Essays

Get used to “the cloud” playing a major role in eDiscovery. Whether organizations source cloud-based storage, EDD processing and hosted review, or application via software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, the cloud is of interest to a large majority of consumers. While general market data shows that many information management professionals have concerns about SaaS and cloud-based services, the legal market – generally more conservative when it comes to cutting-edge technology – is a cloud pioneer.

The eDJ Group’s corporate consulting does not usually touch tactical matters. Most corporate clients already have good service provider relationships or we partner up with a local provider to keep our role clearly on the strategic requirements, goals, technology and workflow. Despite our best intentions, you sometimes have to jump into the fray when a client says jump. That was how I found myself once more elbow deep in batch scripts on a large preservation collection project with a looming deadline. Every time we tried to transfer executables, .BAT files or anything except normal MS Office files we ran into security system blocks. It quickly became apparent that even with administrator rights, we could not run or move the remote collection packages or scripts within their environment. I try sending zips via email. They never arrive. Next I dust of my FTP site and get everything uploaded. Their firewall blocks all FTP connections. Final resolution? We had to resort to a freemail account. Success!

Recent changes to Facebook promise to let friends share content more easily and to allow users to follow the lives of others through subscriptions. The more freely information flows, the better, right? Based on the way FaceBook and Twitter usage has grown, that would certainly seem to be the case. As we pointed out in our information governance webinar with ViaLumina, Ltd., one of the primary value propositions of IG is creating business value through better usage of information. The other side of the IG value coin is risk management; the free flow of information through social media presents real risks – both for corporations and individuals. More and more client inquiries focus on collection of social media content. FINRA is one regulatory body that has state that social media content must be treated like any other electronic content. To that end, many archiving vendors now have ways to capture Twitter feeds and store alongside emails and instant messages. Depending on how active a Twitter user the employee is, this could result in a lot of data flowing into the archive. With the increasing usage of social media, organizations are looking to get ahead of the curve in terms of collecting it.

It seems like there is always some kind of job movement in the eDiscovery marketplace. It seems I’m constantly getting updates on LinkedIn and Plaxo on the status of someone’s new role at a company. This last weekend’s batch of LinkedIn updates I received inspired me to write up a post on mentorship in the eDiscovery industry in the current job market.

EDJ is in the midst of creating a research report analyzing the HP acquisition of Autonomy (look for further details on that next week). There is a lot of negative market reaction to the premium that HP is paying (over 10x Autonomy’s revenues), but not a lot of attention being paid to the real issues. The latest example is the escalating war of words between Oracle and Autonomy. Oracle claims that Autonomy was shopped to them and they turned down the offer due to the high price; Autonomy denies the claim. Oracle then releases the Powerpoint presentation slides used in the Autonomy meeting as proof of the claim. While the industry can’t divert its eyes from this tabloid-like news, the real issues at the heart of the acquisition get ignored.

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The new eDJ Tech Matrix has been gaining steam, which has required lots of deep product dive sessions and new features to categorize. I thought that I should call out some interesting highlights:TotalDiscovery from BIA is now offering a subscription pricing for legal hold notification at $1/Custodian/Month. Yet another sign that eDiscovery is moving towards true cloud subscription licensing.Mitratech’s TeamConnect is also available on a Saas subscription model. It has been a while since I got to dig into their offerings and I was impressed by the customizable dashboards and sharp J2EE-based platform. I was pleased to see that they had already added the new L600 series UTMBS eDiscovery code set that was ratified by the LEDES Oversight Committee on July 13, 2011. The ongoing project is drafting expanded eDiscovery activity and expense codes, so I hope to hear of more legal billing systems incorporating the new codes.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-10-07 10:51:40  I was lucky enough to attend the Law Tech Texas conference on Wednesday (October 5) in Dallas put on by Texas Lawyer (an ALM publication). For my Twitter friends, the feed is #lawtechtx.The keynote was led by John Ansbach, the Chief Legal Officer at M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) who focused on technology in the legal [...]

For quite some time, I’ve seen the eDiscovery market as an entry channel for broader information management solutions. Many of the expertise location and knowledge management applications of the early 2000’s found a home in the social network analysis function that can help in early case assessment and review. Machine learning and predictive analytics are helping make predictive coding and tagging a reality. And, we’re starting to evolve beyond just eDiscovery. Our recent information governance survey results showed that a majority of respondents believe that auto-classification is the future of information governance. Such solutions can help organizations with defensible disposition and storage management.

EDJ's report, "Analyzing HP's Acquisition of Autonomy" is now available. On August 18, 2011, H-P agreed to buy U.K. software firm Autonomy Corp. for just over $10 billion, a multiple of more than 10x Autonomy’s estimated revenue for next year. Those kinds of numbers grab attention – and they raise the inevitable scrutiny of all affected by the acquisition: customers, competitors, employees, former employees, and shareholders.

Big Data was a top theme in StoredIQ’s Industry Advisory Board last week. The StoreIQ team believe in the ongoing transformation of enterprise digital landfills from trash to the treasure trove promised by business analytic mining of “Big Data”. The fundamental idea is that immature repositories of unstructured ESI are a liability, while a mature content lifecycle environment (people, process and technology) makes that wealth of information work for the benefit of the company. Let’s face it, storage is relatively cheap compared to 10 years ago. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the key factors to calculating the ‘true cost of ownership’ for a mythical gigabyte of Office files, but the cloud market has already given us a solid baseline cost. Amazon S3 and their competitors can make a profit at 6-14¢/GB/month, so that pretty much confirms that actual storage is cheap.