Essays

Happy Thanksgiving!! As we approach the eve of Thanksgiving, I wanted to take a moment to give a heartfelt "Thank You" to all of the loyal blog readers and clients. With your continued support, we continue to grow and implement our unique business model. There is so much to be thankful for these days here at the eDiscoveryJournal and eDJ Group. Over the past few months we have been carefully planning our next steps. I wanted to give everyone an update on our direction and how we’ve moved beyond a niche blog site.A few weeks ago we announced the creation of the eDJ Group, Inc. Now headquartered in Austin, Tx, the eDJ Group is now the main business entity for our organization which all of our products and services roll-up. The eDJ Group is made up of several practice areas: 1) Strategic Consulting, 2) Analyst Services, 3) the eDiscoveryJournal, and 4) eDJ Matrix.

The cost of storage has come up in several recent engagements for firms and corporations. I started thinking about while we were brainstorming in preparation for our recent webinar on enabling expiry on archives. Calculating a Return on Investment (ROI) on a legal hold initiative includes the recovered cost of storage when you can eliminate 40-80% of your non-records. It was pointed out that storage costs have dropped so much that eDiscovery costs have superseded them as the primary motivation for cleaning house. My panelists trotted out several figures ($/GB) from well known analysts for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of storage. I feel that Amazon S3, Rackspace and other global cloud services have clearly set the market price on storage at less than 15¢/GB. Yep, that’s right 15¢/GB. I can recall early eDiscovery hosting RFP’s at $30-50/GB/Month for online storage. That was just for storage, but it made an easy argument for in-house systems when many matters can run for 2-3 years or longer. Hosting providers generally lead with their processing and review offerings and tend to bury the ongoing storage costs deep in their bids, even though these recurring costs can represent the highest margin item on the engagement.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Mikki Tomlinson. Published: 2011-11-29 16:37:22  I was happy to see Greg Buckles’ post Has eDiscovery Disenfranchised Our Paralegals.  The answer is, wholeheartedly, YES!  So, why am I happy?  I am happy because someone finally brought the topic up publicly. It is a very real problem that the legal industry needs to address.  Instead, however, we seem to be treating the [...]

Currently, we are working on a “State of Information Governance” report, wherein we slice the numbers from the survey a bit further to gauge how mature the practice of IG is. While the general results of the survey show IG gaining traction within organizations, the actual practice of IG seems to be fairly basic thus far. The State of IG report will go further into the many reasons we say this, but we wanted to share one statistic that shows IG programs have yet to completely evolve.

In my last post, we explored the relative cost of Amazon S3 Cloud storage compared to traditional hosting provider costs. Despite the potential cost savings of servers and storage in ‘The Cloud’, I am not yet seeing many firms or corporations jumping to move their eDiscovery to the Cloud. In a recent analyst briefing on our eDJ top 2012 eDiscovery Trends, Barry Murphy posited that legal and compliance resisted the leap beyond the firewall until they had more public success stories and caselaw. So what are they worried about? Data security was the first concern of a recent law firm client. “How can I assure my client’s that their sensitive ESI is safe and that we are not inadvertently waiving privilege?” Good question. So I went looking for a good answer.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Mikki Tomlinson. Published: 2011-12-07 13:24:18  Another successful Executive Counsel Institute - eDiscovery for the Corporate Market event (“The Exchange”) was held inLos Angeles December 5 and 6.  I have participated in this conference multiple times in the past and, once again, was not let down.  The Los Angeles meeting, lead by Browning Marean of DLA Piper and Robert Brownstone of [...]

Continued from Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? - Part 1…The second concern regards how to move the actual data to and from the Cloud storage. Many providers will tell you that you can just upload your data directly via web or ftp. STOP HERE. Normal File Transfer Protocol or web page upload is NOT protected. So use an SFTP equivalent or better yet look at the previous paragraph and only send encrypted packages. Internet backbone speeds still limit the practical size of uploads to 5-10 GB unless you have a dedicated pipe to your provider. Data uploads that take longer than 1-2 hours may crash or bog down your own network. eDiscovery performance is all about getting that large collection on line for review as fast as possible. But just as the speed and performance wars died from lack of interest, I think that most legal users have come to understand that it may take a day or two to properly handle and process potential evidence. While service providers and certain global corporations may have a high proportion of large (>10 GB) collections or productions, a quick check with a couple clients revealed that only 10-15% of their collections might need to be loaded directly by the host. I wrote a piece last year about how Fedex may be the true winner in the migration to the cloud.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Mikki Tomlinson. Published: 2011-12-13 16:21:27  I have spent countless hours over the last 5 years searching for the cure to many of my e-discovery ills: technology that will hold data in place for purposes of complying with preservation obligations in litigation.  I am not referring to sending legal hold notices to custodians of data or self-collection.  I am referring to actually locking [...]

One recurring topic that keeps popping up was Predictive Coding, or Technology Assisted Review (we’ll use the defined term "PC-TAR" to avoid controversy from this point on). We know that using PC-TAR will help save money in the overall eDiscovery process. Albert Barsocchini recently did an article on “Ediscovery Production Without Review” last week and quoted an attorney at a major law firm that said they are producing documents without any reviewing any documents in a linear review process. This immediately raised the mental flag in my head as this was the first that I’ve heard of someone going straight to production using PC-TAR technology without first doing a human review of the responsive documents.

What a year 2011 has been for the eDiscovery market. The Analysts at eDJ put our heads together and reviewed what transpired in 2011 and what kind of trends we will see in 2012. As a thank you for your support throughout the year, eDJ’s report “eDiscovery Trends: 2011 Year in Review and Forecasting 2012” is available for free download. 2011 saw trends around pragmatic ideas such as managing eDiscovery as a process and taking control of Information Governance (IG), while also hinting at forthcoming heat around “the Cloud” and predictive coding. We also saw the beginning of the rise of the “eDiscovery platform,” with vendors advertising solutions that could manage the full eDiscovery lifecycle. And, there was continued merger and acquisition (M & A) activity in the Discovery marketplace, with two acquisitions in the “bombshell” category given the premiums paid by acquirers. Symantec bought Clearwell in June, 2011 for close to $400 million (a premium of approximately 8x Clearwell’s revenues), while HP bought Autonomy for about $11 billion (a premium of more than 10x).