For some of the new readers, eDJ Briefings are a chance to catch up with the latest from providers kind enough to sit down with me and talk candidly. At Legal Week I no longer do formal presentations or demos. Instead I ask execs to give me the top three points they would like to convey to you and the market. We sometimes get off track and you can imagine that I do not hold back when my perspective is asked for. My goal is to cut through the marketing fluff and noise to answer the ‘Why should I care?’ question. The scheduling change from the usual Tuesday-Thursday conference had me running back and forth in the Hilton-Sheraton-Warwick triangle. I had to decline a host of last second briefing requests that I hope to get around to. I also had multiple private meetings with peers with startups still in stealth mode that I hope to report on soon. If I missed you in New York, please reach out and understand if I am booked up for a while. Enjoy my quick takes.

Everlaw

AJ Shankar – Founder/CEO; Colleen Haikes – Dir. Corporate Communications; Tyler Petersen – VP, NA Sales

I enjoyed catching up with AJ and Everlaw since their big round of funding last November. I have previously described the new generation of Cloud eDiscovery platforms as ‘simplified, self-service eDiscovery for the SMB market’. Everlaw, DISCO and Logikcull previously occupied that category in my market perspective. AJ happily challenged that market/analyst preconception, making the case that Everlaw hosts large, complex matters for Fortune 100 corporate counsels, 78 of the Am Law 100, the U.S. Justice Department, and all 50 state attorneys general offices. This month Everlaw has more than 100 active cases in the TB size range. Having the DOJ sponsor Everlaw’s FedRAMP application certainly supports Everlaw as a large enterprise provider.  A couple my favorite AJ quips, “Being intuitive does not make a product less functional. There is no reason why you should be miserable using a platform.”

Everlaw released a new feature to help legal teams easily redact audio and video evidence.

Beyond redefining Everlaw’s historical and evolving market position, AJ indicated that the platform’s expansion will stay in the eDiscovery lane with legal hold, cloud connectors and legal drafting tools. While others may feel the market is saturated, AJ sees so much room to better find the evidence, especially with all the growth in new data sources and video. Everlaw will ‘follow the data’ with better features like native spreadsheet and video redactions as Zoom/Teams evidence pours in.

Luminance

Orianne Auger – Head of Discovery

My first briefing with Luminance, an #ArtificialIntelligence platform covering contract lifecycle processing, transaction diligence and discovery workflows/modules. Luminance was founded in 2015 by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge and has 400+ global customers in 60+ countries. The platform is available via cloud and on-prem. The volume-based licenses includes unlimited users or project managers. Now that we understand Luminance’s basic offerings, Here is my best understanding of their market approach and differentiators.

Luminance uses unsupervised and supervised machine learning to build custom language models for legal processes. The UI  communicates to attorneys with visual analytics and augmented review that uses highlighting and recommendations rather than making judgments. Their goal is to demystify the technology to improve accessibility for counsel. Luminance was one of the first such systems to be used in the Old High Bailey, which I consider a very conservative venue for such high tech.  Ms. Auger, “You do not need a certification to find evidence. Tech should not be a barrier to practicing law.“

Reveal-Brainspace

This briefing reminded me why I generally decline briefings on the exhibit floor. Unlike years past, I was scheduled to meet with marketing folks rather than execs, but I blamed that on the last second reshuffle of LegalWeek. Neither of the marketing folks made the booth. First, the Reveal booth was much smaller than I expected based on their heavy sponsorship presence on the LITE stages, banners and such. I had a good, quick product session with the poor folks tasked with an unexpected media briefing. I saw multiple prospects hover around before wandering off because there were not enough resources to engage them. The good news is that potential customers wanted information about Reveal-Brainspace. The bad news is that some left without it. I felt bad about tying up a floor resource for 20 minutes. Here are the top take-aways that I could glean.

Reveal version 11.0 is the first unified architecture of Mindseye (processing), Brainspace (analytics) and NexLP (review/storybuilding/analytics). Version 11.0 is not ready for release, but they can demo it. The unified architecture is important because it enables customers to stay in the platform from processing through production. At this point, that is what they are covering. Other platforms have expanded upstream into legal hold, collections, records management and more. Reveal is staying in their lane for now.

My impression is that their distinct channel partners have continued to resell or host their individual products. This platform transition is always tricky and I expect that some partners may evaluate options that might be less competitive in the Reveal 11.0 platform. I think that we will have to wait and see how Reveal’s channel network reacts to their evolution. They have been announcing partnerships at a breakneck pace leading up to LegalWeek, so far so good.

Reveal 11.0 has a streamlined dashboard that they pitch as being much more approachable for adoption ease. This echoes something I heard from other review/analytics players, intuitive usability over complicated UI. The messaging of fit for purpose workflows should resonate with counsel.

Onna

Hanah Johnson – Sr Comm Manager; Scott McVeigh – Industry Principal

Onna is a cloud platform with 30+ connectors to collect from the primary cloud data sources. Onna collects, normalizes and augments that data for the EDA process to make sense of it prior to promotion of a rich subset to traditional review platforms.  Onna entered the market with Slack connector for collection and preservation of conversations. Slack’s popularity and lack of eDiscovery/Compliance functionality created a perfect opportunity for Onna’s growth. Their primary customer base consists of large tech firms, media and other G-Suite corporations.

The latest Onna release provides in-place preservation for Slack and Google Vault with M365 and Box soon to come. Future vision expands on their API for partners to directly connect and innovate on Onna as a knowledge management and hosted content library.

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.

Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer a journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations. 

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