Historical Essays

On the heels of my writing about the perfect storm brewing in eDiscovery comes good news for all in the market. Recent survey results from the Cowen Group indicate a rise in jobs, plans to purchase software, and plans to purchase outsourced services. The good news is that the data points to wins all around in the market. Organizations benefit by taking proactive steps to reduce the cost of eDiscovery. Software and service providers benefit from increased revenue. And eDiscovery professionals benefit from increased work options and better employment.

During a recent software testing engagement, I ran into an interesting issue with date based searches that could impact your discovery search results. The root of the issue is based in the different ways of representing communication attachments or other multipart items such as Sharepoint/wiki page attachments. In the dark ages of eDiscovery, our software was designed to simulate the myriad physical attachment levels of scanned paper documents. I am not ashamed to recall coding levels of staple, clip and binder groupings back in IPRO ver. 1.5. The system enabled an attorney to determine the exact hierarchical relationship of that individual document to all the others scanned from that box retrieved from Iron Mountain. Newcomers to our field cannot imagine the labor required to manually code in Author, Recipients, Subject and other fields that are now extracted from ESI during processing.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-04-21 09:00:17  Here we sit at the eDiscovery Pavilion inside of the AIIM Expo.  Slowly, but surely, attendees are poking their heads into this area.  It sort of mirrors the real world – information management and IT professionals realize the need to take control of information and the risk it presents, most notably eDiscovery costs.  For too [...]

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.

As AIIM Expo comes to an end, I’m left feeling like the eDiscovery market is on the precipice of becoming a critical part of the information management market, but is not quite there just yet. There is an excitement and buzz about eDiscovery at the conference, but it is not quite yet a crescendo. Yes, there was an eDiscovery pavilion and we got to meet some cool vendors exhibiting there – Catalyst Repository Systems, El Fresko Technologies, iConect Development, Kroll Ontrack, and Planet Data Solutions. But, many of the mainstream eDiscovery vendors were not at the show at all, either as exhibitors or attendees. And, of the large software vendors present – EMC, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, eDiscovery was not an overtly featured capability at their booths. There was even a partner pavilion for Microsoft and the only partners talking about eDiscovery were archiving partners. As we’ve pointed out in other entries, there is a big opportunity for creating eDiscovery solutions for SharePoint; it’s a shame no one is getting out ahead of the curve on that.

Although the AIIM Expo Discovery Pavilion had a modest start with six booths, that did give me plenty of time to visit with my neighbors and dig into their new features and offerings. The sheer size and diversity of Legal Tech tends to make it difficult to get real information at the booth. Everyone is trying to schedule you for an offsite demo and jump to the next person in line. I got to talk shop with the good folks at Catalyst and Planet Data in a way that would not have happened at one of the major eDiscovery shows. The Catalyst team has been busy integrating new conceptual and organizational technology into the user workflow of their CatalystCR platform.