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 mature features. Although ZyLab is slowly catching up in terms of usability, dashboards, navigation and TAR, I feel that they still are an investigation tool working hard to compete with established eDiscovery platforms.
It is easy to see why their primary US customer base seems to be dominated by law firms and government agencies. ZyLAB ONE’s all-on list price starts at $25/GB/Month and plunges for customers hosting upwards of a TB. Firms and agencies prioritize security (2FA, HIPAA, FedRAMP, ISO 27001, SOC-2), references, performance and functionality check boxes over user friendly GUI, adoption ease and workflow automation valued by manpower constrained corporate legal departments. That explains why they have just rolled out certain features such as:
- Granular permissions at data/field level
- Sampling
- TAR 1.0/CAL
- Smart tagging with autoclassification rules
- Auto redaction
- M365/G-Suite integration
- Visual concept wheel
In this Relativity dominated market, eDiscovery players have to differentiate strongly on flexible consumption models, performance, mature functionality, usability or analytics to be competitive. ZyLAB manages to check a lot of those boxes while still feeling like it is just entering the civil litigation market. I can see why it would appeal to law enforcement, agencies and firms with a well-staffed LitSupport team. I am not so sure that it would win any of my corporate RFPs for a dedicated eDiscovery platform where retained counsel is expected to conduct reviews with minimal support. I look forward to keeping tabs on ZyLABs development sprints and expect that their customers knew what they were buying and are happy with their experience. After all, a lot more happily commute in Honda Civics versus Teslas.
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 posted. 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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