always has been dead wrong. My friend Rob Robinson conveniently publishes an annual eDiscovery Market Size Mashup averaging all the published analyst numbers together. These wise and trained market analyst projections average just $3.76B for 2021 eDiscovery software and $7.63B in services. Really? Maybe [...]
In the prior administration, I highlighted the challenge of constantly changing OSHA/state/CDC website guidelines. We now have the advantage of hindsight, extended scientific research and hopefully guidance based on science rather than politics. The Gibbons alert includes a good summary checklist of prevention program elements. My recommendation is to review your existing prevention program against the minor changes and verify that you did indeed [...]
I miss conducting interviews and building statistics to quantify aspects of the eDiscovery Market. At least Ari Kaplan has done a good job conducting 31 interviews with Fortune 1000 GC’s for us. Most of his results and good quotes resonate with what I have heard from clients/peers over the last year. Corporate legal taking more in house with less resources. Investing in technology, but [...]
Relativity’s acquisition of VerQu makes a lot of sense from the corporate RelativityOne customer perspective. Once integrated, the VerQu Hydra connectors have the potential to dramatically expand the scope of holds, in-place searches and collections. The pandemic has escalated adoption of Teams, video conferencing and a myriad of collaboration platforms that Hydra already gives customers access to. In a happy coincidence, VerQu was on [...]