Search results for: simple

While there are some common trends, every company is different and the disconnect between legal and IT is so large that gauging eDiscovery purchasing habits is complex.

Here is the last batch of takeaways from my briefings at the recent ILTA 2010. I have been able to schedule deep dives on some of the new offerings, so I hope to bring you more details on the new toys.

Officially, the U.S. recession started in December 2007 and ‘ended’ last June. Unofficially, we all know of talented people who are still looking for work. Anecdotally, the eDiscovery market seemed to bottom out in the third quarter of last year. I know that I saw a lot more resumes floating around LegalTech 2010 than in previous years. That led me to wonder who had closed shop or been acquired in the last couple years. I figured that one of the better ways to chase this list down would be to compare the LTNY Exhibitor lists from year to year. This exercise turned up some interesting numbers and facts.

We all know that Office 2007 and later files are a different file format from your traditional DOC/XLS/PPT files, but I thought that it was worth exploring them with an eye on their potential impact in eDiscovery activities. First we need a simple explanation of what changed from Office 2003 to Office 2007 formats. Prior to 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files were each proprietary binary file formats that required the application or a viewer to open. Office 2007 adopted an XML-based file format called Office Open XML that uses a common set of XML files within a compressed Zip container. These Extensible Markup Language (XML) files are simple text files that resemble HTML. The files now have an X or M added to their traditional file extensions to indicate whether they are flat XML or if they have embedded macro content. So DOC, XLS and PPT have become DOCX/DOCM, XLSX/XLSM and PPTX/PPTM. There are many advantages to the open formats, but we will focus on the potential discovery impact.

While conducting my discovery scenario testing on Exchange 2010, I found that Microsoft had made two steps forward along with what seems like several strange steps back. In the early days of corporate networks, personal computers and enterprise software, administration was reserved for wizardly geeks who had mastered various esoteric command line languages. I recall the blessed feeling of relief when I stumbled through my first administrative GUI (Graphical User Interface). The admin GUI brought mastery of systems and applications into the realm of the merely mortal user. When evaluating software, I tend to view applications that force the user to learn command switches and syntax as immature. As a counterpoint, I acknowledge that the command line functionality is fantastic for an advanced user to run batch scripts or even automate functionality. When I first looked at Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta (only version available at the time), I was astounded to find that they had killed off ExMerge, the administrative utility used for years to import and export PST files from mailboxes.

Searching for a single term within a document is pretty black or white. It is either present or not. When you step up to searching based on phrases, proximity terms, concepts and compound term clusters things start to get a bit less absolute. Yet, simple lists of terms are generally either overly broad or are missing relevant ESI. The simplest search index does not store information about the position(s) of terms within a document. Modern search indexes such as Lucene, FAST, IDOL and others rely on term position and other information to derive clusters of two or more related terms (concepts) and relevance weighting factors. During a recent briefing call with Mike Wade, CTO of Planet Data, we delved into some of the challenges that Planet Data faced expanding their Exego Early Cost Assessment platform to support concept search and ECA workflow. What really caught my attention was the ability to extract two separate versions of the text from documents, both the raw unformatted text AND the rendered view. Alternatively, they have developed a merged rendering that embeds the extracted object text in-line with the viewed text.

Legal Tech NY 2011 is less than a week away. It just so happens that we launched eDJ at LTNY 2010, so we have been working hard on some new tools. We have completely rewritten my old eDiscovery Application Matrix and transformed it into the eDJ Tech Matrix. The most noticeable immediate change is our new capability to compare individual applications or features across entire company offerings. The eDiscovery market is still relatively young and it is dominated by start-ups with a single software offering. However, we have seen acquisitions by global technology companies such as Autonomy, EMC, Iron Mountain and IBM. That means you might want to see how an individual product compares AND then see all the features offered by a company. Up till this point, the roughly 100 applications in the Tech Matrix had been submitted exclusively by users and the providers.

In some ways I feel like I missed out on parts of Legal Tech NY 2011. My focus this year was to fit in as many roadmap briefings as possible. The sheer scale and audience focus of LTNY has forced providers to plan major product releases and announcements around the show. Product managers would ask me, “Didn’t you see our press release?” Even if I saw it, there were so many in the eDJ search queue that I could not remember them all. So instead of keynotes, sessions, panels or even the exhibition floor, I spent virtually all of my time hearing about the very latest products, features and where the providers think that eDisovery is going this year. With so many briefings, I am going to stick to short summaries and high points. There were quite a few providers who did not have a coherent message or any new functionality significant enough to mention. On with the fun.

Continuing my high level take-aways from my roadmap briefings at LegalTech NY 2011. Predictive coding was one of the hot topics at this show, but it seemed to mean something different to every provider. There is enough confusion around the issue to merit a solid research topic for eDJ in the upcoming months. I know that The eDiscovery Institute is looking to do a comparative research project on predictive coding in 2011-2012, so we can look forward to some hard numbers going into next year from them. On to the provider updates:

As we head into “LegalTech season,” I would normally expect some hyperbole around not-so-well defined terms like “ECA” or “the cloud.” And while there is certain to be some marketing hype around the show, it feels like this year will feature more pragmatism. I expect to see more messaging around actual benefits that solutions have delivered and less “generic” messaging about how many additional features a platform or service has implemented.