Autonomy Nails Another Laurel to Its Crown
July 22, 2008
Autonomy follows it analyst-crushing financial results with the “highest Socha-Gelbmann rankings”. The story appeared in the highly regarded MarketWatch online news service via the PRNewswire via FirstCall via Comtex. I am thrilled that the news reached me quickly. You can read the full story here. If you have been living in a hollow in rural Kentucky, you may ask, “What’s a Socha-Gelbmann Ranking?” Well, let me fill you in.
Socha-Gelbmann
Socha Consulting LLC, operated by George J. Socha, Jr., Esquire, does surveys and delivers services in eDiscovery and automated litigation support activities. Socha Consulting focuses on the eDiscovery market. The acronym means “electronic discovery”, a buzzword much loved by attorneys and consultants involved in figuring out what’s in the terabytes of electronic information delivered by the legal discovery process.
Mr. Socha Jr., Esquire is the principal in Socha Consulting, LLC, a firm which provides expert advice to consumers with respect to effective electronic discovery strategies, and to providers with respect to the development of e-discovery services, software and strategy. Prior to forming Socha Consulting, Mr. Socha worked in private practice where he helped establish litigation support departments at 250-attorney and 50-attorney firms. Mr. Socha is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (B.A.) and Cornell Law School. You can read this bio here. Mr. Socha’s offices are also in Minnesota, in St. Paul, a lovely city.
Tom Gelbmann is the other half of the research report’s team. Information about him is located at Gelbmann.biz here. Mr. Gelbmann runs a consulting practice focused on helping law firms and corporate law departments maximize value from investments in technology. He has worked as a CIO position at two major law firms, and he has also conducted several market research projects on behalf of information and technology service providers to the legal sector. Prior to his work with the legal technology community, Tom served as a Director of Computer Security Consulting for a global consulting organization. You can read his full bio here. His office is in Minnesota. Details are here.
eDiscovery
In a nutshell, eDiscovery indexes documents. The very best systems provide useful tools to the lucky souls who are billable during this tedious process of ferreting for evidence, facts, and supporting material. For example, some eDiscovery systems include billing functions to make it painless for the hard-charging attorney to tally the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months required to “read” lots of email, memos, reports, and files with text in them. Other systems take an item–say, for example, the name of a person–and generate a list of related documents or people. Other systems chew through terabytes of text and generate a visual display of who is related to whom or what is related to what. I have seen systems using cartoon figures and lines to connect individuals, events, cash transfers, and other life actions. Most of these systems allow the legal eagle to enter a word or phrase, see a results list, browse a list of related topics, and perform other activities which can then be saved in a “case audit” file. The idea is that another lawyer can come along and recreate the exact finding process, identify the specific document with the needed “fact”, and print out the audit trail for a cowering opponent whose argument has been trashed with the brilliance of the legal argument, silver bullet fact, and solid research.
So, the most recent study by George J. Socha, Jr., Esquire is described here. The current report looks over the previous five years of Socha-Gelbmann results and the output is the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann 6th Annual Electronic Discovery Survey.
Findings
The new report are available now. The big news is that Autonomy has been, according the the aforementioned news story:
named a Top 5 Electronic Discovery Provider in the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report for its ZANTAZ’ e-Discovery software and service. Autonomy was named a Top 5 Provider in nine software and service categories, including preservation, collection, analysis, production, presentation, and law firm rankings. This marks the fourth consecutive year that the company has been ranked as a Top 5 service provider in the report.
You can get a small nibble of the approach in this series of questions about the 2007 study here.
Autonomy provides, according to the news story:
end-to-end eDiscovery for the largest and most complex legal and regulatory matters, supported by 6,000 servers across five data centers. This comprehensive technology and services solution provides data preparation, analytics for Early Case Assessment (ECA), legal hold, full EDD processing, advanced review and production, all on a powerful platform. Through automatic processing of all electronically stored information (ESI), whether email, audio or video, Autonomy enforces legal hold policies and enables eDiscovery across the organization based on the meaning and relevance of information to litigation.
Kudos to Autonomy for this excellent showing. And, to George J. Socha, Jr., Esquire and Tom Gelbmann, “Keep up the good work.” A happy quack to the Autonomy team as well. With video, fraud detection, and eDiscovery, I may have to recategorize Autonomy from enterprise search vendor to enterprise information application solution provider. If I do this, the search sector will lose a luminary. Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose!
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
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