eDiscovery Discovered
March 23, 2011
I read in my hard copy version the story “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.” (The link may go dead as the Gray Lady tries to regain its can of Monster Energy Drink.)
After reading the story, I was not exactly sure if the information was about the cost cutting that law firms must undertake to keep their partners in BMWs and vacation homes, the software that is now making its way from the green corridors of government agencies to the walnut paneled rooms of legal eagles’ nests, or the brainchild of a PR firm.
Source: http://www.challengecamps.com/programs/session.php?view=session1&subsect=morning
Let’s tackle the legal eagle issue first.
The cost of looking at email is high. Not only is email a generally crappy type of document in its native habitat, email is a downright evil invention when one is looking for who said what to whom at a specific point in time. Clever lads and lasses can make email do magic tricks, including disappear. The legal eagles want systems that prevent messing around with email. The law school grads call this spoliation. Hey, that’s why some of the lawyers command $1,200 and hour or more. With clients getting nervous about the costs of legal services, law firms are trying to manage like real businesses, which as you know are not exactly hitting home runs in the fiscal probity game.
Anyway, license some DARPA or In Q Tel funded software and chop the job down to size. Smart software helps hold down the human hourly charge, or that’s the argument. Does fancy software reduce costs? Er, no. But let’s not let facts get in the way of a great story. The New York Times mentions some outfits that provide eDiscovery solutions. A number of the really big players are left out of the article, but let’s not quibble. It is the New York Times.
The second issue is the software moving from classified applications to a lawyer near you. The reason for this is that as funds in the US government become scarce as cheap carpeting in a Park Avenue law firm, the software vendors are looking for new markets. The move has been underway for a number of years. One of the first outfits to make the leap from Purple Yogi to eDiscovery is Stratify, which is now part of the archiving outfit Iron Mountain. Now there is a stampede of formerly classified technologies hunting for new markets like a pack of hungry wolves chasing squirrels. Ediscovery is a good market because spotting trends without reading the actual words works pretty well. The problem is, as most intelligence professionals will suggest, is that humint is needed. That’s where the assertion about cost control goes wacky. The need for expensive talent to deal with the outputs is not eliminated. A neat chart makes a useful addition to an Interpol briefing document, but it does not do much to unravel a complicated deal involving folks like Mr. Madoff or less well known interesting people like Mr. Gaydamak. (I am getting more interested in the white collar activity which is not tracked in a the manner of Beyond Search.) My view is that eDiscovery software is quite good, but it does have some costs that the New York Times may not have probed with its usual rigor.
Which brings me to the third point: PR.
I wonder if the idea for the story originated with a public relations push from one of the companies mentioned in the write up. There’s no point in mentioning the firms referenced in the write up. The focus of the article is on Clearwell, inventor of the Rocket Docket marketing hook. Cataphora is not yet a household name and several of the leaders did not show up on the radar of the New York Times. In fact, Cataphora is not, in my opinion, an eDiscovery firm. Cataphora says that it is “the world’s authority on the implications of personal and organizational behavior.” Since when did sentiment analysis become a synonym for eDiscovery? These are quite different approaches to content analysis. But why pick nits? My hunch is that there is more PR goodness in the story than information about “smart” software that performs the type of analysis and reporting that lawyers require of their automated systems.
Clearwell Systems output. Yep, no humans needed. Source: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/clearwell-email-thread.jpg
Bottom line: eDiscovery and its apparent fraternal twin sentiment analysis is now an officially recognized type of software. For more information about eDiscovery, you can contact seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and inquire about our briefing on:
- The merger and consolidation wackiness that is currently underway in this market
- The major players in the space
- Where sub-functions such as sentiment analysis fit into the drudgery of eDiscovery
- How specialists fit into the job of winnowing the outputs of systems that rely on numerical recipes and the dark arts of semantic methods to identify what’s hot and what’s not.
Stephen E Arnold, March 23, 2011
Freebie unlike lawyers’ time
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