$1.2 Billion eDiscovery Market by 2014

A press release as posted on Marketwire on October 11, 2010, indicates that a very recent study by The Radicati Group, titled, “eDiscovery Market, 2010-2104”, predicts that the eDiscovery market will reach $1.2 billion in sales by 2014.

This is considerably less than the $2.8 billion market size for 2009 as indicated in the The 2010 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey.

And, unless we assume no growth over the next few year, less than the $1.2 billion forecast by The Gartner Group earlier this year.

I am sure that there are differences in the exact revenues sources that these studies are looking at and also differences in statistical methodologies.  However, under I any circumstances, eDiscovery is a big market and I believe from personal experience that it should continue to grow.

Over the past 12 months I have talked to numerous CIOs and other “C” level information technology executives from the Global 2000 that have jumped into the eDiscovery discussion internally, added the requirements to their radar and expect to budget funds to cover infrastructure to support bringing some aspects of eDiscovery in-house.

According to a somewhat related study that adds an even more interesting twist to the expected growth and direction of the eDiscovery market,  The Cowen Group recently conducted a study of the AmLaw 200, the highest-grossing law firms in the United States, and found 87 of the 200 currently have internal eDiscovery practice groups.  According to David Cowen, founder of the Cowen Group, the results signify the importance of reliable eDiscovery solutions and practices for firms of all sizes and specialties.

The Cowen Group study goes on to state that many of the firms with practice groups reported that their current and prospective clients showed interest in their services due to the presence of the eDiscovery experts. However, the report also found a number of organizations with practice groups still do not have the adequate IT and human resources required to fully support the initiative.

"These findings are significant for corporations who require law firms with legitimate eDiscovery experience," said David Cowen, founder of The Cowen Group. "Many firms realized that they needed to establish an eDiscovery practice group to market themselves to savvy clients, but far fewer made the necessary investments in people, process and technology to develop a group with true eDiscovery expertise."

To improve the standards of eDiscovery use and practice, Cowen expects to release an essential guide for firms planning to implement practice groups.

Having talked to partners from most of the AMLaw200 over the past 12 months, my take is that they are seeing their corporate clients either already brining eDiscovery and associated activities in-house or planning to do so over the next couple of years.   I also have heard time and time again that many of these partners are pleased to see this trend as they never wanted to be in the IT business in the first place.

Summary Questions I have a few questions about the results these various studies:

1.  Is the eDiscovery market in fact growing?
2.  Who is buying? Is is the Global 2000 or the AMLaw200
3.  Are  per unit eDiscovery costs coming down?  And, if so, is the overall cost of eDiscovery going up because of the accelerating increase in the amount of ESI?

The full text of the Radicati Group press release is as follows:

The latest study by The Radicati Group, "eDiscovery Market, 2010-2014," offers an in-depth analysis of the worldwide market for eDiscovery solutions. The study includes market trends, vendor revenue market share, market size and four-year forecasts, and breakouts by region.

eDiscovery solutions enable organizations to identify, collect, analyze, process, and present data stored in various corporate repositories. The data may be collected in response to lawsuits, internal investigations, or regulatory compliance requests. 

eDiscovery solutions today range from custom-built for each individual customer, to pre-packaged solutions that work out-of-the box in less than an hour. About 80% of all eDiscovery solutions are deployed by legal departments of large organizations, and the remaining 20% by law firms. 

This study includes an analysis of leading players in the eDiscovery market, including: Anacomp, Autonomy, CaseCentral, Clearwell, EMC, Guidance Software, Iron Mountain (Stratify), Recommind, StoredIQ, Symantec, and others.

To order a copy of the study, or to subscribe to our market research services, visit our website at http://www.radicati.com/, or call Todd Yamasaki at (650) 322-8059 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting   (650) 322-8059 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

About The Radicati Group, Inc. The Radicati Group is a leading technology research and advisory firm focused on all aspects of email, security, email archiving, regulatory compliance, wireless technologies, web services, instant messaging, unified communications, social networking, and more. The company provides both quantitative and qualitative information, including detailed market size, installed base and forecast information on a worldwide basis, as well as detailed country breakouts.

The Radicati Group works with corporate organizations to assist in the selection of the right products and technologies to support their business needs, as well as with vendors to define the best strategic direction for their products. We also work with investment firms on a worldwide basis to help identify new investment opportunities.

The Radicati Group, Inc. is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in London, UK.

Labels: Autonomy, Clearwell Systems, eDiscovery, Gartner, Recommind, Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey, StoredIQ

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:35 AM 1 Comments

The Conceptual Search Game is Finally On!!

I have been writing (probably preaching to some) about advanced search technology, the differences between conceptual search and keyword search and the importance of advanced search technology in both the Early Case Assessment (ECA) and document review phases of eDiscovery for the past 3 years.

Concept Search Cash Law Emerging http://ediscoveryconsulting.blogspot.com/2008/06/concept-search-case-law-emerging.html
Concept Search vs. Keyword Search http://ediscoveryconsulting.blogspot.com/2008/12/concept-search-vs-keyword-search-in.html
Litigators Need ESI Analytics – Not Boolean Search Tools http://ediscoveryconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/05/litigators-need-esi-analytics-not.html

However, I have been somewhat disappointed in regards to the level of adoption of true conceptual search technology by the leading Litigation Technology vendors.  That appears to be changing.  As an example, in a June 17, 2010 post by StoredIQ titled, “Email Search: Nowhere to Hide”, the author provides an overview of StoredIQ’s search technology with specific focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP).  The reason that I am pointing this out is that 12 months ago, StoredIQ would not have been spending marketing dollars or Blog space on Natural Language Processing (NLP) because the market didn’t know what it was and didn’t care.

In this Blog post, StoredIQ now contends, “Probably of greatest interest to litigators during the discovery process is StoredIQ’s ability to perform natural language processing (NLP), which is the ability to extract linguistically derived natural language concepts from within email and user files including people, places and things. Legal teams can immediately search using over 250 out-of-the-box concepts and attributes including credit card accounts, social security numbers and stock symbols. NLP identifies word usage based upon context within a sentence. For example, NLP can identify if the word ‘will’ is used to identify a person’s name, a legal document or an auxiliary verb showing intent. StoredIQ has proprietary technology for adaptive sentence boundary disambiguation (ASBD) which substantially increases the precision of Natural Language Processing to address common grammatical deficiencies that are present in many business documents. No other information management technologies have this capability. NLP is a critical capability necessary to accurately perform eDiscovery, records management or risk management as full text indexes alone cannot provide the required level of precision.

Interestingly enough,  in my discussions with General Counsel and their litigation support teams from the Information Technology departments over the past 6 months, I have found a new awareness and appreciation for true conceptual search or semantic search or NLP.    So, StoredIQ is on the right track with their current product  offerings and I would bet that they have a product roadmap with more of the same.

So, I guess the conceptual search game is on and the other litigation technology vendors had better take notice of what their clients are saying in regards to what search technology they need.

The full text of the  StoredIQ Blog post is as follows:

A recent article by Jacob Goldstein, 23 Things Not To Write In An Email, illustrates the type of granularity as well as breadth of keywords that can be used by litigators during the legal discovery process to search for relevant information. He points out some keywords that may raise a legal red flag and should be used carefully when constructing emails. However, today’s technology search capabilities provide such precise, complete and accurate results, that there just isn’t anywhere to hide.
For instance, StoredIQ’s advanced search capabilities can look within compressed files, email archives and email attachments, in addition to the text contained in the email message itself. It can also search non-printable text within a document or email and can search through comments and revisions. In addition to search using keywords, StoredIQ supports many advanced search capabilities including:

• Single term search
• Multiple term search
• Concept-based search
• Boolean operators
• Logical grouping of terms
• Wildcards within search terms or Boolean expressions
• Proximity searches
• Natural language entities
• Regular expressions
• Macro-based searches
• Object level attributes
• By hash value (digital signatures)

Probably of greatest interest to litigators during the discovery process is StoredIQ’s ability to perform natural language processing (NLP), which is the ability to extract linguistically derived natural language concepts from within email and user files including people, places and things. Legal teams can immediately search using over 250 out-of-the-box concepts and attributes including credit card accounts, social security numbers and stock symbols. NLP identifies word usage based upon context within a sentence. For example, NLP can identify if the word ‘will’ is used to identify a person’s name, a legal document or an auxiliary verb showing intent. StoredIQ has proprietary technology for adaptive sentence boundary disambiguation (ASBD) which substantially increases the precision of Natural Language Processing to address common grammatical deficiencies that are present in many business documents. No other information management technologies have this capability. NLP is a critical capability necessary to accurately perform eDiscovery, records management or risk management as full text indexes alone cannot provide the required level of precision.
I know a lot of these terms can be a mouthful, but the underlying take away is that legal teams have the technology to precisely and accurately search electronic data, including email, making it much easier for litigators to discover data that was at one time hidden from them.

Labels: Conceptual Search, Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, email, Keyword Search, Natural Language Processing, Seach Technology, Search Terms, Semantic Search, StoredIQ

posted by Charles Skamser @ 11:59 AM 0 Comments

Another Perspective on LegalTech New York 2009

As a follow-up to my February 4, 2009 post on LegalTech New York 2009 titled, "LegalTech New York 2009 Update", I am adding the following post from February 3, 2009 on Law.com's Legal Technology Blog, Titled, "LegalTech New Year". The review points out, as I did in my initial posting, that Early Case Assessment (ECA) was the big winner at the show this year, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was hard to ignore and also does an excellent job covering some of my favorite vendors and their new technologies including Index Engines, Kazeon Systems, Guidance Software, Mimosa Systems, StoredIQ, Clearwell Systems and RocketMatter.

The full text of the post is as follows:

The new year has come and gone on the Gregorian calendar. But the new year for legal technology is still in progress at LegalTech New York, where vendors are unveiling their new products and services and attendees are helping them celebrate.

LegalTech attendees should revel in the number of vendor initiatives aimed at reducing e-discovery costs from acquisition to review and production. And, like last year, EDD vendors continue to design and manufacture their products for international litigation. But LegalTech is not all about e-discovery. There were still plenty of vendors with products outside the Electronic Data Reference Model.

EDD PARTIES
Readers should be aware that Index Engines can access and extract data from tape and tape libraries, really fast. But now they can also extract data from network storage systems, file shares, forensic images, and hard drives and still provide users a single point of access to it -- via a Web browser. Index Engines first indexes data on disparate resources. Once the index is compiled, data can be deduped, searched, reviewed, and extracted on demand. Also note that Index Engines can now filter unwanted file types such as EXE, DLL, etc., during the indexing process to reduce the time it takes to review the data.
In preparation of the new year, Kazeon Systems introduced new pay-as-you-go pricing models that augment their current standard software licensing option and focus on case matters. Kazeon hopes the new pricing models allow customers to implement an e-discovery solution that does not require a major financial investment or lengthy rollout.

Vendors are starting to “go left” of the EDRM to provide organizations a better view of the end of litigation via early case assessment tools. In fact, KPMG promoted the concept with a T-shirt emblazoned with "go left." Toward that end, Daticon EED announced the availability of its Early Case Assessment service that integrates concept-search technology with Discovery Partner, an integrated processing, analytics, review, and production platform. Discovery Partner was also enhanced with an Image Conversion Server that stages production-ready images in anticipation of production. The image server aims to reduce the time it takes to convert images and make the process transparent to reviewers.

Leaning toward the "left" side of EDRM, I watched a demonstration of Guidance Software's EnCase Legal Hold, its new Web-based litigation hold and tracking solution. EnCase Legal Hold has a good point of entrance into the EDD market via EnCase eDiscovery. Guidance hopes the new product will allow customers to issue legal holds and correspond with custodians as well as track and report on the collection and processing of ESI -- all performed with EnCase eDiscovery. Using a single case database, users can issue litigation holds, track correspondence with custodians, monitor and enforce compliance with the legal holds, and track the progress of collection and processing of potentially responsive ESI.

E-discovery players that continue to go to the left side of EDRM are eventually going to meet those players that are moving into e-discovery from stage left. Enter: Mimosa Systems NearPoint. Mimosa started out providing e-mail and file archiving solutions to organizations. Now, it contains a full suite of features designed to automate information management to facilitate the identification, collection, and preservation of content, e-mail and files, based on policies. Endpoint: NearPoint aims to speed up the discovery process and reduce information collection times and reduce storage costs. And don't give me that story that storage is cheap argument unless you power your data center with solar or wind power.

Looking at LegalTech from an international perspective, Clearwell Systems launched Clearwell Mobile for cross-border litigation. The Mobile product is powered by Clearwell’s E-Discovery Platform and provides organizations the ability to “drop” a Platform in a customer’s foreign site and allow legal teams to perform e-discovery “in country,” where the data resides and local counsel are familiar with the foreign entity’s privacy laws. After data has been acquired and responsive data has been retrieved and redacted, it is sent back to the situs of litigation. The good news is that you can return the box after the job is completed, much like returning a rental car – for a one-time, low fee. The other good news: Mobile is fully Unicode compliant.

I watched a demonstration of Mobile at LegalTech. It supports English, Western European, Eastern European, and Asian languages. This multilingual support lends itself to Clearwell’s search technology in search previews, search filters, and search reports in cross-border cases. I witnessed a demonstration of Mobile as it provided automatic language identification to data sets and exacted document counts by language type. The Unicode support also allows users to easily tag documents in different languages and assign them to multiple reviewers.

Huron Consulting remains bullish on outsourcing to India with an announcement of an exclusive alliance with UnitedLex. The alliance will bring together approximately 1,000 domestic document review stations from Huron and 600 Indian-based sets aiming to reduce the costs of e-discovery. As the year progresses, however, and more U.S.-based attorneys in search of work are willing to engage discovery review, outsourcing to India may not be so appealing.

Now, if you wonder about security in your service provider, which you should, check out eMag solutions’ ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification for its operation centers in the U.K. and the U.S. EMag is an international provider of e-discovery services and data and its ISO 27001 certification indicates that it provides guidelines to implement risk management processes and policies that ensure secure infrastructures. So, ask your service provider what risk management framework they use to set security controls that ensure the safety and confidentiality of your data.

StoredIQ announced that it has expanded its e-discovery solution to support Symantec Enterprise Vault as a recognized data source during the legal discovery process. That means Enterprise Vault users who use the StoredIQ appliance get two big benefits. One: Vault users will get access to a broad set of data sources, in addition to the e-mail archive. So instead of aggregating data from multiple sources and manually merging it with information from the Vault's e-mail archives, users will be able to facilitate e-discovery processing by using a single appliance. Two: Using the StoredIQ appliance as the single repository for collecting, processing, and preparing responsive data for discovery has the potential to reduce the time it takes to work across the EDRM and minimize the overall costs.

"BEYOND THE [EDD] PALE"
To list the number of vendors I talked to outside of the EDRM would exhaust me. But there are few worth noting. EasySoft, a provider of legal software to streamline document creation and workflow and eliminate repetitive tasks. They discussed their product lines with me that ranged from managing bankruptcy cases to calculating divorce financials and time and billing. They even have shrink-wrap software to help the family law and personal injury lawyer, but those are limited to New Jersey law.

LawProspector aims to live up to its name in litigation terms. It looks to provide access to critical data about the litigation marketplace in a Web-based, software-as-a-service tool built for litigation support and business development teams at major law firms. LawProspector offers views into the current and future litigation activities of lawyers, law firms, and corporations. What can you do with that? LawProspector says it can be used to evaluate lateral hires, monitor existing client litigation activities, and measure the litigation activities of competing law firms and potential clients. I will validate this in due time.

I also reconnected with Courtroom Connect at LegalTech, a provider of litigation support connectivity to law firms, litigation support firms, and court reporters. It was showing off it's Polycom videoconferencing tools for its Remote Counsel product. It is interesting to note that this company got its start from some Stanford graduates who wired California courthouses much like network providers today wire hotels -- and charge back for services.

Software as a service is almost as hard to ignore today as Web 2.0, especially for solo and small firm attorneys looking for a low-cost method of law practice management. Both Clio and Rocket Matter stepped up to LegalTech with new products and services.

Clio announced ClientConnect, a secure Web-based portal for online document sharing, client collaboration, and online bill paying. Once you set a client up and allow him or her access to their data, they can view information on their matter, correspondence, documents (Microsoft Word, Excel, and PDF files), comments on documents, bills and invoices, and an online bill-paying system. ClientConnect comes at no additional charge to the $49 per month fee for lawyers and $25 per month fee per support staff member.
Rocket Matter, in celebration of the new year, officially launched version1.0 on January 6. Previous to that, it had been operating in beta mode. Like Clio, Rocket Matter is software as a service aimed at legal practice management and time and billing needs for lawyers and law firms. I will be taking a closer look at Rocket Matter after I collect myself from all the activities at LegalTech New York.

Labels: Clearwell Systems, Guidance Software, Huron Consulting, Index Engines, Kazeon Systems, LegalTech New York 2009, Mimosa Systems, StoredIQ

posted by Charles Skamser @ 2:49 PM 0 Comments

Another Round of eDiscovery Technology Enhancements as Vendors Stampede Towards Single Source Solutions

Although it is not the purpose of The eDiscovery Paradigm Shift to track litigation technology vendors and thier most recent releases, it appears that there has been a recent flurry of announcements regarding either the enhancement of early collection or the addition of further Early Case Assessment (ECA) analysis that futher enforce my contention that there is a variable vendor stampede towards single source solutions: eDiscovery Single Source Solutions.

This vendor stampede is great for end users in the short run as it appears that most of the more well know players in the litigation technology market are continuig to offer the missing components to bring their solutions up to the "single source" platform criteria.

However, in the long run as is always the case when market to through a paradigm shift and as we are now witnesses with the last days of NFL training camps, not everyone, not every vendor is going to make the cut. There is going to be consolidation, some complete failures and some near failures. And, in the long run this will be good for a stable mature eDiscovery markte. However, in the short run, even through end-users now have many "good" choices, they better consider other factors in choosing their vendors such as longevity.

In future posts to this Blog, I will offer some suggestions to end users to help them avoid choosing the wrong vendors.

August 2008 Vendor Announcements

Kazeon Extends eDiscovery Collection, Processing and Analysis with Legal Hold and Laptop/Desktop Product

Mountain View, Calif. - August 25, 2008 - Kazeon Systems, Inc., a leading provider of intelligent eDiscovery solutions, today announced the availability of Version 3.1 of its award-winning Information Server IS1200-ECS. The new version introduces a new in-place legal hold, KazHold™ and a new agent-less product for in-place analysis of and collection from laptops/desktops. These new products and functionality are key enhancements in helping organizations streamline their collection, analysis and processing for proactive and reactive eDiscovery processes and ensure that they discover all relevant and necessary information for any litigation related activity. These new capabilities provide extensive defensibility and audit ability for eDiscovery by ensuring no spoliation of data and no modifications to metadata attributes of files and emails, while saving significantly on network bandwidth and cost during the process of collection, processing and analysis. With Version 3.1 of its Information Server IS1200-ECS Kazeon continues to set the standard in addressing the most sophisticated eDiscovery requirements of organizations worldwide. The IS1200-ECS is now being used by hundreds of corporations worldwide, and has more than 50 billion documents and 3000 Terabytes under direct management.

FTI Announces Availability of Attenex® Patterns® 5.0

FTI Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:FCN), the global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance their enterprise value, today announced from the ILTA ’08 conference the availability of Attenex Patterns version 5.0. The release of Attenex Patterns 5.0 marks the first product announcement since FTI Consulting acquired Attenex in July 2008. The new eDiscovery software includes a number of significant enhancements to help corporate IT departments administer and enforce a repeatable in-house eDiscovery process.

“Attenex Patterns is the eDiscovery standard for many law firms and corporations because it puts them in the best position to make the best decision on any matter—whether for investigations, legal or compliance needs,” said JR Jesson, senior managing director of FTI Consulting. “Enhancements in Attenex Patterns 5.0 benefit corporate IT teams tasked with developing a defensible and cost-effective eDiscovery process.”

Among the new features within Attenex Patterns 5.0, the software development kit (SDK) enables corporate IT teams to automate eDiscovery processing tasks, reducing unnecessary expenses and the risk of human error. The software’s open APIs help corporate IT teams leverage existing investments by integrating Attenex Patterns with complementary applications and data sources. Additionally, corporate IT teams can develop integrated utilities for custom eDiscovery processing tasks.

The dramatic growth of enterprise data collected during litigation, internal investigations and regulatory inquiries creates new challenges for corporate eDiscovery teams. Attenex Patterns 5.0 helps the in-house team rise to this challenge by delivering several new performance enhancements for managing eDiscovery matters—whether multinational or multi-terabyte. These enhancements include improved data processing and search performance with Asian languages, faster processing speeds for multiple PST and NSF files, as well as faster de-duplication and re-clustering capabilities to help eDiscovery teams more quickly make sense of the data during internal investigations and case assessments.

Businesses have identified Attenex as a top five eDiscovery software provider for the second straight year in the most recent Socha-Gelbmann eDiscovery survey. A longtime market leader in document processing and analytics software for eDiscovery, Attenex Patterns software consists of:

Attenex® Patterns® Workbench™, enterprise-class data and project management software used by leading corporations to implement repeatable in-house eDiscovery processes. More than a culling tool or appliance, in-house eDiscovery teams rely on Workbench’s unprecedented flexibility for filtering collected data, developing case strategy as well as tracking document decisions and work product throughout the process; and Attenex® Patterns® Document Mapper™, the choice of legal and compliance teams that need to quickly and accurately identify relevant information from electronic document collections of any size. An unparalleled visual interface increases review productivity with a multi-dimensional look at the collection’s main concepts and themes. Reviewers can quickly and accurately identify, analyze, review and categorize documents during internal investigations or case assessments.

Attenex Patterns can be deployed on-premise or on-demand through an Attenex Advantage™ service provider, providing flexible deployment options that can be customized to the needs of any environment. This flexibility, combined with new features in version 5.0, further strengthens Attenex Patterns’ position as the premier eDiscovery software for corporations that want to take control of their eDiscovery process.

StoredIQ eDiscovery Appliance 4.6 Increases Functionality Leadership with Expanded Platform Support and Enhanced eDiscovery Features

Austin, TX. August 25, 2008 — StoredIQ, Inc., whose innovative eDiscovery technology revolutionizes the way companies address eDiscovery and litigation readiness, announced today expanded platform integration support and enhanced eDiscovery functionality designed to improve the efficiency of IT and legal teams performing work within the eDiscovery lifecycle.
"StoredIQ automates more of the eDiscovery lifecycle than any other solution," said Steve Killan, Enterprise Server Manager at James Hardie, the world leader in fiber cement technology. "StoredIQ delivers unparalleled functionality in both breadth and depth from information management through the identification, collection, preservation and processing of electronically stored information."

StoredIQ V4.6 includes:

- Expanded Platform Support
- Ability to insert unstructured information as records into the most current version of EMC Documentum and place those items under litigation hold
- Ability to insert, retrieve and manage information within Microsoft Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007
- Deeper eDiscovery Capabilities
- Improved query report analytics to assist with "meet-and-confer" sessions
Ability to harvest additional email server objects such as tasks, contacts, calendar items, and notes
- Support of the EDRM XML V1.0 load file format
- Enhanced usability and productivity for pre-collection investigations

Labels: Attenex, Documentum, Early Case Assessment, eCapture, EDRM, FTI, Kazeon, SharePoint, StoredIQ, XML

posted by Charles Skamser @ 10:45 AM 0 Comments