eDiscovery Journal

What Silver Lake’s Rumored $3.6B Relativity Investment Means to eDiscovery

I believe that Silver Lake’s reported $3.6B pre-IPO minority investment in Relativity means that every analyst firm sizing of the core eDiscovery market is and always has been dead wrong. My friend Rob Robinson conveniently publishes an annual eDiscovery Market Size Mashup averaging all the published analyst numbers together. These wise and trained market analyst projections average just $3.76B for 2021 eDiscovery software and $7.63B in services. Really? Maybe [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-04-02T11:07:24-05:00April 2nd, 2021|Provider, Corporate, Essay, Global, Market, Purchase|0 Comments

Cracks in Relativity’s Market Dominance?

Reveal-Brainspace continues to make traction with eDiscovery service providers. Onboarding 25 new partners in a single quarter speaks volumes and requires a mature partnership engine. UnitedLex was a Relativity Best in Service partner as recently as 2016. In fact, they are still a Relativity Certified Partner. With large discovery matters lasting 2-4 years, most clients prefer to let them age off a platform rather [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-03-25T11:04:59-05:00March 25th, 2021|Platform, Provider, Analytics, News, Analysis, Review, Purchase|0 Comments

eDJ Brief: ZyLab ONE

Slowly but surely I am resuming regular briefings with providers. I remember when ZyLab first jumped into the US eDiscovery market with their hybrid archive/investigation tool. Thanks to Scott Hunter for walking me through their most recent release. In my not-always humble opinion, ZyLab always reminded me of Nuix. An innovative, independent architecture paired with a techie GUI that lagged the US market leader’s [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-03-10T16:08:37-06:00March 10th, 2021|Platform, Provider, Essay, Firm, Government, Architecture, Purchase, Search|0 Comments

Relativity Acquires Partner Innovations, Again

Relativity has long had a strategy of partner driven innovation wherein they acquire successful integrated products that are converted to module or features. Just look at Relativity Legal Hold, Collect, etc. for prior examples. I call your attention to how their announcement broadens Relativity’s corporate value proposition from simple eDiscovery to include compliance, data requests, investigations and other information governance usage scenarios. This signals [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-02-02T15:09:59-06:00February 2nd, 2021|Platform, Provider, News, Review, Purchase|0 Comments

Reveal: Building AI Driven eDiscovery

If you missed the news, Reveal took a $200M round of funding from K1 Capital and promptly acquired Brainspace. I was lucky enough to get an early briefing on this while brainstorming with the Reveal team on using their platform to analyze the Parler data to support the FBI investigations. In the last year Reveal acquired Mindseye (triage/ECA), LexLP (AI/ML) and even picked up [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-01-27T17:21:27-06:00January 27th, 2021|Provider, Platform, Analytics, Essay, Analysis, Review, Market, Purchase|0 Comments

Exterro and the eDiscovery Patent Game

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. [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-01-11T09:22:38-06:00January 8th, 2021|Provider, Platform, Essay, Collectors, Content Management, Architecture, Purchase|0 Comments

It’s a Jump to the Left – Relativity Acquires VerQu

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 [...]

By Greg Buckles|2021-01-06T12:51:50-06:00January 6th, 2021|Info Gov, Platform, United States, Essay, Corporate, Investigation, Preservation, Collectors, Collection, Legal Holds, Content Management, ESI Sources, Architecture, Purchase, Management|0 Comments

Nuggets of Gold from a TAR Fight – Pt 2

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 [...]

By Greg Buckles|2020-12-08T11:27:58-06:00December 8th, 2020|Federal, Caselaw, Provider, Essay, Firm, Processing, Analysis, Review, Purchase|1 Comment

Exterro:AccessData – Reverse Food Chain?

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 [...]

By Greg Buckles|2020-12-04T11:24:41-06:00December 4th, 2020|Platform, Investigation, Collectors, Preservation, News, Legal Holds, Collection, Matter Management, Processing, Review, Purchase, Search|0 Comments

How Do Your Rates Measure Up?

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 [...]

By Greg Buckles|2020-11-30T16:47:27-06:00November 30th, 2020|News, Purchase|0 Comments