It has been a while since I caught up with my friend Joe Bartolo. Knovos has evolved from their service provider roots (Capital Novus) into a broad, diverse legal technology company. Despite Relativity’s dominance of the large matter review market, mid-market players like Knovos seem to be gaining traction with usable, focused products that meet specific customer requirements. eDiscovery functionality, performance and innovation can [...]
When my old friend Michael Lappin took a role at Ligl (formerly Vertical Discovery) I knew that I needed to see what had lured him there. Ligl is providing what they call an ‘orchestration hub’ for corporate and firm eDiscovery teams. Despite MSFT’s efforts and the ongoing eDiscovery market consolidation, most of these teams are still cobbling together ‘Frankentech’ to track and manage their [...]
Microsoft and Google are busy re-inventing how knowledge workers collaborate. Many of us have stumbled onto complex sets of interdependent Excel workbooks being shared by accounting, sales and other teams. With good chain-of-custody procedures, I have reconfigured environments so that counsel or experts could manually review these ‘semi-structured’ file sets to extract potentially relevant snapshots. The breadth of sources simultaneously touched by Teams and [...]
Lost in all the hype around market consolidation and IPOs is the sad truth that the vast majority of legal technology is destined to end up in the digital dust bin. Thompson Reuters announced the retirement of eDiscovery Point by June 2022. Launched in 2016 and fueled by the CaseLogistix IP/talent TR acquired in 2010, eDiscovery Point never seemed to gain market traction against [...]
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 [...]
Yet another acquisition in the accelerating consolidation of the eDiscovery market space. In this case there is some functional overlap offset by clear differentiation in solution strengths. In my opinion, both players peaked early in the eDiscovery market and were being left behind until recently. Maybe the ParkerGale Capital money and guidance will forge a real competitor to the evolving Relativity-Reveal-Exterro battle royal. For [...]
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 [...]
I spotted my friend Tony LaMacchia's picture in my morning media feeds and made a note to circle back to read the interview by Jeff Kruse and Cash Butler. Normally I would just pull a couple good excerpts in an eDJ News commentary. I had such a hard time remembering which of many feeds I had seen Tony’s smiling face in that it took [...]
A peer with a looming deadline messaged me yesterday to ask if I knew of any way to export Advanced eDiscovery (AED2) collections without processing them into a review set. Despite a vague recollection from the Spring 2021 AED webinar of a MSFT PM saying that a ‘direct to export’ collection feature was on the road map I could not find confirmation. At this [...]
Microsoft’s Information & Protection teams are rolling out Advanced eDiscovery(AED) updates at a remarkable rate. The product team’s April 7th webinar and presentation deck has not yet been published, but I wanted to share some perspectives on how these updates may impact AED users. The pandemic has driven E5 license upgrades and features to support remote employees, which makes AED usage more practical for [...]