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 [...]
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 [...]
I vividly recall my first briefing with Nuix’s dynamic duo, Eddie and Morgan Sheehy. Of course, it happened at a LTNY (probably 2009, but they all blur together). That was shortly after we had converted the eDiscovery Journal from editorial press into the eDJ Group market analyst model. I was impressed with Eddie’s laser focus on breaking the $/GB consumption market and loved Morgan’s [...]
Reveal keeps making the eDiscovery news, so I did a briefing with Jay Leib and George Socha to get up to speed on their overall go to market strategy. Most eDiscovery providers fall into a couple well known buckets that force them to grow, evolve or fade away. Like most players, Reveal started as a service provider focused on hosting large litigation matters.(see Reveal [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Ipro quietly acquired NetGovern in July. This feels like a move to differentiate themselves from the cluster of Relativity competitors that have been slowly losing market share. I am all for moving upstream and building solutions that enable corporate legal to take ownership of their eDiscovery workflow. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out given Ipro’s relatively dated architecture.