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Enjoy my ad hoc observations and opinions on last year’s market and the trends that I am watching:• Dramatic, transparent M&A activity. >$2.5 B compared to $92M in 2014. Even if you remove $1.6B from acquisitions of Kofax and Aderant as being eDiscovery adjacent, we still had 800-1000% investment growth. • Massive, slow migration from enterprise data centers to outsourced private cloud, Office 365, Google Docs and other SaaS/IaaS solutions. More

Ever wonder what happened to your favorite local or even national vendor? Last week’s rebranding announcement of UBIC/Evolve/TechLaw to FRONTEO forced me to do some overdue maintenance on the eDJ Matrix and got me thinking of brands. We all know that the eDiscovery market is slowly consolidating as it matures. Just watching DTI gobbling up regional shops like pac-man reinforces the “Join, or Die” message that I have blogged on far too many times. A couple quick searches and database checks revealed that most brands disappear in full mergers or acquisitions such as the formation of Omnivere or Consilio. So the FRONTEO rebranding is almost a hybrid merger/branding exercise. TCDI just renamed themselves CVFox and CSDisco is now just DISCO. As our market matures and providers try to differentiate themselves from every other Relativity partner, I expect to see more companies shed older generic name elements such as documents, solutions, services, copy and even discovery.

As I return to take briefings and monitor all my news engines, I am struck by the challenges faced by all of kCura’s competitors. There is no denying that Andrew Sieja has maneuvered Relativity into being the default hosted review platform for large discovery matters. The majority of recent eDJ RFP engagements for managed services have boiled down to what flavor of Relativity the client wants vs. whether they are willing to fight their retained counsel over using an alternative platform. Thus the differentiation theme I keep seeing in my provider briefings. They all trot out what they can do better and cheaper than Relativity as if that should convince AmLaw buyers to jump ship. We saw a similar hype cycle with Clearwell before the product went to hide in the Symantec portfolio. (to be fair, this seems to be the fate of EVERY eDiscovery product acquired by a software Borg) It will be interesting to see how this plays out against the Microsoft-Equivio team’s steady progress towards free in-place eDiscovery functionality. Returning to my briefing by the TCDI Fox team, let’s give you the highlights:

I decided to just get you my raw notes and impressions from the exhibit hall floor, formal briefings and shop talk.First Impressions:• Orange continues to be the new black. Seems that everyone wants to imitate kCura• Automation is everywhere. Frequent flyer marketing terms include Simple, Efficient, Automated, Integrated.• What’s with all the empty booths? Kept seeing booths without reps.• Good size crowd of attendees, but serious reduction in the number of booths. The entire 3rd floor is empty. • Briefing sessions alternated between the Sheraton and the London. Problem is that several elevators were out at the Sheraton…• How do I know it is Legal Tech time? It’s snowing!• Don’t do videos or even demos beyond screen shots at conference. Save them for post conference online meetings.

How to describe talking shop with CEO Andrew Sieja, Shawn Gaines and Jacque Flarherty after the team has spent days hosting two thousand peers and customers? Frenetic comes to mind. Our briefing topic hopped faster than a sexaholic swiping right on Tinder (see Andrew’s hysterical keynote malapropism below). I always enjoy these meetings and since I already caught you up after my ILTA briefing, we focused on what made Relativity Fest different from LTNY and the traditional trade shows.

For several years I have monitored the slow recognition and rise of mobile device content in civil discovery. I have run annual surveys, market reports and even put on mobile eDiscovery boot camps. Although it has taken longer than I expected back, I am now encountering substantial vendor charges to acquire, process and review text messages, chat conversations and other ‘business communications’ from Android and iOS phones during my annual ‘eDiscovery Cost/ROI Savings’ reports for long term clients. They are often surprised at how clever providers low ball the collection fees down to $250-400/device while burying exorbitant forensic tech time charges in the processing fees. My clients thought they understood the cost to agreeing to add phones to the accessible ESI source list, only to get sticker shock when I add up all the subsequent forensic time and data processing charges for an average $2,500+ per device total cost just to get it into Relativity. I encourage clients and peers to think through and demand estimates for the total cost associated with what I call 3rd generation ESI data sources before acquiescing to the typical overly broad discovery request. If you embrace the classic, “preserve broadly and review narrowly” model, you may consider investing in basic software and training to enable your corporate legal support or data security teams image unlocked mobile devices when the content is potentially relevant. So how much will that cost?