Essays

Now that ILTA 2010 has wound down, I have been reflecting on the striking differences between this educational networking event and the ‘big’ tradeshow , Legal Tech New York (LTNY). ILTA is volunteer-governed industry organization, although it is managed by a full time paid staff. It describes itself as a peer networking organization and that was certainly a large focus of the event including a heavy emphasis on social technology to forge new connections. This creates a curious blend of grass-roots community organizing within a tightly structured event agenda, somewhat like a national Scout Jamboree. The core value to “maintain vendor independence” includes an admirable “No Sales Pitch” rule for sessions and social events. I was handed a ‘No BS’ button to go with my speaker’s ribbon as a clear reminder.

With so many professionals newly drafted into the complex, dynamic eDiscovery world, there is an ever-increasing demand for educational resources (OLP, ALSP), conferences (ILTA, ARMA, LTNY, Georgetown Institute), associations and materials from authoritative bodies such as The Sedona Conference and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. Many years ago, George Socha and Tom Gelbmann (EDRM founders) began encouraging the participation of independent, corporate and law firm professionals with alternative membership options. I am happy to report that non-providers make up over half of the 2010 Metrics project when I stepped down as the project co-lead. All of this leads up to this week’s announced shift to an ‘EDRM Anniversary Membership Model’ for single or all project participation. The membership cost for an individual is just $200/year and $1,000/year for organizations with 10 or fewer employees. In consideration of the 2008-9 economic downturn and the consolidation in the eDiscovery market, EDRM will continue to waive the individual membership fees for anyone who has lost their job recently.

One of the things I hear in vendor briefings more and more is early case assessment (ECA) happening even earlier. This can be referred to as “very early case assessment” or “ECA in the wild” or “in-place ECA.” At the end of the day, it’s all about moving ECA forward to happen in-line with identification and collection so that organizations can save money, make decisions earlier, and simplify the eDiscovery process.

In reading the morning’s headlines, an interesting statistic stood out to me - 51% of lawyers have lost a case in the last 3 months alone because of eDiscovery problems. The source of this data is not clear, but it came through the Twitter feed of Symantec’s Enterprise Vault team. Taking the stat at face value, it’s astounding – eDiscovery problems as the cause of a lost case. There is something very disheartening about any case being lost on anything other than its merits.

At the recent ILTA 2010 conference I managed to get briefed on quite a few new product offerings. I wanted to pass along the highlights quickly to keep them timely. I may follow up some of these snapshots with full deep dives, but I will stick to the high level takeaways. Let’s get right to it.IPRO is finally taking some strides toward integrating products into a single platform that share the Eclipse database backbone. They have released an ‘Early Data Assessment’ application named Allegro built on Windows Presentation Foundation for a dynamic, better interface and a completely new processing engine. IPRO conservatively estimates 250 GB per day on a laptop or up to 750 GB on a workstation, all without exploding or copying email or file containers. IPRO sells software, not appliances, so performance will vary with your hardware. Like many recent performance claims, the devil is in the details of the test collection and hardware. Providers seem to be very concerned with ingestion performance since NUIX broke the 1 TB per day threshold.

In order to keep my ILTA feedback as fresh as possible, I have decided to try a combined post that just pulls the highlights for a number of the providers that briefed me at the conference. I expect to follow up most of these highlights with a more in-depth piece after the full demo. I have pretty much given up on trying to do full product demonstrations at conferences. You just do not have the time to do them justice in the midst of the hustle and bustle. Nextpoint brings a true Saas/cloud offering to the market with their Trial Cloud, Discovery Cloud and Cloud Preservation web products based on Amazon web services. Their $25/GB/month flat pricing definitely challenges the established players and makes an interesting option for small firms or companies with matters below the usual hosting cost/benefit thresholds. My experience with raw internet transfer limitations says that Fedex will be making a lot of money for matters over 5 GB in size, but everyone seems to be used to shipping hard drives these days anyway.

There is a lot of focus on software applications in eDiscovery – ECA, identification and collection, legal hold. Not to diminish the importance of these applications, but often lost in the hype is the critical importance of the storage hardware and software that support these eDiscovery applications.

Here is the last batch of takeaways from my briefings at the recent ILTA 2010. I have been able to schedule deep dives on some of the new offerings, so I hope to bring you more details on the new toys.

eDiscovery is one of those markets that feels like it fits into the traditional software world, but has enough idiosyncrasies to require expert services. Those services have usually come from law firms, EDD service providers, or consulting companies. Such companies offer experienced litigators, forensic examiners, project managers, and other eDiscovery-related experienced professionals that are critical to executing processes correctly.

While pontificating on industry trends at ILTA, I joked that Fedex was the ultimate beneficiary of corporations that take their eDiscovery to the Cloud. Scant weeks later, my good friend Pete Pepiton at Mimecast responded to my ad hoc remark with the headline, “Fedex’s Profit Doubles”. We have had various Secure File Transfer Protocols for years, yet the practical bandwidth limitations of most internet transmissions have taught us not to try sending more than 5 GB of files via the web. In plain language terms, the web was just not designed for the kind of large file burst capacity transfers that typify an eDiscovery collection. There is a good discussion of these limits by Stacey Higginbotham here.