Evidence Lifecycle Management

I had to the opportunity this past week to speak with Steve Liley, the Founder, President and CEO of WorkProducts and get an update on the current status of his Evidence Lifecycle Management (ELM) appliance. The discussion was prompted in part from my recent post titled, "eDiscovery Confounds Companies and Their Lawyers" and several other posts over the past month revolving around my recommendations for the enterprise to engage in pro-active eDiscovery.

I met Steve about a year ago and found him to have a very indepth understanding of the eDiscovery market with specific insight into pro-active eDiscovery. As such, I always enjoy our discussions/debates regarding the current state of the eDiscovery market.

Discussion Highlights
In our discussions this past, Steve indicated that his customers and ELM Ecosystem Partners are looking to the MatterSpace® Evidence Lifecycle Management (ELM) appliance for preservation management and case assessment/ESI delivery. This is because preservation management and case assessment are interwined with hold notices added/released based on case assessment, etc. Looking at this from the EDRM standpoint, this places MatterSpace® at the very beginning of the cycle if not earlier and places them in competition with other applicance vendors such as Kazeon and Mimosa Systems, litigation software providers such as Autonomy, and best of breed providers for litigation hold such a PSS Systems and Exterro.

He went on to further emphasize that another big reason for this is the WorkProducts business model, which is focused on MatterSpace® being much cheaper than one of the Top Prservation Software Provider (traditional software install for preservation mgt. = $500K+) with a small upfront subscription fee and per custodian crawl vs. a gigabyte model for collection/case assessment. This allows all size cases (3 custodian employment matters, etc.) to utilize MatterSpace® even when the stakes are small ($20K claim) as the user knows how much they are going to spend upfront.

Steve provided me with an example of a large company with 1,000 annual cases that has deployed MatterSpace® for just this reason. He contends that the per custodian crawl model scales up better than per gigabyte scales down for preservation management and case assessment.

We finished up our discussion by discussing the fact that facilitating eDiscovery services providers with behind a corporate firewall appliance that does preservation management & case assessment to then export data to service providers per gigabyte processing and review business models provides for a seamless client experience on all size litigation, scaling with each client’s case management needs.

My Conclusion
The proactive eDiscovery technology vendors hold the key to reducing the complexities and cost of "one-off" eDiscovery. As such, I believe that Steve and WorkProducts have a very bright future.

About WorkProducts
WorkProducts provides a leading Evidence Lifecycle Management (ELM) solution, the MatterSpace® Appliance, that speeds up matter-specific ESI delivery by a factor of ten - with improved quality - while dramatically reducing the risks and costs of ESI processing and legal review. MatterSpace is a secure, plug-and-play hardware and software appliance that quickly installs in a customer's network environment, integrating their eRecords systems with downstream eDiscovery products and services. MatterSpace "crawls" the enterprise network to identify, preserve, collect, index, and de-duplicate all accessible structured and unstructured electronically stored information (ESI) for all identified custodians and sources. This includes all enterprise accessible desktops, file shares, Exchange/Domino email, SharePoint, Symantec Enterprise Vault, ZANTAZ EAS, EMC Documentum, Open Text, etc. It also facilitates collaboration among all concerned parties and monitors and tracks all matter-specific ESI communications and events, including litigation holds.

Labels: Autonomy, EDRM, ELM, Evidence Lifecycle Management, Exterro, Kazeon, Mimosa Systems

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:55 AM