I met with Dave Lewis (Chief Scientific Officer) and Mark Noel (CIO) to explore Redgrave Data since its launch in January by five well known eDiscovery experts.

Defining Redgrave Data

Our industry is filled with technology and service companies spun off from successful law firms. Despite the name and law firm partnership, none of Redgrave Data’s founders came from Redgrave LLP to form the new venture. The five multidisciplinary eDiscovery experts created a boutique consulting firm focusing on integration and application of advanced technologies to solve matters with unique large volume ESI challenges. The new firm rapidly expanded to 15 core specialists to meet the demands of multiple large complex litigation matters with multiple eDiscovery integrated technology stacks.

Mark Noel – “…all of our people are multidisciplinary. We’ve got technologists who are recovering litigators and can wear multiple hats. The kinds of problems we can handle include the big complex litigation where for example, we wrote half a dozen different ad hoc scripts to fix, troubleshoot or transmogrify data to get work product out of one platform and into another so that it can be reused.”

What kinds of matters and clients?

Redgrave Data has focused on direct law firm and corporate clients with large complex matters. Surprisingly, their namesake firm engagements have comprised a relatively small portion of their revenue. Their flexibility and breadth of expertise has expanded engagements from traditional eDiscovery to custom development.

Dave Lewis- “One client had us build a custom web scraper that monitors 40+ different government websites. It collects any filings, decisions, or updates to any of their dockets and processes them into a front end. They can log in every morning to see what has hit.”

Custom Solutions and Technology Stacks

It was interesting to see Dave reaction to his new role as Brainspace power user vs. his days as Reveal’s EVP for AI Research & Development. It reminded me of my leaving Symantec’s PM team to wrestle with giant EV/DA archives for clients.

Dave Lewis- “I keep wishing I could send messages back in time to my earlier self when I was leading the Brainspace AI engineering team. For instance, I found myself having to grab raw trained models from the Brainspace file system for some work I did converting Relativity STRs (search term lists) into Brainspace portable models.”

Mark Noel- “We used AWS tools on high volume audio transcription to cut the cost of traditional eDiscovery audio tools by an order of magnitude. Custom does not necessarily mean expensive.”

Dave Lewis: “One thing that makes Redgrave Datg unique among service firms is having an elite development team and expert data scientists. We can take on projects where you’ve got to get data moved between systems that don’t talk to each other, clean up and enrich that data, do analytics, and wrap the whole thing in custom process automation.”

Where do you see Redgrave Data in the eDiscovery market?

Redgrave Data says that they are not trying to compete with traditional eDiscovery vendors and they are not a software company. Rather than trying to be a ‘one stop shop’, they seem to be sticking to being technology and vendor agnostic specialists for truly challenging matters.

Mark Noel- “One-size-fits-all is a cruel lie. Most commercial products may only be an 80-85% fit for a given client’s needs. A big and expensive operation that leaves 15% on the table is a really big deal. We don’t try to reinvent stuff or offer ourselves up as a soup to nuts shop. We had a client actually stop us right there and say, ‘Thank you, you are the first group that we have talked to that did not claim to do everything.’”

eDJ Take Away

Overall, I am impressed with Redgrave Data’s go-to-market approach and rapid growth. Where were they back in 2007 when I returned to independent consulting? Maybe the market and providers are finally ready to share clients with experts. Possibly mature corporate and law firm customers have become sophisticated enough to engage independent expertise rather than just trust a big eDiscovery shop to cover every issue. Best of luck to the Redgrave Data team.

Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer a journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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