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When the bench has had enough discovery bickering from the parties, it can ‘divide the baby’ and impose it’s own discovery plan. In the case of Armstrong Pump, Inc. v. Hartman, No. 10-CV-446S, 2014 WL 6908867 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 9, 2014), the court appears to have lost patience with both parties and decided that a set of 13 search terms run on ALL of the Plaintiff’s corporate ESI will retrieve actual responsive content. I have served as an expert and defense strategist in too many cases to pretend that anyone outside of the matter can actually determine whether these terms will be effective. So my perspective on the case should be taken as a more general commentary than a professional, informed opinion on this specific case. The K&L summary is a fast read and has a couple interesting points.

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.

Several year's ago, my friend Craig Ball put forth the Edna Challenge, a quintessential small matter with minimal ESI and a $1,000 budget. Earlier this week I posted a blog about SaaS providers and concluded with an opinion that the eDiscovery market is not friendly to smaller litigants, namely non-public companies and boutique firms without litigation support teams. One of the new providers that I called out stepped up to own the fact that they only cover a narrow slice of the discovery lifecycle. Escalate did not dodge my unfiltered take. Instead, they sent me a demo login and asked for my feedback, good and bad. Well here it is:

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.

Something occurred to me while working on my upcoming Ipro Innovations session on ‘Who’s Making the Jump to the Cloud & Why?’ The fundamental role of IT was to create and maintain the dynamic technology infrastructure that supported the applications, connectivity and storage required by the business users. Over time, simple server-client applications evolved into customized enterprise platfoms that made strong IT department essential for competitive corporations and firms. Long standing virtualization and centralized storage trends have made these enterprise platforms relatively hardware agnostic, a key requirement for migration to a public Cloud environment. Now that CIO’s everywhere seem to be sending pilot balloons into the Cloud, is there a role for the traditional IT administrator? Many traditional processing/hosting service providers are asking the same question about their future role in the eDiscovery lifecycle. Are they needed when the ESI is created, collected, processed, reviewed and produced in the Cloud? Because that is the direction that companies small and large seem to be headed. It will be a couple years before Microsoft is giving away fully integrated Equivio Zoom functionality to all Office 365 customers, but sharp providers and IT should be looking at that road map and redefining their own roles if they want to stay relevant and employed. I will share some high points from my session or you can participate in person if you happen to be in Phoenix next week. Meanwhile, here is a fun graphic from my deck.

We had a customer question on whether they should/could disable read receipts in corporate email. There was little business value in their vertical for active use of read receipts (i.e. they did not have a large sales division) and a smart attorney on the stakeholder team thought that they posed more risk than reward. Doug Austin’s blog about Fox v. Leland Volunteer Fire/Rescue Department Inc. is a good read on the potential risks of ‘automatically authenticating’ the fact that a custodian saw a specific message, even if I can think of a dozen scenarios where read receipts falsely report custodian awareness. Shutting down read receipt functionality on Exchange or Office 365 is a simple Powershell Cmdlet:

For the last several years, eDJ has conducted surveys that confirmed the accelerating trend of companies moving their messaging, collaboration and other IG systems to the Cloud. This year I am interested in whether consumers are starting to actually conduct discovery in the Cloud as well. My ongoing eDJ poll ‘Where do you conduct eDiscovery’ has yet to turn up anyone who ‘knows’ that their eDiscovery is being conducted in the public Cloud out of the 16 respondents so far. I know that many popular hosted platforms and well known channel providers use the public Cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, etc) for secured servers and storage. This makes me wonder if most customers are either not asking the right questions or if savvy providers have figured out ways to ‘rebrand’ the public Cloud with ‘private instances’. Sounds like I need to add some new features and categories to the eDJ Matrix to separate the apples from oranges.

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.