E-Discovery Gets Funkier at LegalTech (a review of some vendors)

We cruised the exhibit hall at LegalTech and found some interesting products out there and spoken to a number of vendors and attendees.  We’ll be adding more reviews later this week.

During this period of layoffs, cutbacks, and tight budgets, corporations are looking for a fast return on investment before they spend money on new technology.  LegalTech has been a venue for the introduction/roll-out of new products in e-discovery applications, appliances, and services to the legal services industry.  IT managers have been emphasizing that e-discovery systems can often pay for themselves on a single case.  Plus, IT managers like the fact that e-discovery systems and services are often paid for by the company’s legal department or insurance policies.

A list of e-discovery and automated litigation support services and software vendors on the website of Socha Consulting includes more than 660 vendors. The overall e-discovery market was valued at around $2.8 billion in 2007, $3.3 billion last year, and will pass $4 billion this year, according to the Socha-Gelbman e-discovery survey and report. Many of those vendors attended LegalTech.

It is easy to get confused when scores of vendors all claim to be able to handle a company’s e-discovery needs with their latest products or service offerings.   There is only a small subset of technology solutions that are purpose built for e-discovery.  The majority of these tools have other purposes.  Many of them originally were designed for email archiving or compliance or enterprise search.

Companies just getting started with e-discovery can study the e-discovery reference model and understand the steps in the e-discovery process, many of which are governed by the new e-discovery rules under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  As we all know, those steps include identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production, and presentation of evidence.  Each step is affected by the amount of material that has to be reviewed, the time a judge or regulator allows, and other issues such as whether some of the data is in other countries that have different rules on the handling of personal data.

What follows is a sampling of products and services we saw at LegalTech to address these issues.  We’ll be adding more:

AmericanLegalNet is a company providing advanced workflow technologies which improve on and support the practice of law.   The products include “smart” form technology, streamlined and standardized electronic filing and a web based critical dates and court rules product.  We will have more on this company later this month when we launch our sister web site dedicated to freelance attorneys and solo practioners. 

Clearwell Systems introduced Clearwell Mobile, an appliance that can be shipped overseas for in-country e-discovery processing, analysis, and review to let legal teams keep case data within a country and meet country-specific and European Union data privacy rules. It supports English, Western European, Eastern European, and Asian languages and is Unicode compliant. It provides document counts by language type and can tag documents with different languages and assign them to different reviewers.  Given that cross-border litigation is on the rise this will let companies conduct e-discovery in-country and then send a limited subset of data across the border.  

Exterro has addressed more complex legal matters with a need for sophisticated management capabilities. Exterro has a platform called Exterro Fusion and has added a product called Fusion Genome, a data mapping capability.  It offers features such as legal hold-and-discovery workflow. The application is designed to discover what data is on what server, which departments and business units and people have access to and control over that data, and tie that information with other company information to create a constantly updated map of a company’s data and business topology.  The question the company poses is “if you have hundreds of lawsuits and thousands of systems, can you find all of the information you need?”   The Exterro product does not look at the content itself — it helps companies understand what systems they have, what records are on those systems, and what procedures and policies are in place.  They create a data map (see our earlier posting here about data maps) and help lawyers stay on top of what is going on in each case. The company cites one example of a financial services company with 3,700 business units and 65,000 employees worldwide that has between 700 and 800 active lawsuits pending. The company spent $3.5 million to create a data map, which was out of date by the time it was completed.

Fios Inc. introduced a new e-discovery service designed to help companies with smaller legal matters. Fios On Request, delivered in a software-as-a-service model, lets companies send data to Fios over the Internet or on a disk. Fios removes systems files and de-dupes the files and converts them into html so they can be reviewed via a Web browser, cutting down on what can be a costly review process.  It’s aimed at the need for a low-cost tool that offers some sophisticated capabilities.  According to the company, a Federal judge says that 70 percent of the cases she sees are settled for $40,000 or less.  As far as pricing, Fios is charging $249 per gigabyte for processing and review and another $50 per gigabyte per month for hosting the data. The company says that is less than half the standard processing fee.

FTI Consulting  has combined the analysis and review software it gained when it bought Attenex last year to its Ringtail Legal case management and production capabilities, to launch a new unified application that is being offered by its FTI Technology unit. The package includes clustering and visualization software from Attenex to analyze subject matter and then group data based on a variety of relationships to let companies quickly sort through large quantities of data to find relevant material.

Iron Mountain introduced a new version of Stratify that includes enhanced management capabilities designed to help companies better manage the complex workflow involved in multiple lawsuits and regulatory proceedings.  It includes an automated workflow engine and the ability to impose security rules on the multiple parties involved in a case.  When a company needs to use an external law firm, this service makes it easy to share information with all of those who need to work with that data where the levels of permissions are all different.  Iron Mountain also introduced IP Litigation Discovery Escrow Service, which will hold material such as software source code or documents in one of its offices so the various parties to a suit or proceedings can visit, examine, and review the material.  It’s offered in conjunction with e-discovery so a company/law firm can house and allow limited access to material which can range from source code to financial data for mergers and acquisitions.

MyAttorneyLink is a company building a nationwide database of attorneys, most being sole practioners.  We will have more on this company later this month when we launch our sister web site dedicated to freelance attorneys and solo practioners. 

Recommind  has released MindServer Search 6.0.  The software can help with e-discovery by improving search results based on selected properties such as the freshnesss of a document, specific metadata, length, and other characteristics.  The software looks at 25 different parameters and can group documents through conceptual search based on topics and priority, not just keywords.  That permits automated early case assessment, which can cut down on the amount of data that needs to be reviewed and analyzed.