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 [...]
These kinds of parallel acquisitions generally happen right after a round of funding. To provide some context, Exterro was founded in 2004 and took $100M round of funding in 2018. Zoominfo has them at $36M in revenue with 170 employees (grain of salt). Founded in 1987, AccessData was one of the first forensic tools I used during my CSI years. Owler has AD’s at [...]
Good find by Doug (who credits his wife) on Upturn.org’s new report on the widespread use of Mobile Device Forensic Toolkits like Cellebrite or Access Data by law enforcement. Aside from the civil liberties issues, I want to draw corporate litsupport/compliance/security attention to the logical progression that looms. The latest Gallup poll shows that 58% of employees work remote sometimes or always. I can [...]
With Microsoft retiring their Advanced eDiscovery v.1, some related PowerShell cmdlets and soon the Core eDiscovery interface, I asked the Relativity team for a briefing on how these changes might affect my clients using RelativityOne for in-place holds and collections. Overall I am happy to understand that the Microsoft-Relativity relationship is active and strong. The Relativity Legal Holds team has been aware of Microsoft’s [...]
If you somehow missed the September 11, 2020 announcement (MC223426) or January’s (MC199461) admin message, Microsoft has now effectively disabled any legal matters you have in the original Advanced eDiscovery (designated v1.0). You can manually export the data, but I have yet to find any reports or convenience features that would enable a lonely litsupport manager to dump out a list of matters, custodians, [...]
This is a follow-up to my recent blog on the new Teams meeting recording functionality and the potential eDiscovery impact you may encounter. Because this information was only sent to M365 admins and I could not find a public announcement, the link is to a public board where another kind techie posted the message content. If you are not tracking M365 announcements, major change [...]
My peer Tom O’Connor spotted this post Ignite 2020 Microsoft announcement of upcoming new Teams functionality. These remind me of the recent online Word transcript feature, useful for end users and a potential headache for eDiscovery practitioners. Despite O365’s Advanced eDiscovery module, Microsoft has always focused first on end user functionality over compliance, security or legal discovery requirements. There is little doubt that the [...]
I recently challenged eDiscovery providers with cloud collection and review solutions to start tracking the CDC and OSHA websites giving the official safety guidelines for business reopening. Since then, news outlets have clear evidence that those CDC guidelines have been changed in response to political pressure. While keeping eDJ discussions apolitical, I feel the need to raise the red flag in regard to the [...]
Normally I dig through the actual ruling language for new eDiscovery caselaw. In this case my former Symantec alumni has written a great summary of the contested discovery protocols. I refrained from quoting his closing four take-aways, but they are worth a read. What caught my interest here was the defendant’s original strategy to use its “Microsoft Tool” (I bet O365 Advanced eDiscovery) to [...]
The Wayback machine has taken 2,073 snapshots of the CDC’s COVID-19 Business Guidance webpage since it was launched March 6, 2020. Why would it make >11 snapshots per day (74 on August 17th)? This CDC page is the primary national level guidance for businesses that want to reopen safely. The nifty Changes tool (beta screenshot below) shows that page could have changed 2-3 times [...]