Historical Essays

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The new eDJ Tech Matrix has been gaining steam, which has required lots of deep product dive sessions and new features to categorize. I thought that I should call out some interesting highlights:TotalDiscovery from BIA is now offering a subscription pricing for legal hold notification at $1/Custodian/Month. Yet another sign that eDiscovery is moving towards true cloud subscription licensing.Mitratech’s TeamConnect is also available on a Saas subscription model. It has been a while since I got to dig into their offerings and I was impressed by the customizable dashboards and sharp J2EE-based platform. I was pleased to see that they had already added the new L600 series UTMBS eDiscovery code set that was ratified by the LEDES Oversight Committee on July 13, 2011. The ongoing project is drafting expanded eDiscovery activity and expense codes, so I hope to hear of more legal billing systems incorporating the new codes.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-10-07 10:51:40  I was lucky enough to attend the Law Tech Texas conference on Wednesday (October 5) in Dallas put on by Texas Lawyer (an ALM publication). For my Twitter friends, the feed is #lawtechtx.The keynote was led by John Ansbach, the Chief Legal Officer at M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) who focused on technology in the legal [...]

For quite some time, I’ve seen the eDiscovery market as an entry channel for broader information management solutions. Many of the expertise location and knowledge management applications of the early 2000’s found a home in the social network analysis function that can help in early case assessment and review. Machine learning and predictive analytics are helping make predictive coding and tagging a reality. And, we’re starting to evolve beyond just eDiscovery. Our recent information governance survey results showed that a majority of respondents believe that auto-classification is the future of information governance. Such solutions can help organizations with defensible disposition and storage management.

EDJ's report, "Analyzing HP's Acquisition of Autonomy" is now available. On August 18, 2011, H-P agreed to buy U.K. software firm Autonomy Corp. for just over $10 billion, a multiple of more than 10x Autonomy’s estimated revenue for next year. Those kinds of numbers grab attention – and they raise the inevitable scrutiny of all affected by the acquisition: customers, competitors, employees, former employees, and shareholders.

Big Data was a top theme in StoredIQ’s Industry Advisory Board last week. The StoreIQ team believe in the ongoing transformation of enterprise digital landfills from trash to the treasure trove promised by business analytic mining of “Big Data”. The fundamental idea is that immature repositories of unstructured ESI are a liability, while a mature content lifecycle environment (people, process and technology) makes that wealth of information work for the benefit of the company. Let’s face it, storage is relatively cheap compared to 10 years ago. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the key factors to calculating the ‘true cost of ownership’ for a mythical gigabyte of Office files, but the cloud market has already given us a solid baseline cost. Amazon S3 and their competitors can make a profit at 6-14¢/GB/month, so that pretty much confirms that actual storage is cheap.

Earlier this fall, eDJ conducted a survey on the usage of software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in eDiscovery. We reported that almost 70% of respondents are leaning toward using the cloud or a hybrid cloud/on-premise solution for eDiscovery. When we sliced this data a bit further, however, we found that only about 35% of corporate respondents are leaning toward cloud solutions for eDiscovery. Part of the explanation for this could be the fact that law firms have relied on hosted review for years now and are comfortable with cloud-based solutions. Corporations, on the other hand, tend to be very concerned with security and privacy issues and therefore want to exercise more control over data. eDJ has launched a new survey to dig deeper into the issues around the Cloud and eDiscovery.