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 [...]
I fell down the eDiscovery patent rabbit hole while researching Exterro’s recent press release on the patent granted on their Gateway Coordinator. You should never take press releases, white papers, blogs, etc. at face value. Go to the source when possible. In my USPTO search for the announced patent, I stumbled across 7 more Exterro patents covering workflow management, custodian monitoring and predictive search. [...]
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 [...]
Good summary and perspective by Doug. First a bit of context and techno translation. The Orion Platform is SolarWinds’ primary systems management bundle for on-premise and hybrid environments. SolarWinds’ products cover the breadth of IT management. That means the hacked version of Orion gave the hackers potential access to servers, applications, databases, storage and more. I have struggled to keep up with the new [...]
The matter and article highlight the increased risk that corporate trade secrets and confidential data may be disclosed by the largely remote corporate workforce. I appreciate the well-structured guidance and concrete action steps proposed. The authors recommendation to perform an IP audit is a good starting point. However, I would add the need for automated categorization solutions that flag and highlight files and communications [...]
I wanted to take advantage of Rob Robinson’s timely release of his Winter 2021 eDiscovery Pricing Survey Results and compare a few key prices with those I calculated in my blog analysis of the TAR fight order in Lawson v. Spirit Aerosystems. I appreciate and encourage Rob to keep running his surveys. Seventy nine respondents (n=79) is quite respectable given the recent proliferation of [...]
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 [...]
I am encouraging peers to take Rob’s survey. We all need better data and insight. As someone who has written a lot of these kinds of annual surveys, I always struggle between wanting to keep the questions identical to show trends and wanting to adapt them to the current purchasing realities. In this case, there are several questions that are starting to age out [...]
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. [...]