Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2011-02-10 11:13:06  Continuing my high level take-aways from my roadmap briefings at LegalTech NY 2011. Predictive coding was  one of the hot topics at this show, but it seemed to mean something different to every provider. There is enough confusion around the issue to merit a solid research topic for eDJ in the upcoming months. I know that The eDiscovery Institute is looking to do a comparative research project on predictive coding in 2011-2012, so we can look forward to some hard numbers going into next year from them. On to the provider updates:Autonomy continues their slow march towards assembling the corporate super search engine with new messaging around ‘Chaining’ together technology AND the different stakeholders in the eDiscovery lifecycle. This means opening up direct access through the firewall to outside law firms and the other discovery players. They are not focusing on specific products, but on the overall Meaning Based Computing value proposition that moves beyond search and metadata to actual ‘Human Information’. The sheer breadth of their individual offerings makes this a good strategy. While other players are driving specific products, they continue to hammer out a single cohesive message.Index Engines has fired a shot across the bows of traditional tape processors like RenewData and eMag with a $50/tape offering. The customer ships the physical tapes and gains direct cloud access to the content. Before you rush to Fedex, the price rises to $150 or $250/tape if you want to dedup or fully index across your collection. They will store your index offline instead of charging the usual monthly hosting charges. As one law firm visitor said, “Thanks for killing the accessibility argument.” Matter of fact, I recall one expert deposition from last year where this pricing would have saved me a lot of grief. The Index Engine process and filters can be used to support a managed destruction initiative, where you create rules for what you know can be destroyed rather than trying to identify records. The concept that you could extract an indexed, deduplicated repository and kill off all the known corporate spam should be interesting to the market.BIA hit the show with their new cloud based collection offering at TotalDiscovery. What was most interesting to me was the integration of custodial self designation (i.e. letting the custodian tell the system where they think the relevant ESI resides) and lawyer driven collection rules. This is coming closer to what I have coined “expanded custodial designation”. Key custodians have to be interviewed, just look at the Qualcomm mess to see what happens when you don’t ask your custodians before collecting. The trick is to ‘trust but verify’ by expanding their designated relevant locations with search or simple rules. So I like BIA’s approach and the straight forward workflow that incorporates attorney oversight of the process. They have also worked to push back processing fees with early direct access to EDB/PST files and others.For any of you not following the M&A activity in our market, DTI has been working hard to consolidate after the EED and Daticon acquisitions. Their strategy is to marry their extensive local service network with leaner, meaner coastal data centers (down from 5 data centers). They will continue to market their Discovery Partner product, but have invested in partnerships with Nuix, Relativity and iCONECTnXT to meet the demands of more sophisticated customers. The idea is to keep the client relationships and small jobs local, while having the large capacity data centers for the larger matters.

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