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One of my favorite client’s just put in her notice and that got me thinking about managing legal holds with our increasingly mobile workforce. We all know those key custodians who are the “go to” person when you need to understand the history and critical details on ESI data sources. These ‘system ’ or ‘perpetual’ custodians are named in almost every legal hold. Their departure can have a disproportionate impact on discovery events unless they can properly document and transfer knowledge prior to their departure. It took me a solid month to create the ‘discovery bible’ documenting process and sources when I left my last position as the ‘corporate custodian of record’ back in 2006. We had a contract in place to cover any future calls, affidavits or testimony that was reviewed and approved by Symantec’s legal department. That gave my old team confidence that they could call if stuck or needing confirmation. Not every custodian has that flexibility and many do not depart on friendly terms. So how can you mitigate the potential impact of legal hold custodian departures when you know that they are going to happen?

Launched in 2012, Xera is a web-based review platform available as a direct purchase or through their hosting partners. iConect continues to invest in user accessibility, mature workflow and new partner integrations for their HTML5 web interface. What does all that mean? The iConect team is betting that the market wants a dedicated review point product accessible by any level of user from any device. This bucks the ‘Platform’ trend that has had providers bolting processing, collections and legal hold code onto their review programs. Clearwell started this ‘feature sprawl’ race to the mythical Unified eDiscovery Platform more than five years back, but the market still seems to gravitate to ‘built for purpose’ tools that have feature depth as well as coverage breadth. Thus new functionality added to Xera such as the free iView metrics visualization module, customizable dashboard tiles, seven new localized languages (including Russian, Japanese and German) and classification by drag/drop.

In 2012 Microsoft acquired Yammer, one of the top enterprise collaboration platforms. Think of it as business Facebook with document and conversation sharing functionality. Enterprise class Office 365 customers got the first Yammer integration back in November 2013 and Microsoft just extended Yammer to midsized business and education plans. A sad fact of innovation is that businesses can and will adopt new technology well before the corporate caretakers (Legal, Compliance & Security) have the tools to handle the new source. Last year, I spent a lot of time researching discovery of ESI from mobile devices from an enterprise perspective. The primary goal of many mobile discovery strategies is to minimize the unique ESI stored on those devices to make them essentially irrelevant to typical civil litigation. As much as I would love to use that same ‘duplicate source’ exclusion strategy on files uploaded to Yammer, the broad collaboration functions add critical context that will clearly be relevant to some matters if they are allowed to persist for anything beyond a few months. So have your users found Yammer and started using it with IT’s blessing or on their own? If you have opted for the enterprise system with limited administrative functions, have you had to preserve or collect from it?

Last year’s eDJ Cloud adoption survey confirmed that our ‘early adopter’ consulting clients were not the only ones piloting or actively migrating email and files to Office 365™ and Google Vault™. My early research and the new Office 365 Collection category of the eDJ Matrix only found 3-4 products that could connect to and collect from Office 365 mailboxes and SharePoint sites. A year later that same category now shows 14 products with O365 connectors. I expected the ‘big box’ tech players like IBM, Symantec and Xerox to lead the integration efforts because their archiving offerings already had cloud infrastructure on their roadmaps. The old school forensic players, Guidance and Access Data, had to support the law enforcement collection requirements, so they would be right behind or ahead of the big boys. You know that a data source has become a ‘requirement’ rather than an option when the mid tier cloud Saas players such as @ Legal Discovery add Gmail™ and O365 to their remote collection capabilities.

As part of an interview request, I did a fast review of SaaS processing, hosting providers suitable for small firms looking for fixed price service. The market does not make this easy for you or for me to make sense of in the eDJ Matrix. The line between software, SaaS and professional services continues to blur as providers create web interfaces to upload/download ESI with hidden 3rd party tools and manual tech time behind the curtain. We originally differentiated between the traditional software and hosted service offerings with the assumption that the hosting providers were using a publicly available technology, example: Catalyst CR by Lighthouse eDiscovery listing indicates that Lighthouse manages/hosts the Catalyst CR platform. There are 115 eDJ Matrix SaaS technology offerings for the Small-Medium Business (SMB), but only 40 Managed Service SaaS offerings for the SMB. Frankly, this is because we only expanded the eDJ Matrix to cover service providers in our last year of analyst work. I started the eDJ Matrix to track and compare technologies many years ago and that is still the most mature data. Updating the Everlaw listing after my briefing last week was easy because they claimed to be free of 3rd party code. My check turned up two relatively new players in the SaaS eDiscovery market, Wind Legal and Escalate. Neither one gives enough hard information on their minimalist websites to confidently categorize them, but at least Wind discloses that they are a custom interface for Relativity.

I had almost thought that the venerable Yahoo LitSupport list had finally died when a classic question arrived this morning seeking replacement options for LexisNexis’s LAW. Although the poor poster will now undoubtedly get a wave of sales rep responses, they were probably prepared to deal with the spam. The good news is that there are LOTS of processing/EDA/ECA tools on the market, but most are server based platforms instead of desktop apps. The main difference is the sticker shock you will get looking at ‘modern’ Processing/ECA tools compared to the old school LAW flat purchase price. LAW’s low cost and lack of volume caps/costs is why it is still around. Responding to the request (yes, I still answer posts on the list and direct questions) got me thinking about how the classic small firm or private company solo lit support power user has been caught in the market transition.

Matter management platforms that are suitable for large enterprise customers are not as common as a simple Google search or general software purchasing site would lead you to believe. There are LOTS of home grown Saas offerings suitable for solo or small firms, but very few with mature, customizable workflow actually designed for corporate legal departments managing hundreds or thousands of legal matters. When Mitratech announced that their acquisition of Bridgeway would benefit these enterprise customers, I immediately wanted to see how many viable competitors were left in the market, which is not as easy as that sounds. I created a matter management category in our eDJ Matrix that found 9 solutions, but experience tells me that our categories require some research to tune and nudge the providers to update their listings. My quick impression is that one of the leaders in enterprise legal management (ELM) just absorbed another primary competitor. That leaves providers with broader offering suites such as Thomson Reuters, HP, Exterro and IBM. eDJ’s clients now have fewer options for matter management functionality without all the baggage.

Just as I was lamenting the shrinking field of Matter Management offerings suitable for enterprise level customers, the founders/execs of iManage announced that they have extracted their product from Autonomy-HP borg. I hope that the developers did not drink the IDOL Kool-Aid and are able to revert the database/index/analytics back to something practical for customers to deploy. This on the same day as U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer approved a $100 million settlement between a Dutch pension fund and HP over the Autonomy acquisition. Catch the Courthouse News Service article title, “Pensioners Get $100M for HP’s Takeover Flop”. Nice juicy terms such as “disasterous $10.3 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp.”, “botched acquisition” and “blamed former Autonomy executives for misrepresenting its revenue”. Fun.

With the announcement of Roper Industries acquisition of practice management software provider Aderant for $675M, my rough tally of publicly disclosed investments in the eDiscovery/Info Gov market space hit $2.2B with a billion this week. Rob Robinson keeps a good chronological list of M&A activity here. A couple interesting notes for your consideration. 2014 had 34 announcements, but only quantified roughly $92M in press releases. I know that unquantified acquisitions of familiar private players such as Applied Discovery, TeamConnect and Falcon Discovery represent several times that total, but 2015’s higher rate of disclosure demonstrates more mature, outside investment in our market. We all discount HP’s 2011 $11B Autonomy acquisition as an aberration in the market, but 2015 shows that eDiscovery is slowly integrating into the global enterprise technology/services market space. Although Aderant does not publish their revenue, Roper’s bullish projection of $125M in 2016 revenue for Aderant leads me to ballpark their 2015 revenue around $100M. That give this deal a 6-7x multiple, which beats most deals that I analyzed in 2014. Nice to see the multiples creep back up and enough M&A to justify the $15B+ market estimates batted around between the ivory tower analyst shops.

As I conduct my 2015 Analytics research, I am asking interview respondents how they think the trend towards analytics and automation will impact eDiscovery careers and roles in the next five years. I have just finished my first round of interviews and already have a couple interesting tidbits to share. We all know that technology has the long term potential to replace, reduce or transform jobs in any field. My initial respondents certainly felt that automation of technical collection, processing and culling tasks would reduce technician headcount, but not impact ECA, search crafting and other tasks requiring human discretion. Interestingly enough, they did NOT think that PC-TAR review would eliminate full time paralegal or counsel positions. Instead, they felt that the swollen ranks of firm associates and contract attorney reviewers were vulnerable to market pressure instead. Not from PC-TAR adoption, but from proportionate, targeted collections resulting from maturing eDiscovery teams empowered by the new Federal rules and caselaw. You don’t need PC-TAR for a single skilled practitioner to tackle a couple thousand email and files with a modern eDiscovery platform like Relativity, IPRO, CaseData or others. A decade ago, savvy paralegals loaded small custodial self-collections using Summation’s eDocs & eMail module (sidenote: the requirements for that module were done on bev naps at my favorite SF bar – Plouf). Despite all the technical limitations and problems, that desktop software met the self service needs for most small matters without a huge eDiscovery budget. It is my view that the use of analytics on in-place enterprise data to make proportionate, defensible collections will return us to those days for a large percentage of matters. There will always be massive class action, EEOC, regulatory or IP matters that require large scale PC-TAR or linear review, but these should be the exception. Smart providers and practitioners will adapt their offerings and skills to meet the new demands. More insight as my interviews continue. I still have some time slots open for corporate or firm practitioners willing to share their perspective on analytics in eDiscovery, so send me an email or at least take the survey!