#2 – What is interesting to me is how customers focus on negotiating lower processing/hosting prices while ancillary tech/service prices (collections, analytics, classification/organization, productions, etc.) are often ignored. I do ROI reports based on the true TCO per matter/custodian/GB to get a better measurement. Overall I agree that the $/GB has been steadily dropping for the last 20 years. #5 – I am not [...]
Born in the 1980’s, Management by walking around (MBWA) always seemed to have noble aspirations and feet of clay. I am all in favor of execs and management descending from their office sanctorums to have meaningful bidirectional engagement with their direct reports, customers and such. All too often MBWA has been nothing more than cubicle stalking and making sure that everyone looks busy. While [...]
For some of the new readers, eDJ Briefings are a chance to catch up with the latest from providers kind enough to sit down with me and talk candidly. At Legal Week I no longer do formal presentations or demos. Instead I ask execs to give me the top three points they would like to convey to you and the market. We sometimes get [...]
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 [...]
I am generally bullish on what I consider to be the undersized eDiscovery market. The $44 stock price spike after the CS Disco’s IPO equates to a $2.5B market capitalization. That is a 36X MULTIPLE of CS Disco’ s reported $68.4M 2020 revenue. Red flags pop up for me considering that CS Disco lost $29.8M in 2020 and $22.8M in 2019. According to the [...]
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 [...]
Despite the recent drop in share prices ($11.86 down to $2.47), public ASIC investigations, executive departures and now AFP raids, I still believe that last November’s bully Nuix IPO was a signal of the world market’s appetite in legal technology. It would be a shame if the two largest eDiscovery transactions to date both proved to have cooked their books. For those of you [...]
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 [...]
Reveal-Brainspace continues to make traction with eDiscovery service providers. Onboarding 25 new partners in a single quarter speaks volumes and requires a mature partnership engine. UnitedLex was a Relativity Best in Service partner as recently as 2016. In fact, they are still a Relativity Certified Partner. With large discovery matters lasting 2-4 years, most clients prefer to let them age off a platform rather [...]
Slowly but surely I am resuming regular briefings with providers. I remember when ZyLab first jumped into the US eDiscovery market with their hybrid archive/investigation tool. Thanks to Scott Hunter for walking me through their most recent release. In my not-always humble opinion, ZyLab always reminded me of Nuix. An innovative, independent architecture paired with a techie GUI that lagged the US market leader’s [...]