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

eDiscovery XML

Coming from the object oriented software development world and more recently from the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development world, XML or eXtensible Markup Language is a mainstay. However, with my new pond being eDiscovery technology, XML is just another acronym that everyone has to learn. And, although us eDiscovery technology gurus may never catch up to the SaaS nerds, I would suspect that XML is going to have to be a big part of our pond as we all seek to exchange and integrate the massive amounts of ESI that we have so eloquently generated.

As such, I found the following article, E-Discovery Guru Not Yet Wed to XML, by Craig Ball published on the Law Technology News site on March 25, 2008 to be extremely informative and timely. The text of Mr. Ball's article is as follows:

I want to love XML. I want to embrace it with the passion of my wiser colleagues, excited by its schemas, titillated by its well-formed code, flushed from its pull-parsing. I want to love XML as much as the cool kids do. So why does it leave me cold?

I want XML the dragon slayer: all the functionality of native electronic evidence coupled with the ease of identification, reliable redaction and intelligibility of paper documents. The promise is palpable; but for now, XML is just a clever replacement for load files, those clumsy Sancho Panzas that serve as squire to addled TIFF image productions. Maybe that's reason enough to love XML.

XML is eXtensible Markup Language, an unfamiliar name for a familiar technology. Markup languages are coded identifiers paired with text and other information. They can define the appearance of content, like the reveal-codes screen of Corel Inc.'s WordPerfect documents. They also serve to tag content to distinguish whether 09011957 is a birth date (09/01/1957), a phone number (0-901-1957) or a Bates number. Plus, markup languages allow machines to talk to each other in ways humans understand.

Internet surfers rely on a markup language called HyperText Markup Language or HTML that forms the pages of the World Wide Web. There's a good chance the e-mail you send or receive is HTML, too. If you've tried to move documents between WordPerfect and Microsoft Corp.'s Word, or synchronize information across different programs, you know success hinges on how well one application understands the data of another.

Something as simple as importing day-first European date formats to month-first U.S. systems causes big headaches if the recipient doesn't know what it's getting.
Standardized markup languages alleviate problems by tagging data to describe it (e.g., ), constraining data by imposing conditions (e.g., restricting dates to U.S. formats: ) and supporting hierarchic structuring of information (e.g., 01/09/1957).

There are so many kinds of data and metadata unique to applications and industries that a universal tagging system would be absurdly complex and couldn't keep pace with technology and business. Accordingly, XML is extensible; that is, anyone can create tags and set their descriptions and parameters. Then, just as persons with different native tongues can agree to converse in a language both speak, different computer systems can communicate using an agreed-upon XML implementation. It's Esperanto for electrons.

In e-discovery, we deal with information piecemeal, such as native documents and system metadata or e-mail messages and headers. We even deconstruct evidence by imaging it and stripping it of searchability, only to have to reconstruct the lost text and produce it with the image. Metadata, header data and searchable text tend to be produced in containers called load files housing delimited text, meaning that values in each row of data follow a rigid sequence and are separated by characters like commas, tabs or quotation marks. Using load files entails negotiating their organization or agreeing to employ a structure geared to review software such as CT Summation or Lexis Nexis Concordance. Conventional load files are unforgiving. Deviate from the required sequence, or omit, misplace or include an extra delimiter, and it's a train wreck.

By tagging each value to identify its content and connection to the evidence, XML brings intelligence and resilience to load files. More importantly, XML fosters the ability to move data from one environment to another simply by matching the tags to proper counterparts.
Like our multilingual speakers using a common language, as long as two systems employ the same XML tags and organization (typically shared as an XML Schema Definition or XSD file), they can quickly and intelligibly share information. Parties and vendors exchanging data can fashion a common schema custom tailored to their data or employ a published schema suited to the task.

There is no standard e-discovery XML schema in wide use, but consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann are promoting one crafted as part of their groundbreaking Electronic Discovery Reference Model project. Socha (a member of LTN's Editorial Advisory Board) and Gelbmann have done an impressive job securing commitments from e-discovery service providers to adopt EDRM XML as an industry lingua franca. See http://edrm.net.

A mature e-discovery XML schema must incorporate and authenticate native and nontextual data and ensure that the resulting XML stays valid and well-formed. It's feasible to encode and incorporate binary formats using MIME (the same way they travel via e-mail), and to authenticate by hashing; but these refinements aren't yet a part of the EDRM schema.

So stay tuned. I don't love XML yet, but it promises to be everyone's new best friend.

Craig Ball, a member of the editorial advisory boards of both LTN and Law.com Legal Technology is a trial lawyer and computer forensics/EDD special master, based in Austin, Texas.

Labels: EDRM, eXtensible Markup Language, Glebmann, Metadata, Socha, XML

posted by Charles Skamser @ 4:10 PM 0 Comments

EDRM XML Adaption Rate for End-Users

It appears that eDiscovery vendors such as Catalyst, Exterro and ONSITE3 are starting to adapt the new EDRM XML standard. I wonder what the adaption rate will be for end-users?

The goal of the EDRM XML project is to provide a standard, generally accepted XML schema to facilitate the movement of electronically stored information (ESI) from one step of the electronic discovery process to the next, from one software program to the next, and from one organization to the next. The ESI includes both underlying discovery materials (e.g., email messages and attachments, loose files, and databases) and information about those materials (e.g., the source of the underlying ESI, processing of that ESI, and production of that ESI).

For copies of the EDRM XML XSD version 1.0 and related materials, please go to the EDRM XML Downloads site

Labels: Discovery, eDiscovery, EDRM, Litigation, Litigation Service Providers, XML

posted by Charles Skamser @ 4:33 PM 0 Comments