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The worlds of academic research and eDiscovery do not collide often enough. All too many practitioners assumed that first generation eDiscovery processing, search and collection technology were accurate and effective. I will stay off of my soap box on validation testing, but my long term readers know my passion for defensible, transparent process and tools. All too many ‘academic white papers’ in eDiscovery are funded from provider marketing budgets and even academic organizations such as the governmental Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) can have their results ‘reinterpreted’ by spin doctors to sell products to consumers desperate for reassurance. The hype cycle around Predictive Coding/Technology Assisted Review (PC/TAR) has focused around court acceptance and actual review cost savings. The last couple weeks have seen a bit of blogging kerfuffle over the conclusions, methods and implications of the new study by Gordon Cormack and Maura Grossman, “Evaluation of Machine-Learning Protocols for Technology-Assisted-Review in Electronic Discovery”. Pioneering analytics guru Herbert L. Roitblat of OrcaTec has published two blogs (first and second links) critical of the study and its conclusions. As much as I love a spirited debate and have my own history of ‘speaking truth’ in the public forum, I can’t help wondering if this tussle over Continuous Active Learning (CAL) vs. Simple Active Learning (SAL) has lost view of the forest while looking for the tallest tree in it.

The overwhelming majority of corporations allow users to connect their personal smart phones to access work email and apps, called a Bring Your Own Device or BYOD policy. As I was publishing the results of my 2014 Mobile Discovery Survey, I ran across a rather inflammatory blog by security software company Avast! that detailed all the personal information retrieved from 20 Android phones that users had sold on eBay. I have heard stories from several security specialists concerning overseas hackers who set up web sites to troll for used phones from users with email addresses that match to company domains. I have never been able to corroborate those stories with any published stories or studies, but I long since updated client termination and BYOD policies and practices to make sure that outdated phones were wiped properly. The crux of Avast!’s bit of fear mongering is that a simple factory reset or even a remote ‘wipe’ will NOT actually delete or overwrite data on an Android OS phone. Ars Technica has a nice plain language explanation though some of their information was a bit out of date. The key point is that without encrypting the phones, the information is still there and can be recovered with forensic or even simple commercial software. Given that 21.4% of survey respondents (N=28) rely on users to manage mobile device security and access, this does raise a serious concern for corporations.

As I have been wrapping up my briefings with analytics providers and hearing them describe their ‘differentiating features’, I have been expanding the key features to support the new market categories for the eDJ Matrix. The surveys will run for another week or two, so if you want to get access to the direct results or the report, just log in and answer seven quick questions for Participating Member access when they are published. I have conducted roughly 15 focus interviews with active consumers and service providers. This is where you learn the really interesting bits. I have another week or so of briefings and demos of the latest technology releases. I will try to put out eDJ Briefs on these sessions, but expect them to be completely focused around user workflows and differentiating functions. There could be more analytic features if someone brings me a real game changer, but I feel pretty solid on the coverage when mapped against my new buying categories. That’s right. My intent is to only create categories that align with the way real people are consuming this technology, instead of the way that marketers seem to think that you should buy it.

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?

Why Aren’t Lawyers Using PC, or TAR, or PC-TAR, or CAR, or CAR-TAR, or Whatever We Call It?It’s been a long time—too long—since I have written anything for the eDJ Group. Once of my excuses is that I’ve been spending some time writing for some other sites, or put another way, exercising my inner snark. Several weeks ago, Greg Buckles posted preliminary results of his survey on analytics usage in eDiscovery. Greg then questioned his own results, or at least the raw statistics generated from his survey, presenting what he saw as the actual results: "My best estimation is that only 5-7% of matters that reach the review stage . . . actually use some form of PC-TAR."I’m not surprised at his general conclusion, though I do feel disappointed at those numbers. We all should feel that way; just a few years ago, machine learning technology represented something genuinely new and amazing. Even within the over-hyped, commercial blitz of the eDiscovery industry, predictive coding was genuinely promoted by many as the way that the ever-rising costs of eDiscovery, created by technology, could be solved by technology.

Amazon and Microsoft cloud storage and servers have driven the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for online data storage down into the 10-15¢/GB/month range depending on whether you need a dedicated, encrypted appliance or other special security for your sensitive data. The bottom line is that this has eDJ Group clients challenging traditional $15-30/GB/month hosting fee proposals. Why pay 100x the market rate for a provider or law firm with a dedicated data center? The response to my fast survey on the pro-portion of evidence vs. collection size has been great (lots of folks wanting to download the 2014 Analytics Adoption Report), so with Mikki’s 2014 legal hold surveys wrapping up, I have created two fast surveys (consumer/provider) with a couple simple questions to get some insight into the changing hosting fee market. For more than a decade, monthly $/GB hosting fees have provided a surprisingly large portion of provider revenue and profit. AWS and Azure have challenged that model and we all want to understand how customer attitudes have changed. What is a fair price for the expertise and liability of managing cloud storage for discovery collections?

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: