Riding the Wave of Early Case Assessment

This past weekend, I finally emerged from a rather lengthy project and therefore I now have a bit of time to get back to my  Blog.  At the top of my list was the desire to comment on an article entitled, “Riding the Waves of Early Case Assessment” published on April 26, 2011  on the Law.com. The author, George Rudoy is CEO of Integrated Legal Technology, a legal technology and services consultancy, based in New York, does an excellent job of framing some of the issues surrounding Early Case Assessment (ECA) and adds some biting yet very true commentary on some of the early technology winners.  My only real complaint with the article is that he didn’t solicit any input from me (just kidding).  I guess that I will need to invite him to join my LinkedIn network and also join my Early Case Assessment Association Group (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1827179&mostPopular=&trk=tyah).

First of all, Early Case Assessment (ECA) is both a very clever marketing term that has no doubt propelled vendors such as Clearwell way beyond the point where they should have been had it not been for the term (BTW – Clearwell’s success will be studied at Harvard business school in the years to come as an excellent example of how to successfully position a product in an emerging market).  On the other hand and as many have pointed out to me as I have ranted on about the fact that ECA is actually a technology, the practice of ECA (whether you call it that or not) has been around for many years and is nothing new to the experienced and blooded litigator.  I concede that fact.  However, I also believe that technology now exists (actually has existed) for many years that can in fact advance the practice of ECA.  It is just not being applied yet to what I would call the eDiscovery subset of the Information Governance market.

I have been an enterprise technology junkie and serial entrepreneur for many years and therefore I have an excellent understanding of what technology exists and what it can and cannot accomplish.  And, since entering the litigation services/eDiscovery market about five years ago full time, I have been continuously amazed at the lack of the “market’s” interest in utilizing very pertinent and established technologies from other enterprise types markets (e.g.  Information Governance, BPM, etc.).  In addition, I had the great fortune of working with Dr. Herb Roitblat several years ago and learned more about semantic search and related technology such as predictive coding than was probably necessary for any normal person (even a technology junkie such as myself).  Having this knowledge base as a foundation, I have developed what would the market would consider to be a fairly radical concept of ECA and where it fits in the EDRM.  However, after reading George’s article, I think that I may have some company.

Without going into a long drawn out description of where ECA technology fits in the EDRM, just let me state that I believe we should be following an iterative process (i.e. like the Agile software development model) where we are constantly analyzing the entire dataset to determine what we should be looking for, how we are doing, risk assessments, etc.  And, today’s available technology lends itself to this approach.  Further, as we move more and more ESI to the Cloud, this approach becomes even more practical, less expensive and much more productive. In the coming weeks, I hope to set aside some time to address my model in more detail.  So, stay tuned. 

The full text of George Rudoy’s article is as follows:

Can you really conduct early case assessment, or is it simply a fancy name for a more traditional indexing and culling model?  What exactly is "early case assessment" (ECA)?

While working on a project for one of my corporate clients, I had to delve deeper into this question and reached out to a few of my old industry friends and colleagues -- Gyorgy Pados of Capital Legal; Richard Cohen, of Renew Data; Rick Lutkus and Lori Chavez of Seyfarth Shaw; Michelle Mahoney of Mallesons Stephen Jaques; and Jonathan Maas of Ernst & Young --  to gain a better perspective on the widely debated phenomenon.

As the novelty of the ECA concept starts to wear off and more and more practical evaluation and understanding develops, it’s time to reflect on the positioning of ECA on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) framework. Is it mature enough yet to be used in the best way -- and embraced?  What capabilities are properly framed "ECA"?

The legal technology industry uses ECA in various ways. ECA could refer to appliance, software, or software as a service to quickly collect/index, de-duplicate, and search electronically stored information (ESI) to provide fast analysis of its content. The concept is a platform or service to facilitate a quick fly-over of the ESI collection to gather key reports of data make-up, information, and communication histograms patterns, concepts and themes, keyword analysis, and evaluations. Most ECA products provide dynamic probing and data-evaluation facilities to arrive at the relevant ESI, very much like the traditional fact-finding early-case-evaluation approach to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the case. But is this the right way to define ECA, or should it mean something different, such as analytic capabilities prior to collection or indexing of data?

The premise of early case assessment is to give legal teams the ability to conduct up-front, fast, intelligent data gathering, with probative queries on the dataset to reduce it to a relevant universe that can be assessed.  Legal teams have a need to see "what they got" faster than what traditional EDD services typically can provide. 

Let us consider two often-mentioned vendors that offer early case assessment: Clearwell Systems and Guidance Software.

Clearwell has done well in quickly turning the need for ECA into widely used capabilities both prior to and after collection, and while it is debatable whether the company was first to hit the market with it, it is hard to dispute that it was the first commonly used tool. Guidance has been in the e-data business for many years, and its EnCase eDiscovery product has been in the e-discovery market since 2002.  While a little late to the post-collection review stage, Guidance's tool can be effectively used for identification, preservation, collection, processing and producing load files for review platforms.

So let's compare and contrast.

EnCase offers ECA functionality prior to, during, and after the collection on the basis of its Optimized Distributed Search ("ODS") technology, which allows IT administration to place servlet  on individual workstations and gain complete visibility to the end-points without having to index or migrate data. A high percentage of its customers are using these capabilities in support of multiple types of investigations (inappropriate activity, remote intrusion, e-discovery), and it would be valid to characterize EnCase as a comprehensive general-purpose discovery and forensic engine.  Its ability to reach every node in a network, including desktops, laptops, and servers, make it a popular collection and processing tool.

However, as previously mentioned, the tool has had analysis and first-pass review capability for less than one year, and it lacks full-blown review capabilities.

The Clearwell Legal Discovery Solution claims to have "90% data culling rates, and improved defensibility in court that addresses each stage of the e-discovery lifecycle from identification and legal hold through review and production, delivering significant cost savings and improved case outcomes".  Clearwell boasts quite an impressive list of clients (a certain reward for being the first on the scene in terms of in-house review capabilities) and enjoys instant recognition when the topic of ECA in the review context is mentioned.

However, there is a price to be paid for beating everyone else to the punch. Clearwell is now facing stiff competition and is rumored to lose potential clients over its pricing as well as limited data volume per appliance.  It doesn't offer metadata-only collections, which are valuable for pre-collection analytics.  Defensibility is also coming into question, with recent customer satisfaction issues (NDLO and Microsoft cases) challenging the supremacy of the product.  While well defended by Clearwell, such challenges widen the opening for other products to capture some of their market share.

While the debate on the usefulness and effectiveness of ECA continues, it should be noted that how the term is defined continues to evolve. Some of the service providers adapted quickly enough to have ECA as part of their "arsenal" a few years ago. Many of these tools were designed to filter metadata after collection and help the company decide how much a case will cost. This is a noble objective, but not completely in line with the original intent of ECA -- which was to help an organization determine its risk exposure and make strategic decisions about a case based on that analysis.

RenewData, which spent considerable time and effort researching ECA, analytics, and keyword-development techniques, took its time selecting a suite of ECA tools and chose not to go with Clearwell, Guidance, etc. The company's desire was to deliver tools that were more in line with the definition of ECA based on review capabilities, and it felt that what was already on the market wasn’t quite there yet. Instead, it focused on building two proprietary content analytics tools -- Vestigate and Anagram -- which can together help clients sift through large amounts of data quickly and relatively inexpensively, and make the strategic decisions that ECA promises.

Rich Cohen, president of RenewData, explains: "We have taken a unique approach to ECA, one that focuses specifically on the language of the matter, versus leveraging metadata filtering or complex mathematical formulas to simply churn through documents quickly. The result is a much more mechanical, transparent process that delivers far greater insight and greater certainty that you’re making strategic case decisions based on all relevant data available."

Considering the risks at hand, this could be a significant step forward -- to be able to determine your risk exposure early on in a case, based on what human beings are seeing in the language rather than point to a "black box"  purchased off the shelf.  Clearly, ECA capabilities both pre- and post-collection continue to evolve.

Labels: Clearwell, Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, EDRM

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:57 PM 1 Comments

Will Kroll Ontrack Survive or Open the Market to Newer, Better and Less Expensive Solutions?

Earlier this week, Marsh & McLennan (M&M) announced the sale of Kroll, its computer forensics division which last year generated $678 million in revenue. Kroll is being acquired by Altegrity, an investigative services company which is owned by Providence Equity. Financed by Apollo Investment Services and Goldman Sachs, the acquisition price is $1.13 billion.

The shear size of the acquisition is news in and of itself as it lends credence to the potential of the eDiscovery, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and associated computer forensic markets. However, I am more interested in what it means to the technology side of the industry and how it will effect buying behavior within the Global 2000.

In a June 8th, 2010 blog post titled, “What’s Next for Kroll Ontrack,” Aafre Hilay from Clearwell explores whether Kroll should fix or sell Ontrack. And, more importantly, describes how early technology players in any industry normally ends up being a burden to their owners and eventually fade into the sunset. Thereby, enabling the next generation of technology platform to emerge and takeover the market.

“Just as Yahoo was an internet pioneer in the 1990s, Kroll Ontrack was the pioneer of electronic discovery services. Like all pioneers, as the first to market, Kroll had to build everything itself. So Kroll Ontrack invested not only in recruiting and training its staff of skilled consultants, the company also developed its own suite of e-discovery tools and software. It offered this integrated package of services and software to the market and, justifiably, charged a price premium. But as the industry matured, it disaggregated with more savvy customers and new companies focused on specific parts of the value chain. Customers became better educated and more confident making decisions, diminishing the value of Kroll’s “we-are-the-safe-choice” value proposition. These customers today have many more options for e-discovery than was the case in years gone by, primarily because of a generation of e-discovery software companies, such as Clearwell, Guidance, Exterro, and kCura/Relativity, which offer capabilities like collection, ECA (Early Case Assessment), litigation hold management, and linear review. These have been widely adopted by Kroll Ontrack’s competitors, negating Kroll’s technological advantage. Even worse, because Kroll Ontrack’s competitors do not need to invest in R&D, they have a substantially lower cost structure. As a result, they have undercut Kroll Ontrack on price, which has halted its growth and squeezed its margins,” states Mr. Hilay.

I believe, as I stated in a recent blog post titled, The Era of the Megalith in College Football and eDiscovery, “…with today’s agile development methodologies and rapidly evolving open source technology stacks, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Megalith development teams to compete long term. And at some point, your code base becomes so large and integrated in such strange ways that no one actually even knows how it works. I guess at that point you sell your maintenance stream to CA or IBM and go home.”

I suspect that Kroll Ontrack and the other early entrants into this market are at that point where the Clearwells and KCuras and Exterros of the world just have too much of an advantage and therefore my answer to Mr. Hilay’s question is that Altegrity needs to sell Ontrack before it drags them under.

The full text of Mr. Hilay's post is as follows:

Yesterday, Marsh & McLennan (M&M) announced the sale of Kroll, its investigative services division which last year generated $678 million in revenue. Kroll is being acquired by Altegrity, another investigative services company which is owned by Providence Equity. The acquisition price is $1.13 billion, below the $1.3 billion M&M was rumored to be asking, and the deal is financed by Apollo Investment Services and Goldman Sachs.

There are many aspects to this transaction, but I want to focus on just one: what does this mean for Kroll Ontrack, Kroll’s largest division with $250 million in revenue and a staggering 1,500 employees, making it by far the world’s largest e-discovery service provider?

To answer this question, I will first outline the strategic challenge facing Kroll Ontrack, before outlining two alternative strategies its new owners may adopt for addressing it.

Strategic Challenge: Kroll Ontrack Is The “Yahoo! Of E-Discovery”
Just as Yahoo was an internet pioneer in the 1990s, Kroll Ontrack was the pioneer of electronic discovery services. Like all pioneers, as the first to market, Kroll had to build everything itself. So Kroll Ontrack invested not only in recruiting and training its staff of skilled consultants, the company also developed its own suite of e-discovery tools and software. It offered this integrated package of services and software to the market and, justifiably, charged a price premium.

But as the industry matured, it disaggregated with more savvy customers and new companies focused on specific parts of the value chain. Customers became better educated and more confident making decisions, diminishing the value of Kroll’s “we-are-the-safe-choice” value proposition. These customers today have many more options for e-discovery than was the case in years gone by, primarily because of a generation of e-discovery software companies, such as Clearwell, Guidance, Exterro, and kCura/Relativity, which offer capabilities like collection, ECA (Early Case Assessment), litigation hold management, and linear review. These have been widely adopted by Kroll Ontrack’s competitors, negating Kroll’s technological advantage. Even worse, because Kroll Ontrack’s competitors do not need to invest in R&D, they have a substantially lower cost structure. As a result, they have undercut Kroll Ontrack on price, which has halted its growth and squeezed its margins.

In a directly analogous way, Yahoo! has seen its broad internet service to consumers eroded by a host of more focused competitors such as Google, Facebook, and Skype. Consumers today are much more familiar with the internet, and feel comfortable making separate choices for search, social networking, and messaging, without the need for an umbrella brand. That has left Yahoo! without a reason for being: even today, its CEO struggles to answer the fundamental question “what is Yahoo!?”

Solution: Sell It Or Fix It
As Kroll Ontrack’s new owner, Altegrity has a simple choice. It could sell Kroll Ontrack, making the strategic challenge someone else’s problem; or Altegrity could fix it, by adopting a fundamentally different strategy.

Let’s consider each in turn:

Sell It: Most sensible people would find it funny to think about selling something right after you bought it. But in this case, it could make a lot of sense. Altegrity is a leading provider of investigative services, not e-discovery, making the “non-Ontrack” part of Kroll’s business a much better fit. So why not sell Kroll Ontrack, pay down debt, and focus on the services business which it understands? This would be especially attractive if, as Vivian Tero at IDC suggests, there are willing buyers such as ECM or storage software companies which like Kroll Ontrack but do not want the services business.

Fix It: Mike Cherkasky, Altegrity’s CEO, is a former head of Kroll, and so is perhaps uniquely well placed to bring about a change in direction. To do so, he must decide what Kroll Ontrack wants to be. If its goal is to be the leading e-discovery service provider, then it should kill its internal software development efforts and focus on providing customers the absolute best service using industry leading tools. If it wants to be an e-discovery software company, which would be a much harder transition, then it needs to exit the services business and make its technology available every litigation support company.

Either way, it will take time and a lot of painful decisions for Kroll Ontrack to recover its momentum. But if any encouragement is needed, the Altegrity and the Kroll Ontrack teams need only look at what’s happening to Fios, another of the industry’s early pioneers. So far, Fios has refused to decide what it wants to be, abandoning its internal review platform for Relativity but keeping its proprietary processing software. The result? It’s had three different CEOs in the past 12 months, and competitors continue to steal market share.

Labels: Altegrity, Clearwell, Early Case Assessment, eDiscovery, Exterro, kCura, Kroll

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:49 PM 0 Comments

The Era of the Megalith in College Football and eDiscovery

As a fanatic Boise State Football fan, I have had enough on my plate the past couple of days trying to sort out which of the new megalithic conferences that my beloved Boise State Football team is going to end up in. Looks like the new PAC 16 will take what they want from the Big 12, the Big 10 will expand and then the rest of the conferences will get the leftovers.

Now, with the announcement of the merger between CT Summation and AccessData (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/accessdata-corporation-and-ct-summation-announce-merger-95979904.html), it looks like we are going to have to start shorting out the creation of Megaliths in eDiscovery.

As a long time proponent of single source solutions, I like the concept of what the combination of CT Summation and AccessData can bring to the table.

As the leader in in-house eDiscovery collection, processing and analysis, AccessData brings to the merger an unsurpassed technology portfolio, designed to enable the world's largest companies to take control of eDiscovery and dramatically reduce costs. Its AccessData eDiscovery software is currently the most comprehensive eDiscovery solution on the market, enabling organizations to address litigation hold, automated collection, processing, and analysis prior to attorney review.

CT Summation, the premier provider of litigation workflow and eDiscovery solutions to law firms and corporate legal departments, brings to the deal a comprehensive suite of software products that are the gold standard throughout the legal community. CT Summation's iBlaze, Enterprise, WebBlaze, CaseVault, CaseVantage and Discovery Cracker products have received more than 45 legal industry technology and "Reader's Choice" awards since 1997. CT Summation is part of Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services, which operates under the CT brand. Wolters Kluwer will remain as a strategic investor in the new AccessData Group, LLC, with a minority stake in the company.

By combining these complementary workflow solutions, AccessData will be able to deliver the first, true end-to-end eDiscovery software solution for corporations and law firms that supports the litigation process from litigation hold through trial.

However, just like the thought of a PAC 16 super conference, is combining CT Summation and AccessData just too overwhelming and too much? I suspect that that answer is both yes and no depending upon who you ask. For me, the thought of a super conference would be fine as long as Boise State was one of the teams. I am not sure how that relates to eDiscovery and therefore I am going to drop the analogy at this point.

Over the past 5 years, Autonomy has had somewhat of a lock on single source solutions in the eDiscovery space (no disrespect meant to the other players trying to do this). And, they (Autonomy), overall, provides a pretty good solution. However, they do not provide the best solution at every step along the EDRM. Therefore, some users would prefer to have the option to choose their own “best-in-class” components and integrate them together. And, over the past couple of years, some very good independent and individual component technologies are emerged such as Clearwell and Relativity. Neither of these vendors address the entire EDRM. However, they both do an excellent job at their piece and both seem to be trying to expand their capabilities to support more of the EDRM. However, at this point, the integration of these best-in-class players is still the big trick. Therefore, the value of an Autonomy or now a CT Summation / AccessData (are they going to call it AccessData?) is the fact that it is all integrated together, there is a common workflow of shorts and it comes from one vendor (i.e. you only have one phone call to make when something doesn’t work). So, the enterprise has to decide if they want the single-source Megalith solution or if the would prefer to chose individual best-in-class components and then integrate them together. Obviously, there is some big money chasing the Megalith path.

On another note and actually the topic of a future post is the concept of an open API (that’s always a matter of perspective), plug-and-play workflow management platform that would enable end-users to choose the best-in-class route and magically integrate them all together into a very productive eDiscovery / GRC workflow. Exterro has just such a solution and I believe that combined with the right best-in-class components will make a very compelling argument against the Megalith. As indicated, I plan to cover the workflow platform in great detail over the next couple of weeks. However, to provide some insight into my thinking, with the right workflow management platform, best-in-class solutions provided a tremendous amount of long term flexibility for users and place a tremendous burden on the Megalithic providers to keep pace with the steady stream of innovation that is inevitable in any market. This is not a new phenomenon.

But, with today’s agile development methodologies and rapidly evolving open source technology stacks, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Megalith development teams to compete long term. And at some point, your code base becomes so large and integrated in such strange ways that no one actually even knows how it works. I guess at that point you sell your maintenance stream to CA or IBM and go home.

So, in summary, given the ongoing the economic condition throughout the world and the buying shifts that are occurring in the user base, there just isn’t enough room in the vendor community for as many player and therefore there is going to be consolidation through mergers and acquisitions. Whether or not this leaves the market with a few Megaliths (Super Conferences) to choose from is anyone’s guess. But, just like the shack up that is occurring in college football, this is all very exciting to watch.

Labels: AccessData, Autonomy, Clearwell, CT Summation, ESI, Exterro, IBM, kCura, Kroll, Relativity

posted by Charles Skamser @ 4:57 PM 1 Comments

Early Case Assessment (ECA) Moving to The Corporations

Many eDiscovery vendors and consultants have seen more eDiscovery work moving back to the corporations. And, based on surveys over the past 12 months and direct discussions with eDiscovery decision makers within corporations, most industry analysts have predicted that eDiscovery work is moving back to the corporations at an accelerating rate. Now, The Cowan Group has confirmed this trend through the results of its "Q1 Critical Trends Survey". Collecting responses from 47 major corporations on their current workload, as well as near-term plans for technical and talent acquisitions, The Cowan Group is reporting that 22% of the corporations that they surveys are expecting to in-source more eDiscovery work within the next 90 days.

According to The Cowan Group Survey, 15% of the 47 major corporation indicated that they planned to move more eDiscovery collections in-house within the next 90 days. 35% of the respondents indicated that moving Early Case Assessment (ECA) in house was a top priority. 19% of the respondents indicated that they were considering an investment in Clearwell and 10% indicated that they were anticipating an investment in Relativity.
It appears that the trend of eDiscovery moving back to the corporations is indeed true.

So, the last 3 quarters of 2010 should be really good for the eDiscovery vendors and consultants that are fulfilling the requirements of the corporate legal departments.

Labels: 2010 eDiscovery Predictions and Trends, Clearwell, Clearwell Systems, Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, Relativity

posted by Charles Skamser @ 11:38 AM 0 Comments

Status of Early Case Assessment (ECA)

After about 18 months since the term Early Case Assessment (ECA) emerged, it appears that users are beginning to understand that the key to reducing the overall costs of eDiscovery lies wtih reducing the amount of data that eventually has to be produced and reviewed. Also, it appears that eDiscovery vendors have figured out that the ultimate winners in this space will have a comprehensive seamlessly integrated solution that supports either all or at least a major portion of the EDRM model.

However, it also appears that even though costs have come down significantly, the overall cost of eDiscovery is still way too high.

OVERVIEW OF THE MAINSTREAM TOOL MAREKT

Following is an an update on the ECA offerings from "some" more sell known and mainstream vendors in this space:

ClearWell

According to their website, Rated as a "Strong Positive" (highest possible rating given) in Gartner's 2008 E-Discovery MarketScope Report and voted a Top 5 E-Discovery Software Provider by the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann survey, the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform is the first enterprise-class e-discovery solution that manages all legal matters, regulatory inquiries, and corporate investigations in a single application. Leading companies have chosen Clearwell to process, analyze, review, and produce ESI. As a result, they accelerate early case assessments, cull-down data by up to 90%, increase review throughput, reduce movement of data across multiple tools, and improve the defensibility of their electronic discovery process.

However, word on the street is that it still costs between $450 and $550 per GB for ECA and then additional fees to go to production for review. Given the costs of TIFF and other production processing that may be required could push the overall cost of eDiscovery to well over $1,000 per GB. In addition, ClearWell still requires a farily large investment in hardware and software for "someone" in the channel or the ultimate end-user.

CaseCentral
According to the CaseCentral website, CaseCentral the leader in secure, on-demand eDiscovery software for corporate counsel and law firms looking to simplify and take control of eDiscovery, announced in June 2009 the release of the CaseCentral Early Case Assessment (ECA) offering, which is the industry’s first ECA product to seamlessly integrate with active litigation review and production software. CaseCentral’s integrated, multi-purpose eDiscovery review platform enables clients to start with ECA and extend through analysis, review, production and post-production re-use, facilitating collaborative assessments of new case merits and liabilities, application of first pass review, and real-time transfer to active review if required, all at a price point that shatters the current ECA pricing model.

Pricing for CaseCentral early case assessment starts at $10/GB/month or $120k/TB/year, which is two orders of magnitude less than competitive products, enabling clients to cost-effectively consider much larger data sets for ECA during first pass review. CaseCentral ECA pricing also takes away unpredictability making it easier to budget for ECA activities. Contemporary early case assessment tools charge clients a significant premium for perceived value, often starting at $100k/100GB, which equates to $1,000/GB. ECA can be about small data sets (Gigabytes) or about very large data sets (Terabytes) and current pricing discourages or limits the amount of data that can be considered during early case assessment before ultimately culling down the data set to a smaller amount for active review. This approach forces inside and outside counsel to take risks to limit the data set for ECA and active review.

Anacomp
According to an August 25, 2009 press release, Anacomp®, Inc., a leading provider of litigation support and business process services and solutions, today announced the availability of new early case assessment (ECA) services that offer law firms and corporate general counsel (GC) departments the ability to gain early insight into cases, help determine case strategy, and predict, control and minimize the costs, risks and time of electronic discovery. The new services augment Anacomp’s robust portfolio of eDiscovery services, which leverage CaseLogistix®, Anacomp's flagship litigation review platform, and the company’s proven experience in accelerating litigation processes and reducing costs and risks.


Anacomp's ECA services provide the metrics, methods and technologies to empower litigators to make optimal decisions early pertaining to case strategy and budgets. The services include defensible search methodologies to reduce the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) required for review, and the means to slash indexing times and nearly all reprocessing prior to review. The services offer litigators the ability to bring predictable, reasonable costs to electronic data discovery processes, reduce unnecessary capital expenditures, and eliminate spends typically made under tight deadlines or resource constraints.

OVERVIEW TO OTHER TOOLS VENDORS ENTERING THE ECA MARKET

Following is an update on other tools vendors that have entered the ECA space:
Venio Systems
According to their website, Venio Systems is a cutting edge Electronic Discovery software solution created to save legal, government and corporate industries time and money. Venio FPR™ allows forensic units, attorneys and litigation support teams to analyze data, provide an early case assessment, a total case assessment and a first pass review of any size data set. Unlike other E-Discovery management platforms, Venio FPR™ can export to ALL industry standard litigation support applications while providing extensive reporting options.

Based on a cloud computing model, rumor has it that pricing will be consumption based and very agressive thereby putting downward pressure on the rest of the ECA market.

Trial Solutions
It is also rumored that Trial Solutions may be releasing a cloud based (i.e. SaaS) ECA solution that is seamlessly integrated with ImageDepot, its leading Online Review Tool (ORT). It is further rumored that they may also be planning to offer very aggressive consumption based pricing for ECA.

eMag Solutions
According to an August 2009 press release, eMag Solutions, LLC, an international provider of enterprise content management (ECM) and electronic discovery solutions, announced the company will introduce eMag PreVu 3.0, the latest version of eMag's web-based data management portal to sort, search and filter electronically stored information (ESI) as well as manage early stage workflow. eMag PreVu helps customers manage costs and eliminate extraneous processing steps and shorten the time to complete projects.

The introduction of version 3.0 of the eMag PreVu hosted raw data culling application will occur at next week's annual ILTA conference being held at the Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center near Washington, D.C. August 24-27th.

Early case assessment has become a critical way for organizations and their legal teams to reduce uncertainty around both the costs and management of ESI and e-discovery, while helping them gain a stronger understanding of the nature and scope of the data involved in litigation, data migration, or enterprise content management projects. eMag Solutions has a strong track record of delivering cutting edge tools that help clients achieve great success around data management, and PreVu 3.0 is yet another example of this. eMag PreVu 3.0 allows users to create early stage processing requests to facilitate e-discovery, litigation planning, or ECM to make strategic decisions more timely and effectively.

eMag PreVu 3.0 provides the ability to efficiently cull large data sets prior to loading into an active archive, review tool or other repository, resulting in dramatically reduced review costs. Significant enhancements in PreVu 3.0 include advanced searching options, the ability to group and tag files, increased options for filtering, as well as extensive reporting capabilities.

Another key aspect of PreVu 3.0 is its ability to facilitate cross-border, multi-national collections. Clients are able to utilize the hosted application in conjunction with eMag's UK processing facilities and international on-site services to accommodate international data protection and privacy laws.

earlyCASE
According to a recent press release, Atlanta-based earlyCASE, the leader in advanced early case assessment for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and eDiscovery, today released filtering and culling capabilities in its market-leading eDiscovery early case assessment software available as Software-as-a-Service “SaaS” from www.earlycase.com. earlyCASE is a SaaS web-based eDiscovery application which uses an on-demand deployment model (runs on your local PC), collects, preserves, analyzes and filters the ESI that your computer can access in-place without the data ever leaving your computer or network.


earlyCASE allows you to quickly and safely collect, organize, understand eDiscovery data, and apply filter / culling rules before it is processed for discovery. It supports Unicode, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates, removes known system files and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions, easily and quickly cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the meet and confer, discovery processing and document review.

In the past, preserving, collecting, analyzing and filtering electronically stored information had to be handled in separate steps. earlyCASE can safely collect ESI, preserve all metadata, seamlessly analyze and filter the ESI to deliver rapid early case assessment and reduction in the amount of data being processed and reviewed. With the release today of the latest version of earlyCASE, you can create filter rules and see in real time the reduction in size and counts these rules have, then use earlyCASE to quickly separate the filtered documents, files and emails from the collection all without any additional software or costs.

earlyCASE is offered in three versions, a Basic (FREE) version, a Professional version for a small flat rate charge, regardless of the amount of data you analyze, and an enterprise edition. The Basic version offers 40+ high-quality eDiscovery reports, details the expanded sizes and counts of the data, estimates your processing and review budget and provides a long list of detailed as well as summary reports. With the Professional version, duplicate files and emails are identified, Lotus Notes files are processed, Known System Files are identified, EnCase images are processed. earlyCASE Professional also provides the ability to set filtering rules can be applied to reduce the amount of data, a 26(f) report for meet and confer is available to help clients reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information—custodians, context, third parties, and more. earlyCASE provides you the tools and results to best understand, define and memorialize the ESI going into the meet and confer. Duplicate document detection and removal, removal of known system files, elimination of files outside the dates of interest, container processing (zip, rar, arc), Lotus Notes NSF’s, EnCase images and numerous Filtering options are the primary reasons most people use the Professional version of earlyCASE.

Labels: CaseCentral, Clearwell, Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, eMag, Venio Systems

posted by Charles Skamser @ 11:44 AM 2 Comments

Reducing eDiscovery Costs vs. Law Firm Profits

I have spent the better part of the last two (2) weeks talking with top litigators from AM 100 Law Firms, eDiscovery service providers, eDiscovery consultants and the General Counsel from corporations that are either currently involved in cases with major eDiscovery costs or have recently complete a case with major eDiscovery costs.

What has been interesting is watching the ongoing battle between the General Counsels trying to reduce the overall costs of eDiscovery and the Partners from the AM 100 Law Firms trying to maintain their profits margins.

I have posted several extensive articles on the cost of eDiscovery and therefore I am not going to go over the details again.  As a review, Businesses and other organizations spent more than $2.7 billion on electronic data discovery last year, and spending on eDiscovery will grow to more than $4.6 billion by 2010, according to consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, who presented their Sixth Annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey in a report published earlier this year on Law.com.  And, according to well know legal technology Blogger, speaker and general industry expert, Brent Barney, in a posting on law.com titled, "Subdue the Costs of Document Review", document review can account for 50 percent to 90 percent of the costs involved in a litigation matter.  And at $150 - $400 per hour, the classical docuemnt review portion of the eDiscovery process is a very large profit center for the AM 100 Law Firms. 

However, with the emergence of the discipline of Early Case Assessment (ECA) and associated technologies from legal technology vendors such as Clearwell Systems and earlyCASE,  designed to dramatically reduce the amount of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) or Electronically Stored Evidence (ESE), profits from document review are beginning to dwindle. And, the law firm partners that I have talked to are not very happy about it.  As a result, they are investigating whether or not they should be jumping into the ECA technology waters and setting up computer forensic practices to offset the loss in profits from document review.

Interestingly enough, and really the point of my article, is that the General Counsel and their associated Information Technology (IT) departments that I have talked to are also looking into whether or not they should be jumping into the ECA technology waters and setting up either internal computer forensic practices or partnering with independent third party computer forensic partners and third party ECA service providers to dramatically reduce the amount of ESI/ESE before it is sent to their outside counsel for review.    This investigation by both parties to this issues is shaping up to be a classical market paradigm shift and one that I and most of the eDiscovery world will be watching with great interest.

Please note that I will be attending LegalTech in New York February 2-4, 2009 and will post any and all additional opinions and data points that I can gather regarding this topic.

Labels: AM 100 Law Firms, Brent Barney, Clearwell, Clearwell Systems, Early Case Assessment, earlyCASE, eDiscovery, ESI, LegalTech New York 2009, The Cost of eDiscovery

posted by Charles Skamser @ 11:25 AM 0 Comments

New SaaS Player in Early Case Assessment (ECA) for eDiscovery

With the increased legal burden introduced by the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure driving the litigation market to contain costs related to eDiscovery, Early Case Assessment (ECA) solution providers such as Clearwell Systems have gained a tremendous following. However, at a cost of $150 per gigabyte to assess your case and/or develop strategies for Rule 26(f) meetings, there is still plenty of room for new and less expensive solutions.

And, it appears that Level 9, a software development firm out of Atlanta, GA has come up with a solution called earlyCASE to fill the demand for a lower cost ECA.

earlyCASE is a SaaS based eDiscovery application which uses an on-demand deployment model (runs on your local PC) and analyzes the ESI that your computer can access in-place without the data ever leaving your computer or network. earlyCASE allows you to quickly see and understand all of your data before it is sent on to Electronic Data Discovery (EDD) and document review. It supports multiple languages, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates, email conversation threads and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions and easily cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the meet and confer, discovery processing and document review.

earlyCASE is offered in three versions, a Basic (FREE) version, a Professional version for a small flat rate charge, regardless of the amount of data you analyze, and an enterprise edition. The Basic version offers 28+ high-quality eDiscovery reports, one which estimates your processing and review budget while providing an immediate understanding of your data. With the Professional version, Lotus Notes and EnCase images are processed, a 26(f) report for meet and confer is available to help clients reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information—custodians, context, third parties, and more.

earlyCASE provides you the tools and results to best understand, define and memorialize the ESI going into the meet and confer. Duplicate document detection, container processing (zip, rar, arc), Lotus Notes NSF’s and EnCase images are the primary reasons most people use the Professional version of earlyCASE.

earlyCASE basic is available for FREE, earlyCASE Professional is priced at $198 per run (unlimited data), and earlyCASE Enterprise licenses start at $8,000.

Having tested earlyCASE on my laptop, I found it to be extremely easy to load, easy to use and fast. It generated a reasonable quote of how much it was going to cost to process the data that I identified, provided an adequate number of standard reports for analysis and review and because it sits on an MS Access Database, I was able to build several custom reports that met my specific reporting requirements. All in all, I identifed and analyzed almost 20 gigabytes of data and it only costs $198 as opposed to the $3,000 it would have cost for the same basic information using other ECA tools.

earlyCASE is not an EDD tool. But, it seems to have filled the void for a lower cost ECA and hopefully has opened the door for more lower cost and easy to use SaaS based eDiscovery solutions.

Labels: Clearwell, Early Case Assessment, earlyCASE, ECA, eDiscovery, EnCase, FRCP, FRCP Rule 26(f), Lotus Notes NSF

posted by Charles Skamser @ 8:08 PM 4 Comments

Electronic Data Discovery Workflow and Best Practices

Over the past twenty four (24) months I have had the opportunity to meet with law firms, the litigation and IT departments of the Fortune 2000, regional litigation service providers, eDiscovery consultants and eDiscovery technology vendors to discuss the current state and technologies of eDiscovery.  Based upon these discussions, I have come to the conclusion that there are substantial differences in approach and a complete lack of standards in Electronic Data Discovery (EDD) workflow and best practices throughout the entire industry.

Even after the tremendous body of  EDD research and information being proliferated by the Sedona Conference Institute and the other various groups associated with the Sedona Conference along with the excellent EDD guidelines and standards established by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, there is still a wide chasm between what these experts have established as the EDD standards and how the main stream litigation market processes EDD.

As such, I am planning to spend the next two (2) - three (3) weeks soliciting detailed input on "real world" EDD workflow and best practices from all available sources and then publish the results.  Please note that this exercise is not intended to replace any of the work done by either the EDRM or the Sedona Conference.    However, I believe that we could lay the foundation for creating a mainstream guide to EDD.

As a place to start, I would like to offer the following questions for discussion:

1. What tools are being used at each step of the EDRM model if any?
2. Are these tools integrated or do you have to move data in between them?
3. If you have to move data, is anyone really using the new EDRM XML standard?
4. How many IT organizations have instituted data retention policies with litigation in mind?
5. How many IT organizations are using technologies like Kazeon or Autonomy for for in-place collection, processing and analysis, in an integrated workflow within a single application?
6. Are the tools as mention in # 5 able to collect all of the data?  And, if not, how the remainder of the data being collected and integrated?
7. How does litigation hold technology  from vendors such as Exterro fit into the process? And, are they tightly integrated or loosely coupled requiring manual management?
8. Where do early case assessment technologies from vendors such as Clearwell Systems fit into the process?
9. Is the market finding that the tools as listed in # 8 are sufficient for "flattening" all of the embedded files from the Electronically Stored Information (ESI) or are they only used to gather and produce a general file extension catalogue?
10. Is the market using tools like Clearwell for early case assessment and then importing the data into standard EDD processing tools like LAW and iPro for production processing?
11. Given the answer to # 9, is the market concerned that "smoking gun" ESI is not being discovered?
12. Given the answers to # 9 - # 11, how are these tools being used in conjunction with  requirements and preparation for the 26(f) conferences?
13. When is culling and de-dupe taking place and what technologies are being used?
14. Are the keywords for culling and filtering being externally determined by the legal teams or in some way being internally generated by technology?
15. Where do conceptual search technologies such as Orcatec and leading de-dupe technologies such as Equivio  fit into this process?
16. What percentage of ESI is the culling and de-duping process removing from the data pool?
17. How is the market completing the various review processes and what tools are they using?
18. Is the market doing early case assessment with native files, loading the results into a review tool, completing an initial "quick peek" of the data to develop keywords and then loading the data back into an EDD processing solution for another culling and de-dupe pass?  Or, is this all happening in a single pass?
19. Is the market concerned that opposing parties are not processing data effectively enough produce adequate responses?
20. Is the market actually using the 26(f) conference to define how opposing parties are going to produce responsive data?
21. How is the market handling privileged ESI during this process?  What is the actual privileged information is only part of an ESI data set?
22. Is the market still imaging ESI into TIFF and PDF for Review and final production?
23. How do bates numbers fit into this process?
24. How is the market integrating paper data into this process?
25. How is the market handling complex coding?
26. Is the market still using in house legacy client/server solutions for the most part to complete the various pieces of the EDD process?
27. What does the market think about the new generation of SaaS based EDD solutions?
28. Are there any single source end-to-end solutions?
29. Are there any integrated end-to-end solutions?
30. Is the market concerned with chain of custody issues?
31. Have the courts ruled in any definitive way on any accepted way of processing EDD?
32. Has the cost of eDiscovery gone down or gone up over the past six (6) months?  And, if it has gone down, why?
33. Do corporate IT departments want control over the EDD process?  And, is that the right place for it to reside?

Answering these questions and the ones that these questions will prompt is certainly not going to fill in the chasm between the current best practices and standards as put forth by the experts and the rest of us mere mortals in the litigation market.  However, it might begin to provide the market with some real world examples of what works and what doesn't work.
I encourage everyone who has input to any one of these questions to respond.  And then , stay tuned for an update in a couple of weeks.

Labels: Autonomy, Best Practices, Clearwell, EDD, eDiscovery, EDRM, EDRM XML, IPRO, Kazeon, The Sedona Conference, Workflow

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:49 PM 1 Comments

The Cost of eDiscovery

As we approach the two(2) year anniversary of the December 2006 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), it has been interesting and somewhat educational to follow the tremendous confusion and the dramatic changes in the cost of processing Electronically Stored Information (ESI). As I have been claiming, the changes to the FRCP and the subsequent requirements to utilize new technology to meet these changes, is a classical example of a market paradigm shift causing chaos and therefore the opportunity for the free market system to run wild. And, as George Socha and Tom Gelbmann report in the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Survey, commercial expenditures on Electronic Data Discovery (EDD) topped $2.7 billion in 2007 , up 43 percent from 2006, and that they predict that they will grow by 21 percent, 20 percent and 15 percent in 2008, 2009 and 2010 which equates to a $4.5 billion market at the end of 2010. As a point of comparison, Gartner Says "Worldwide IT Spending On Pace to Surpass $3.4 Trillion in 2008".

Standard EDD Fees
In a traditional electronic data discovery (EDD) project, costs break down along the following lines: (1) The cost of collecting data; (2) the cost of processing data from its native format into a format that can be loaded into an electronic document review system, and: (3) the cost of reviewing the data. Please note that according to the Fourth Annual Fulbright Litigation Trends Survey, document review accounted for 30 to 50 percent of all litigation costs. So, the current trend is to reduce the amount of data that has to be reviewed and to also reduce the actual review costs.

Manual Data Collection and Computer Forensics: The cost of manually collecting data and performing computer forensics is billed at an hourly rate plus expenses. In 2007, rates ranges from $350 - $750 per hour and have dropped to $250-$500 per hour or even lower depending upon the complexity of the project.

EDD Processing: EDD Processing or what is more commonly known as electronic data discovery (EDD) includes loading the data onto an EDD platform, extracting and "flattening" attachments and embedded files, converting the data to a readable format, reducing the volume of the data by culling it down based upon key word filters, de-duping and then creating a load file to enable the data to be loaded into an electronic review software. In 2007 EED processing costs were $1,500 - $2,000 per Gigabyte (GB) and have dropped to less than $1,500 per GB depending upon whether or not the clients request key word filtering, de-duplication or other specialized processing. In addition, in the last six (6) months, some service providers and vendors are charging less than $1,000 per GB for what they are calling "quick peek" EDD processing which is nothing more than flattening and converting the Electronically Stored Information (ESI) into a format that can be read by one of the electronic document review platforms.

Manual Document Review: Document Review is the "time honored" ritual of paying a lawyer or paralegal and hourly rate to literally review every document associated with a matter to determine pertinence, privilege and responsiveness. In 2007, if done manually in the United States by a licensed lawyer, hourly rates for review ranged from $250-$500 per hour or higher. However, in response to the markets demand to reduce the cost of review, many of the larger US based law firms are setting up off-shore operations in India and Malaysia to take advantage of the lower cost of labor and there are also now several third party off-shore document review organizations that are putting downward pressure on hourly fees with rates as low at $35 per hour. In addition, there are now several software solutions that contend that they can supplement human document review to even further reduce the costs.

Recently, several service providers, law firms and other interested third parties have introduced the concept of per-unit pricing for document review as opposed to the conventionally accepted billable hour. So, as with any market going through a paradigm shift, creative people will step in to fill a demand or void. Brett Burney does an excellent job of outlining some of the current trends in reducing the cost of document review in a June 23, 2008 article on the Law.com site, titled "Subdue the Costs of Document Review".

Document Review Platforms: There are several very poplar legacy client/server document review platforms such as Concordance and Summation and several newer Online Review Tools (ORT) such as iConect, RingTail, ImageDepot and Lexbe. The costs to host data on these platforms runs about $50 per Gigabyte (GB) with $100 - $200 per GB setup and load fees. However, several of the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based ORT's such as ImageDepot, have recently run promotions to offer hosting and review of unlimited amounts of data for $1 per month for 5 months with a twelve (12) month commitment.

In keeping with the standard dynamics of new technology being introduced into a market in a paradigm shift, these newer ORTs are using SaaS technology that is very scalable and very inexpensive to run and can actually make an acceptable margin at these lower prices. It will be interesting to watch how the legacy vendors respond. The new lower price points will force them to either develop their own SaaS based tools, acquire one of the newer SaaS based tools or go out of business.

Solutions that Reduce the Amount of ESI
As stated, the easiest way to reduce the overall cost of EDD is to reduce the amount of data as early in the process as possible. Not surprisingly, several advanced technology vendors have emerged to fill this demand, including Clearwell Systems and Kazeon.

Clearwell Systems: Clearwell System's E-Discovery Platform, for instance, is an appliance-based system that identifies duplicate email and document attachments. It filters email according to domain, sender and receiver to further winnow the amount of data that needs to be reviewed. Beyond that, it handles reporting and hosting (in your client's data center, of course) and offers privacy controls.
Standard pricing for Clearwell Intelligence Platform is $65,000 per 100 GB of managed data. Compared with processing fees of about $1,500 per gigabyte of data, Clearwell Intelligence Platform costs clients about $650 per gigabyte to reduce the data required for review. By reducing the amount of data to be reviewed (which, again, is more expensive per gigabyte than the processing work), companies can realize significant savings -- a minimum of $200,000 per 100 GB, assuming 1% is actually reviewed.

Kazeon: Kazeon contends that they revolutionizes the way companies perform eDiscovery by using the Kazeon Information Access Platform software to intelligently discover, search & index, classify and act on electronically stored information. Kazeon provides a full spectrum of proactive and reactive eDiscovery solutions in response to litigation, information security and privacy, corporate investigations, regulatory compliance and storage consolidation requirements. The Kazeon Information Server software automates eDiscovery functions from identification, collection through processing, preservation, analysis and review for corporations, service providers, and law firms. Through the development of unique search & indexing, analysis and workflow automation technology, Kazeon has been recognized by various industry forums, including Gartner's eDiscovery MarketScope and the recent Socha-Gelbmann eDiscovery Survey 2008 where Kazeon was recognized as a Top 5 eDiscovery Software Provider. Kazeon has established partnerships with leading companies, including Fujitsu, Siemens, Google, Network Appliance, Oracle and Symantec.

Kazeon's Claim of $4.30 per GB Processing Costs Stirs Up the Industry
On May 6, 2008, in a press releases announcing that Attenex and Kazeon have formed an eDiscovery Alliance, the real news was buried in the boilerplate as Kazeon contended that they could process a Gigabyte (GB) of data for $4.30. This was actually not new news as they had previously contended in a press release titled "ESG Lab Finds Kazeon’s Information Server Delivers Fast and Cost Effective Information Access" this same financial offering in a slightly less alarming way by stating that the ESG Lab verified impressive price/performance with a single Kazeon Information Server appliance able to index 2,500 documents per dollar and a cost as low as $4,300 dollars per terabyte (which is approximately $4.19 per gigabyte).
However, even in the face of the overwhelming Blog posting response from the industry about this claim being completely misleading, Kazeon has not removed the claim from subsequent press releases and in fact has embraced the claim as the center piece of their marketing message. The best and most thoughtful response came from a posting on the eDiscovery 2.0 Blog by Kurt Leafstrand on May 6th, 2008 titled "eDiscovery Processing: You Get What You Pay For". Given the fact that the eDiscovery 2.0 Blog is written and sponsored by Clearwell Systems, a another player in the eDiscovery space, it may be a bit biased. However, Kurt did a great job of listing the various critical and required processing components that need to be considered when comparing the overall cost of Electronic Data Discovery (EDD).

Example of the Cost of an EDD Project (Using Standard Technology)
Given all of the above as a general foundation for the fees associated with an EDD project, following is an example project:
Parameters and Assumptions

1. Two (2) US based corporations
2. Two (2) Sites for ESI Collections
3. Approximately two (2) terabytes (TB) of data (all native ESI)
4. 2X expansion of ESI during the initial flattening and extraction of attachments and embedded data
5. 50% reduction during initial processing with key word filtering and de-duplication
6. Document Review required at multiple locations
7. Time from matter filing date to completion is estimated to be 3 years.
8. Onshore legal review at 300 pages per hour

Collection Costs
Collection of the data along with computer forensics work, travel expense, storage hardware and hourly rates is as follows;
Collection Fees = 10 hours x $300/hour = $3,000
Storage Hardware = $2,000
Travel Costs = $2,500
Computer Forensic Fees = 10 hours x $300/hour = $3,000

Total Collection Costs = $10,500

Initial Processing Costs (Flattening, Culling, De-duping)
4 TB of Data x $1,000/ GB = $4M (Reduced back down to 2 TB)

Hosting and Review Technology Costs
36 months of Hosting for 2 TB at $50/GB/Month = $3,600,000

Document Review
2 TB of data at 75,000 pages per GB = 150M pages
150M pages at 300 pages / hour = 500,000 hours at $150 / hour = $75M

Total Cost of Project
Collection = $10,500
Processing = $4M
Hosting = $3.6M
Review = $75M

Total Cost = $82,610,500

Alternative Approach
Obviously, $82M is cost prohibitive. So, where can we save from money? Following is an alternative approach:
Changed Assumptions

1. Use of new front-end processing technology
2. 90% reduction in data during culling and de-dupe
3. Use of off-shore review

Alternative Collection / Processing Costs
Although it may not be completely realistic, lets assume that both sites had technology to automatically gather, filter and de-dupe the data (e.g. Clearwell, Kazeon). And, there was no computer forensic work required. Therefore, the cost of processing 4 TB of data using the Kazeon model would be 4 TB x $4,300 / TB = $8,600 (reduction of data to 400 GB)

Alternative Hosing and Review Technology Costs
36 months of Hosting for 400 GB at $50/GB/Month = $720,000

Document Review
400 GB of data at 75,000 pages per GB = 30M pages
30M pages at 300 pages / hour = 100,000 hours at $40 / hour = $4M

Total Cost of Project
Collection / Processing = $8,600
Hosting = $720,000
Review = $4M

Total Cost = $4,728,600

Conclusion
ESI reduction through culling and de-dupe is essential to reduce the amount of data that has to be hosted and reviewed along with reducing the cost of actual document review is the key to reducing the overall cost of EDD processing.

Labels: Clearwell, Consulting Fees, EDD, eDiscovery, Electronic Data Discovery, FRCP, Kazeon, Pricing, Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:49 AM 2 Comments

Integreon Announces Single Source eDiscovery

In a followup to my recent post from July 2, 2oo8 titled "eDiscovery Single Source Solutions", Integreon Managed Solutions, Inc., the global leader in integrated Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), has confirmed the interest in providing single source solutions by announcing the launch of “Doctane”, a complete discovery management solution, which simplifies litigation project management, reduces the total cost of litigation and improves the predictability of litigation expense budgets.

Doctane offers a full suite of discovery services which can be integrated or selected as stand-alone components, at a fixed price per document including: Discovery Management Consulting; Data Collection, Processing, Analysis and Early Case Assessment; Data Hosting; Document Review and Production. Doctane is operated entirely in-house by Integreon, so clients benefit from the “one stop” convenience of managing all their discovery requirements with a single service provider.

Integreon has chosen MetaLINCS, Attenex, Concordance FYI and CaseLogistix as its best-in-class technology partners and Offers the flexibility of rapid start, cost control, and round-the-clock review teams with a choice of in-house, full-time staff attorneys to conduct privilege and responsiveness reviews from wholly-owned domestic centers in New York City, Fargo, ND (USA) and offshore centers in Mumbai and New Delhi (India), and Manila (Philippines).

As previously stated, I believe that vendors such as Integreon that go down the single source solution route are absolutely on target with market demand and as such will be one of the survivors as the market shakes out the pure players. However, from a users perspective, I would be more concerned with the risk associated with a player like Integreon that is taking a best-of-breed technology approach and is therefore at the mercy of the actually software vendor than with a player such as Case Central, Autonomy or Clearwell Systems that actaully owns their own technology.

Please note that as my next followup to eDiscovery Single Source Solutions, I am planning to review The OneO® Discovery Platform, an recently announced offering by Orange Legal Technologies out of Salt Lake City.

Labels: Attenex, CaseLogistixs, Clearwell, Doctane, EDRM, Integreon, Litigation Support Software, MetaLINCS, Orange Legal Technologies, single source

posted by Charles Skamser @ 9:38 AM 0 Comments

Kazeon Press Release Focuses Attention on the Cost of a Latte and the Falling Cost of eDiscovery

Like lots of other eDiscovery professionals this morning, I had to do a double take when I read the press release today from Kazeon announcing their new partnership with Attenex, titled, "Attenex and Kazeon Announce eDiscovery Alliance". The double take was caused by the fact that Kazeon announced that they can deliver industry-leading price/performance for in-house processing of ESI in preparation for reactive and proactive eDiscovery matters as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte. This is actually not new news as they had previously contended in a press release titled "ESG Lab Finds Kazeon’s Information Server Delivers Fast and Cost Effective Information Access" this same financial offering in a slightly less alarming way by stating that the ESG Lab verified impressive price/performance with a single Kazeon Information Server appliance able to index 2,500 documents per dollar and a cost as low as $4,300 dollars per terabyte (which is approximately $4.19 per gigabyte).

However, any way you crunch the numbers, position the cost or spin the offering, it is just flat alarming and bordering on unbelievable for both users and technology vendors in the eDiscovery market. Bottom line, whether or not you believe that Kazeon is comparing true eDiscovery apples with the rest of the apples in the market, it doesn't matter as this is definitely the first shot across the bow of the rest of the eDiscovery vendors. Prices are comming down and the rest of the market is going to have to keep up. Unfortunately, many of them have very old technology that requires lots of manual manipulation and processing and therefore may not have the "legs" to stay in the race. I don't see any dramatic changes in 2008 as users will still trying to figure out what they are getting for thier investments or not getting from each of the vendors. However, once this is all common knowledge, 2009 may be the year of the changing of the vendor guard in eDiscovery.

All of that being said, the best comments on this press release came from Kurt Leafstrand of Clearwell on his eDiscovery 2.0 Blog. The title of his posting is "eDiscovery Processing: You Get What You Pay For" and does a really great job of questioning whether or not Kazeon can really support even the minimum requirements of the EDRM processing node for what basically amounts to the less than the cost of my favorite Starbukcs venti, breve, sugar free hazlenut latte.

With all the talk of the cost of lattes, maybe the next big eDiscovery winner will be the vendor that announces a cross marketing deal with Starbucks to include a free venti latte with every GB of data procesed. Remember that you heard it first here on the eDiscovery Paradigm Shift Blog.

Because I beleive that it is one of the more humerous eDiscovery posts that I have read in some time, I am inlcuding the entire contents of Kurts Blog post below:

Anyone reading today’s announcement from Kazeon could be forgiven for doing a double-take: did someone misplace the decimal point? Kazeon claims that it can perform “processing of ESI in preparation for eDiscovery matters as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte.” Assuming that’s not simply a typo, it begs an obvious question: If Kazeon really can process information at a tiny fraction of what e-discovery service providers are charging, how come every e-discovery service provider isn’t going out of business? Why wouldn’t everyone take this incredibly good deal?
The answer (in press releases, as in politics) lies in definitions. Exactly what sort of processing would you be getting for your four dollars and change?

You’ll have to ask Kazeon to get the answer to that one, but give a venti latte to a bleary-eyed e-discovery service provider who’s just pulled an all-nighter preparing for a meet-and-confer, and they’ll tell you all about the nuances, complexities, and risks inherent in e-discovery processing that may be difficult for enterprise search/information lifecycle management vendors to grasp. Quite likely, they will refer you to EDRM’s processing node overview, which outlines the basic goals of robust processing:

1. Capture and preserve the body of electronic documents;
2. Associate document collections with particular users (custodians);
3. Capture and preserving the metadata associated with the electronic files within the collections;
4. Establish the parent-child relationship between the various source data files;
   Automate the identification and elimination of redundant, duplicate data with the given dataset;
5. Provide a means to programmatically suppress material that is not relevant to the review based on criteria such as keywords, date ranges or other available metadata;
6. Unprotect and reveal information within files; and Accomplish all of these goals in a manner that is both defensible with respect to clients’ legal obligations and appropriately cost-effective and expedient in the context of the matter.

And that’s just the high-level overview. After the caffeine from the latte starts to kick in, they’ll tell you it’s also absolutely critical to:

1. Provide statistical count tie-outs that reconcile every incoming email, loose file, and attachment with the processed document set
2. Automatically scan critical large container files (such as PSTs) for errors and problems prior to processing
3. Automatically perform custodian mapping to track ownership of all documents
   Maintain detailed reports on every anomaly encountered during processing, down to the individual email, loose file, and attachment
4. Automatically handle common metadata anomalies (with logging) so that the maximum number of documents are made available for review
5. Provide robust and thorough handling for container files regardless of container format
   Support non-email content types such as contacts, calendar entries, tasks, and notes
6. Robustly handle embedded objects
7. Provide full visibility into exceptions encountered during processing, along with an integrated exception handling process to allow repaired/decrypted data to be easily added back into the document set

All that for under five bucks? That’s quite a deal! But remember, if you drive by your corner gas station tomorrow morning and they’re advertising regular unleaded for 20 cents a gallon: It may be cheap, but it’s probably not gas you’re getting.

Labels: Clearwell, EDD, Electronic Data Discovery, Kazeon

posted by Charles Skamser @ 6:50 PM 1 Comments