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.
One of the hot topics at LegalTech 2010 was cloud computing. “The cloud,” as we like to refer to it, promises to offer cost savings and other efficiencies – in an economy obsessed with cost reduction, the buzz around the cloud is not surprising.
This year I tried an experiment in my continual quest to gather as much information from the Discovery Maze (LNTY Exhibit Halls) as possible. The experiment was a bust, but there were lessons in why and how it failed. The idea was to recruit corporate and firm managers and specialists with 5+ years experience to be ‘Secret Shoppers’ on the Exhibit Hall. This way I could try to reach more of the floor and everyone in the network would share their feedback on a set of secured web pages.
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-02-16 09:00:27 As corporate legal departments struggle to control costs, they are often shocked at the lack of transparency and standardization in eDiscovery software and service purchasing. Public corporations have long since created structured procurement processes managed by IT departments and business units. Because the legal service industry evolved from the copy and scanning providers selling [...]
While utility computing holds much promise, there are also examples of SaaS being used effectively in the eDiscovery market. EDD processors offer a web-based interface to case data. These interfaces provide varying levels of review functionality. When you think about it, hosted review has long been a staple of this market and the review platforms of vendors like CaseCentral, Kroll Ontrack, and Iron Mountain / Stratify are really SaaS applications.
One of the topics bouncing around LTNY was the new SaaS pricing of $100/GB/year for processing, hosting and review by Houston based Sfile Technology Corporation. In this world of hidden pricing, NDA wrapped RFPs and other hide-the-ball licensing games, Sfile is publishing their upfront pricing and undercutting the current market average of $300-500/GB by a huge margin. Aside from the usual belly-aching from other processing-hosting providers, I expected that most of my corporate and firm clients would be excited about the potential downward price pressure.