Essays

Slowly, but surely, for a source here and a source there, the seeds of a rumor were planted into my brain over the past few weeks. People kept asking whether it was true that Symantec was about to buy Clearwell Systems. I know better than to answer those questions; sure, I could ask my contacts at either company, but they wouldn’t be able to comment. And, having been an analyst over a decade now, I know better than to believe every acquisition rumor I hear. In the past year, I’ve had folks practically confirm that Autonomy is buying Open Text and that Oracle is buying Autonomy. I don’t believe the rumors until I see the announcement. And so it is – Symantec buys Clearwell Systems for $390 million.

Expanding on Barry’s fast reaction, what will Symantec’s acquisition of Clearwell for $390 million mean to the existing Symantec/Clearwell eDiscovery customer base? Many companies with Enterprise Vault and Discovery Accelerator already utilize the Clearwell appliance for processing, ECA and review, whether on site or through a hosted provider. For them, it may mean breaking the volume based (per GB) licensing model that has dominated our market for far too long. The Symantec Information Management Group (in which I was a Product Manager) has dominated the email archiving market and recently added the Discovery Collector appliance to enable corporations to search, preserve and collect directly from unstructured ESI sources not being actively archived. Clearwell was the earliest partner to leverage the Discovery Accelerator API to import archive search results directly into a processing and review platform back when I was the Product Manager. So there is a long standing synergy between the product suites, although there is also functional overlap that will need to be clarified for prospective customers.

I spoke at a session of the AccessData user conference in Las Vegas recently. The trip was great, with the exception of losing $500 at the craps table. I love going to user conferences because I get a chance to chat with real folks practicing real corporate eDiscovery. Most can’t talk on the record, but I get a chance to hear the things they are really trying to do – real-life stuff. I was able to have some good chats after my session on eDiscovery trends. Interestingly, I heard some very similar themes from some very diverse users.

One of the first questions from Jason Velasco, the new eDJ CEO, was, “Any particular reason that eDJ is still on POP3/IMAP for email?” This may sound like techno-jargon, but he was asking why we were still thinking like solo practitioners in this age of cloud based solutions. Traditionally, running a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino server has not been worth the time and expense for most small businesses when most web hosting companies will route your email for free. As an old developer with half a dozen domains still hanging around, this free email routing via POP3 or IMAP protocol made sense. For a growing business with geographically remote users, it does not support our requirements for shared calendars and other collaboration tools. More importantly, my recent hardware loss was a personal wake up call to the fact that even solo practitioners should consider moving to synchronized cloud storage to enable universal search, access and security. I cannot count the times that I have had to send damaged attorney drives to Kroll or a friend with a clean room.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-06-07 09:30:24  Well it’s a fine day for me. I’ve started a new role at a new and growing company.  There is great technology and a changing legal landscape.  It’s still the same story that we’ve been saying for years.  But now I get to look at the industry from a different perspective.Yes, I admit it.  I’ve been [...]

No sooner did Recommind announce that it had patented predictive coding was there an article in law.com about the unhappy reaction of Recommind’s competitors. With the blogosphere chirping, I thought it a good idea to weigh in on this news. I read the Recommind press release, which states that the patent covers “systems and methods for iterative computer-assisted document analysis and review. This patent gives Recommind, its customers and its partners exclusive rights to use, host and sell systems and processes for iterative, computer-expedited document review.” It is not hard to see why competitors are reacting defensively to this release – it would appear at first glance that Recommind would be the only company allowed to provide predictive coding software.

A new eDiscovery malpractice lawsuit was filed this week, J-M Manufacturing v. McDermott Will & Emery. The central issue is the production of 3,900 privileged documents in a 250,000 document qui-tam investigation. Nate Raymond at Law.com/LTN gives a good summary here. This case was definitely the hot topic at last night’s Houston b-Discovery social meeting. In reading the complaint, a couple things jumped out at me.

Twice in the last month, I have monitored client enterprise system issues that were caused by ever-expanding back-up time. Now generally I am not down in the pits with the admins wrestling to keep massive communication, archiving, etc systems stable any more. However, I have recently been asked to serve as the corporate 30(b)(6) witness on enterprise systems. That means I need to understand their history, architecture and to monitor their ongoing health. Back-up windows have always been a necessary evil for enterprise systems that constantly ingest new documents. There are many replication and live fail-over systems that avoid taking systems off-line, but old fashioned tape back-up seems to dominate my client base. This means that legal searches, placing holds and retrievals are effectively stopped 4+ hours per day. The impact of a 15-25% productivity loss becomes all too clear when trying to give clients a realistic estimation for large PST migrations, archive conversions, legal hold initiatives and even critical case productions. Imagine telling the U.S. Attorney that their data will be another couple weeks just because we have to back up the system every night.

Microsoft’s SharePoint has achieved significant market traction over the past decade – various research studies show the level of organizations using SharePoint ranging from 50% - over 90%. Clearly, SharePoint is a force to be reckoned with. The eDiscovery market took notice of SharePoint in the last few years and we’ve seen archiving and collection solutions become available. While SharePoint has appeared in real cases, it has not reached critical mass as an eDiscovery issue just yet.

Things couldn’t be better for me these days at eDiscovery Journal. There is so much going on right now in the eDiscovery industry even with the annual “August Downtime” coming up in a few weeks. I have been on the phone every day since I started work speaking with eDJ’s clients and sponsors. The feedback on Barry and Greg has been exceptional (no surprise there) and I’m confident my move to the eDJ was a good one. One of the organizations that I’ve been working closely with over the past couple of weeks is IQPC. These are the folks that put on conferences around the globe on many different topics and industries. I have presented as well as attended quite a few of these events over the years, and have always enjoyed the curriculum and presenters. The good news is that eDJ and IQPC will be working together in the coming months on several of their programs.