In the days of on-site policy assessment engagements, I loved asking random attendees to step away from their laptops so that I could ‘compliance check’ them. For new or stuffy clients I would ask the MIS/Security stakeholder to pick some random ‘safe’ machines on the floor for the check. Inevitably, every poor admin chosen had stashes of PSTs/MSGs, private gmail mailboxes open, various chat [...]
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 [...]
The legal hold notice market is dominated by cloud services that use a wide variety of security methods to send out your notices from their trusted domains. Having implemented a large number of these systems recently, I can tell you how difficult it can be to establish that trust relationship and bypass all the spam/virus/phishing filters to ensure that all custodians receive their hold [...]
The pace of corporate migrations to Microsoft 365 (the new name for Office 365) has accelerated over the last nine years (2011 launch). I have supported these migrations of most of my long term clients with policy reviews, preservation audits, workflow adaptions and more. Two to five years post-migration my health checks and annual discovery metrics reports tell a universal tale of bloated mailboxes. [...]
Even though Microsoft just released their new version of the Advanced eDiscovery (AED2) interface, they seem to be releasing UI changes in relatively short development cycles. That is good if you are waiting for the Graph API functions to integrate with AED2, but bad if you already updated your protocols and documentation. This update changes the workflow for adding a Custodian or Data Source [...]
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 [...]
Several headlines and familiar names caught my eye as I skimmed my weekend feed. The founder of Vista Equity Partners (Robert F. Smith) announced a $140M settlement with the DOJ and the IRS while his long term Texas business partner Robert T. Brockman was charged with evading $2 billion in taxes, the ‘largest-ever’ tax fraud case to date. Vista’s co-founder Brian Sheth is said [...]
Having been off the ‘speaker circuit’ for the last couple years, I have had a hard time prioritizing virtual conferences while focused on relaunching the eDiscovery Journal. Logikcull asked for me to cover their InHouse 2020 virtual networking event and frankly some of the corporate focused sessions looked interesting. Between accepting their invitation and the event my clients and a research engagement consumed that [...]
Many years ago as a product manager at Symantec (now Veritas again), I advocated for the acquisition of Globanet because they were a key partner in so many of our compliance-eDiscovery deals. The Veritas Compliance Portfolio covers the core enterprise unstructured data sources (file shares, Office365, Box, Exchange, SharePoint and many more) with a variety of solutions. Their eDiscovery Platform even does remote laptop [...]