Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-01-26 17:24:21 2009 has been a hard year for corporations of every size. The wave of high publicity eDiscovery sanctions in 2007-2008 had General Counsel’s focusing on reducing discovery risk before the economic down turn. Now they are tasked with cutting departmental budgets and the ever-growing cost of discovery. So we have gone through a dramatic transition [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-01-26 17:26:52 The eDiscovery buzz word these days is ‘ECA’ or Early Case Assessment. But what does that really mean and what software functionality really comprises an ‘ECA solution’? The current Wikipedia definition of ECA appears to focus purely on scanning and generating reports on sources of unstructured ESI to derive an estimate of the potential [...]
As legal technology migrates from external service providers to inside the firewall, it is more important than ever to test and understand your rates of collection, processing, loading, reviewing and producing ESI. Litigation support is a deadline driven business. Counsel will wait as long as possible before pulling the trigger on discovery in the hope and expectation of resolving the matter without having to incur further costs. Successfully adapting to this pressure cooker lifestyle requires that you construct a ‘burst capacity’ workflow as opposed to a normal ‘continuous capacity’ model.
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-26 23:07:42 If the term Early Case Assessment (ECA) causes you to roll your eyes and reach for a copy of your JD/MBA buzzword bingo sheet, you’re not alone. ECA is a term thrown around by technology providers ranging from email archiving vendors to actual document review vendors. But, just this once, let the marketing hypesters off [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-30 13:01:03 Much to my surprise, there are many who believe that the email archiving market is dying fast. As evidence, they point to:The introduction of Microsoft Exchange 2010 with native archiving capabilitiesThe struggles of pure-play archiving vendors to compete with larger vendors like Symantec and the aforementioned Exchange 2010The substitution of collection appliances and/or search tools [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-02-02 06:39:40 LegalTech New York is appropriately scheduled early in the year. Optimism is high, marketing budgets flush, and sales plans are bullish. In the past, LegalTech has tended to be blustery. Too many vendors put out meaningless press releases in an effort to drum up buzz. Too much of the content focused on law firms (though, [...]
As a result of the potential for significant sanctions, one of the first information governance initiatives organizations seek to implement is legal hold – or litigation hold (yet another example of how much confusing industry jargon is out there). Implemented well, legal hold can help an organization avoid sanctions and improve both the efficacy and efficiency of downstream eDiscovery activities – collection, processing, and review.
The final result was an initial list of 543 sites that met my fairly strict requirements. That means that almost 95% of sites were only vaguely related to our industry or practice. No wonder webinars, conferences and training organizations are getting decent attendance. If you do not already know what you are looking for, your odds of finding it are pretty slim or you are in for a lot of surfing.
“What positive impact?” you ask. It seems that when times get tough, good companies get busy and the others go out of business. Every booth that I visited trotted out new features, licensing options and a better overall understanding of the customer’s needs. The economic pressure cooker seems to have sounded the wake up call to service and technology providers alike. What impressed me the most was that everyone was able to express a consistent value proposition message. Many still have technology flaws and poor usability, but they are becoming aware of the user’s context and can present their offerings within some kind of usage scenario.
Barry Murphy called out 2010 as “the year of ECA”. Certainly those three letters were found on almost every booth, even if the exhibitors did not exactly agree on what that entails. The majority of the processing players seem to consider canned reports and inventory functionality to provide ECA support. But the important trend is that everyone is looking to provide upstream decision support.