Everlaw’s announcement of a ‘New World of #ediscovery’ peaked my interest. Frankly, I have not been inspired by any concept analytics since @SkipWalter recruited me into Attenex 15+ years ago. At first glance, the new Everlaw concept clustering bears a lot of resemblance to Attenex Patterns.
Is Everlaw’s new clustering revolutionary? Not in my opinion, but that does not lessen the potential market impact. Everlaw’s scability, usability and integration into the user workflows may prove attractive to customers wrestling with very large collections in Relativity or Reveal-Brainspace.
So what is new?
- Scale – 25 million documents visualized normally just creates big, clunky clusters/categories. Everlaw seems to have figured out how to show users the forest and the trees in the same UI.
- Time – Visualization with millions of documents usually takes a long time and has significant navigation lag. Everlaw’s demo videos show a very responsive navigation based on a new GPU acceleration process. I look forward to seeing real world speed with client collections rather than demo data.
- Predictions – The ability to overlay predicted relevance, coding tags and search criteria on the global concept clusters brings the learning models into the live visualization. Everlaw is correct that this has been traditionally broken into different review phases.
While I see this as a very strong offering by Everlaw, it still relies on hosting and processing these massive raw collections. I was hoping for visualization of the documents in place. That has been my digital Grail quest for far too long. #Microsoft can cluster in place with their recently renamed Purview eDiscovery (AED). It is a shame that the slow performance, size limits and lack of cluster visualization have killed this option for most larger matters for the majority of global corporate legal teams that I have encountered. The small startup I have been supporting has made this work for sets of live personal data, but that is not eDiscovery in place. Have you played with the new Everlaw clustering? Shoot me a note with your insights.
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
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