eDiscovery at the AIIM Expo – Day 1 Impressions

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-04-21 09:00:55  Old school eDiscovery professionals are used to hitting the big three conferences; Legal Tech, ARMA and ILTA. So I came to the AIIM Info 360 Expo without preconceptions to this conference focusing on ECM technologies, providers and adjacent services. The last several years have reinforced the message to the market that the money and investment is ‘going left’ on the EDRM lifecycle. Review costs still dominate the actual litigation spend, but we all know that discovery starts where the ESI lives, which makes information management initiatives and technologies the best long term bet. The conference is attended by IT admins, records managers and the providers offering anything needed to get records into a system. Every other booth seemed to offer some kind of Sharepoint based workflow application. Microsoft dropped a full training center into the middle of the conference floor and surrounded it with partners. It definitely took the ‘app d’jour’ prize.AIIM set up an eDiscovery Pavilion area for the first time this year. Most of the traffic was not quite sure what to make of Catalyst, iConnect or Data Planet, but Kroll seemed have good brand recognition with IT managers. Most of the traffic would stare at the booth displays until a friendly hail gave them the opportunity to figure out how this eDiscovery stuff applied to them. Once the ice was broken, most seemed eager to talk shop and share war stories about impossible requests from legal and growing piles of tapes under hold.Outside of the eDiscovery Pavilion I found providers with eDiscovery services like Océ Business Services selling their traditional scanning and records management services. Some indicated that attendees did not ask about eDiscovery and felt that it was still a bit early for the AIIM Expo. Trillicom archive migration said that eDiscovery was definitely a business driver that deserved a place at the table. The Expo attendees get the impact of eDiscovery when it is put in their context, but they are still learning the buzz words and basic concepts. Corporate IT has met eDiscovery. They may not embrace the information governance or discovery compliance mantra, but they acknowledge the new FRCP requirements.Catalyst System’s new Fast Track offering is a good example of the new hybrid approach to hosted providers. The client uses secured, fast FTP to upload collections and is able to manage most of the processing and loading remotely. This enables Catalyst to come down on their per GB pricing and puts the client in control of the process without a heavy investment.iConnect was one of the first web-based review platforms and is investing in a completely new web 2.0 architecture and GUI. It made my heart glad to hear them brag on cost/time projection tools that enable a customer to input expected review rates and hourly costs. This kind of early cost calculation functionality is critical to enable counsel to make the call on settlement and to budget matters. The EDRM Metrics project has been promoting similar tools for several years and it is exciting to see them creep into applications.So AIIM is a place to see where IT and records are headed. I hope to get more time with some of the bigger ECM players in attendance tomorrow and let you know what is in the pipe. Legal Tech New York may still be the ‘must see’ eDiscovery conference, but more traditional technology conferences have taken notice of the eDiscovery wave and made room for us.