UK and eDisclosure: Indifferent or Distracted?
November 21, 2010
Businesses in the United Kingdom are slow to wake when it comes to eDisclosure practices despite a rising number of requests. Results from Recommind’s second annual UK eDisclosure survey relayed in the Information World Review article, “UK Enterprises Still Not Ready for eDisclosure”, state that one in two businesses have seen request increases, but two-thirds of the respondents dedicated less than 5% of their IT budget to meet those needs with 32% not even able to search e-mail archives.
Simon Price, Recommind’s European director, believes that while UK businesses are paying attention, they are unprepared to move beyond e-mail and meet today’s eDisclosure challenges. “Increasingly companies are finding themselves in situations where they are required to produce information from a variety of other sources, which can be a time consuming and expensive process if it’s a matter of searching through volumes of information which have been left to grow totally unmanaged.”
We say: In a lousy economy the legal climate may turn nasty and quickly.
Christina Sheley, November 21, 2010
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Content Analyst Partners with TCDI
November 3, 2010
Lawyers need tools to respond to the demands of their clients. Content Analyst Company, the leader of advanced document analytics tools, helps Technology Concepts & Design, Inc. (TCDI) reduce the time required to analyze information generated by the discovery process.
[The companies] will incorporate Content Analyst Analytics Technology (CAAT) into its proprietary eDiscovery Application Suites: Discovery WorkFlow® and ClarVergence®. This partnership offers TCDI’s clients improvements in Document Review efficiencies and increased visibility into their document collections. The enhanced analytics will also reduce the time and cost associated with Document Review.
The tie up will yield improved document review and increased visibility into their document collections.” Content Analyst Company develops advanced document analytics tools, based on patented Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology. Content Analyst Analytical Technology (CAAT) exponentially reduces the time needed to discern relevant information from large volumes of unstructured text. For more information, navigate to www.contentanalyst.com.
Harleena Singh, November 3, 2010
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eDiscovery: Feeling Its Oats
November 3, 2010
One indication of the vigor in the eDiscovery market is the quarterly report from Epiq Systems. The story in MarketWatch makes this point: eDiscovery leads the Epiq Systems growth compared to the other segments. The MarketWatch.com press release added:
Third quarter results were highlighted by record performance of the eDiscovery segment. eDiscovery realized a 64% revenue increase, benefiting from new engagements both domestically and internationally and the 2009 launch of document review services.
Epiq Systems is a leading global provider of integrated technology solutions for the legal profession that serves law firms, bankruptcy trustees, and financial institutions with innovative technology solutions including electronic discovery. “The third quarter represents the strongest quarterly result in the history of the company’s eDiscovery business,” states the press release, mentioning that “Operating revenue for the eDiscovery segment for the third quarter of 2010 was $20.0 million, up 64% compared to $12.2 million for the year ago quarter.” This new all-time high for the eDiscovery segment is a definite sign that eDiscovery seems to be a good sector for search and content processing companies.
Lawyering could become a more active growth sector than innovating.
Harleena Singh, November 3, 2010
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Recommind Estimated 2010 Revenues: Fact or Fiction?
October 25, 2010
Last week I heard that Recommind disclosed its revenues. The information I saw surfaced on the e-discovery 2.0 blog in “Recommind Publicly Discloses Its Revenue—and It’s Less than You Might Think.” The write up contained some interesting information, but I don’t know if the figures and factoids are spot on. Nevertheless, I did find the information interesting and in line with what my Overflight model spits out for a privately-held company in the search and content processing business.
Smash cut to the death of the fox in the jaws of the search hounds: Recommind’s estimated 2010 revenue is $23 to $28 million. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Most of the companies chugging along in the search and content processing rendering yard generate less revenue. And even with the outfits with great visibility and a strong client list, the need for cash is growing. Endeca accepted an intravenous drip from Intel and SAP Ventures. High flying Palantir sucked on a $90 million money milk shake this summer. And BA-Insight—a vendor of Microsoft SharePoint snap in systems—palmed $6 million.
The challenge with numbers from privately held companies is that the data are difficult to verify. Heck, try and figure out what publicly traded Amazon spends on R&D and makes on its widely publicized Amazon Web Services product line. Impossible task in my opinion. Move those finances into a private company and figuring out what’s what is tough. Google allegedly used some fancy dancing to trim its tax bill and that arabesque is only now being evaluated.
With regard to finances, a top line revenue figure or a growth rate are handy hand holds for the arm chair analyst or the azure chip consultant. In the real world, some financial types are interest in the company’s long term expenditures for R&D, the debt, the structure of deals’ payouts, executive compensation, etc. Without more numerical grit, who really knows. I recall looking at financial data for one high profile search system and learned that a number of debts had been rolled together, refinanced repeatedly, and the burden was little more than an annoying payment. The approach was similar to the person who buys a new vehicle by looking at the monthly payment, not the cost of the debt. In the Enron and Tyco world, these were old tricks. In the BearStearns Lehman Brothers world, magic accounting is what makes MBA men men and MBA women get a zest for living.
There were some factoids in the write up. Here are ones I noted:
- Recommind is placed on a par with Exterro and kCura. Fascinating to me because Exterro and kCura are what I consider next generation systems.
- Recommind is chasing three markets and according to the write up, Recommind’s revenue from the legal sector is “less than many other companies in the space.” No support but I found this an interesting observation.
- Recommind had a lousy 2009. No big surprise there.
I am not so quick to chastise Recommind for the alleged revenue. Compared to some of the search and content processing vendors I track, that $20 million or so looks pretty good compared to $1.5 to $3.0 million. We don’t know the cost structure or the net, but at least Recommind is still in business. It is, therefore, doing something right which is more than I can say for the search vendors listed on my Death Watch list. I recall I tried to visit the company, but it was too busy to make time for the addled goose. I suppose that’s a marketing ploy of sorts. I still want to understand the difference between the Recommind approach and the Autonomy IDOL approach. But now I am pretty busy and will content myself with recycling the Recommind revenue figures. And as for the “smaller than you might think”, I don’t think too much about Recommind or its revenues. I am a busy goose indeed. For more information about Recommends, navigate to www.recommind.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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ZyLAB Steps Up US eDiscovery Efforts
October 18, 2010
The health and pharmaceutical industry rely on stars to make otherwise similar services more relevant to a particular vertical market or niche. ZyLAB has implemented a similar chess move. Blogger and author Mary Mack has left one eDiscovery firm to join ZyLAB’s US team. “Mary Mack Leaves Fios, Joins ZyLAB” reported:
Mary Mack, longtime corporate technology counsel to e-discovery company Fios and author of its featured blog, Sound Evidence, is leaving that company to join another e-discovery company, ZyLAB, as enterprise technology counsel and part of the leadership team charged with developing its North American business.
My hunch is that other eDiscovery companies are going to have to add to their starting line up. A blogger, however, is a special creature. Congratulations to ZyLAB. I await moves from others in this branch of search and content processing.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2010
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Clearwell Goes All in One
October 13, 2010
“Clearwell Unveils All-in-One eDiscovery Platform” alerted me that another vendor has shifted from a solution to a platform. Clearwell flashed on my radar with its Rocket Docket system. The company won some kudos because a law firm or corporate legal office could ring Clearwell on the phone, and the company would deliver a ready-to-run box. The system could be plugged in and pointed at the content to be processed. The company has added nifty features that lawyers find quite useful. One lawyer told me a couple of years ago, “I can save my discovery trail and rerun it or show it to a colleague.”
According to the write up in Computer Business Review:
The platform can pull data from over 50 sources, including cloud-based applications, and offers a single dashboard for report generation. Other features of the new platform include an interactive data map, which enables users to navigate through data sources with what Clearwell calls an iTunes-like filter; collection templates, which save commonly-used collection settings, including specific directories, filters and preservation stores; and collection analytics, which provide a portfolio of analytical charts and tables that display the types of data collected.
For more information about this platform, navigate to www.clearwellsystems.com.
My views, before I forget them, include:
- How many platforms does an organization need? In some situations, cloud solutions make more sense. My recollection is that Brainware offered a spin on hosted a few years ago. One could call Brainware and the firm would pick up hard copy and digital data obtained via discovery, process it, and then provide secure access to an authorized user.
- Has the law firm market shifted? My sources tell me that buyers of these eDiscovery systems are corporate legal departments. The hook for these sales is that a CEO wants to know right away if there is an “issue” in the discovered materials.
- Has the number of vendors chasing the legal market forced down prices for basic services? The “platform” sounds like a higher value sale, particularly when connectors are provided to make it easy to ingest popular file types. The platform play, if successful, could draw the attention of a larger, more established platform provider. What happens when platforms collide? Unlikely because lawyers are not diffused widely in most organizations. Maybe the play will lead to a buy out.
Just some questions to which I don’t have answers.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2010
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ZL Systems and TREC
August 13, 2010
I don’t write anything about TREC, the text retrieval conference “managed” by NIST (US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology). The participants in the “tracks”, as I understand the rules, may not use the data for Madison Avenue-style cartwheels and reality distortion exercises.
The TREC work is focused on what I characterize as “interesting academic exercises.” Over the years, the commercial marketplace has moved in directions that are different from the activities for the TREC “tracks”. A TREC exercise is time consuming and expensive. The results are difficult for tire kickers to figure out. In the last three years, the commercial market is moving in a manner different from academic analyses. You may recall my mentioning that Autonomy had 20,000 customers and that Microsoft SharePoint has tens of millions of licensees. Each license contains search technology and cultivates a fiercely competitive ecosystem to “improve” findability in SharePoint. Google is chugging along without much worry about what’s happening outside of the Googleplex unless it involves Apple, money, and lawyers. In short, research is one thing. Commercial success is quite another.
I was, therefore, interested to see “Study Finds that E-Discovery Using Enterprise-Wide Search Improves Results and Reduces Costs.” The information about this study appeared in the ZL Technologies’ blog The Modern Archivist in June 2010. You can read the story “New Scientific Paper for TREC Conference”, which was online this morning (August 10, 2010). In general information about TREC is hard to find. Folks who post links to TREC presentations often find that the referenced document is a very short item or no longer available. However, you can download the full “scientific paper” from the TREC Web site.
The point of the ZL write up is summarized in this passage:
Using two fully-independent teams, ZL tested the increased responsiveness of the enterprise-wide approach and the results were striking: The enterprise-wide search yielded 77 custodians and 302 responsive email messages, while the custodian approach failed to identify 84% of the responsive documents.
The goose translates this to mean that there’s no shortcut when hunting for information. No big surprise to the goose, but probably a downer to those who like attention deficit disorder search systems.
So what’s a ZL Technologies? The company says:
[It] provides cutting-edge enterprise software solutions for e-mail and files archiving for regulatory compliance, litigation support, corporate governance, and storage management. ZL’s Unified Archive, offers a single unified platform to provide all the above capabilities, while maintaining a single copy and a unified policy across the enterprise. With a proven track record and enterprise clients which include top global institutions in finance and industry, ZL has emerged as the specialized provider of large-scale email archiving for eDiscovery and compliance.
Some information about TREC 2010 appears in “TREC 2010 Web Track Guidelines”. The intent is to describe one “track”, but the information provides some broader information about what’s going on for 2010. The “official” home page for TREC may be useful to some Beyond Search readers.
For more TREC information, you will have to attend the conference or contact TREC directly. The goose is now about to get his feathers ruffled about the availability of presentations that point out that search and retrieval has a long journey ahead.
Reality is often different from what the marketers present in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
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Iron Mountain/Stratify Get an Azurini T Shirt
August 10, 2010
“New Iron Mountain Consulting Arm Combines Records Management and eDiscovery Expertise to Help Clients Cut Information Costs and Risks” interested me. Iron Mountain, a company with lots of trucks that move paper from Point A to Point B, has jumped into consulting services. Readers of this blog know that I find the folks donning azurini T shirts an interest.
According to the news story which looked to me like a public relations-type write up:
[Iron Mountain] announced the formation of a new consulting practice, which combines the company’s long-established practice in records and information management and its electronic discovery management team. Iron Mountain Consulting advises customers around the world on how to lower the cost of managing information and records, meet complex industry regulations, prepare for eDiscovery, manage complex litigation and avoid data or IT systems disasters. By combining its deep knowledge in hardcopy records, electronic information management, litigation readiness and legal process into one consulting practice, Iron Mountain can better advise and offer customers integrated solutions for consistently managing all of their information with less cost, risk and complexity.
What will be the new pecking order at Iron Mountain? [a] Records retention, [b] software licenses, consultants who sell big jobs and want to use another firm’s solutions? Image source: http://www.tigersoft.com/TigerSoft-Practical-Psychology/T01.htm
Three observations:
- Other blue chip and azure chip consultants will have to make certain each knows something about records retention policies, archival storage, and search. Iron Mountain has lots of experience with paper and digital content. A company with “real” clients and “real” experience may win engagements that the amateurs once viewed as their Jus primae noctis.
- Iron Mountain will have to figure out how to make the human resources, travel, and bonus stuff work. There is a big difference in accounting when one sells a monthly hauling service, licenses to software systems, and brain power. In my experience, those jumping into an azure colored pool often find that upon exiting their bathing trunks are tinted in a color not too different from red ink.
- Management will have its hands full. In an outfit like Iron Mountain the technical folks have been gaining influence. Senior management at a firm like Iron Mountain is not going to be toting and iPad and attending Defcon. When a consultant nails a big job, the pecking order is going to change or the azure chip person is going to hike right on over to a “real” consulting firm. Consultants sell clients and their loyalty (such as it is) is for the client. If the client wants a solution from a third party firm, the consultant will get that best-of-breed solution and the money. The Iron Mountain folks are likely to be really annoyed to have an azure chip person sell a competitor’s product. If Iron Mountain does not deliver objective solutions to a consulting client, that’s an exciting situation to consider.
This will be interesting to watch. Stratify complements other search and retrieval technology at Iron Mountain. Will Stratify the azurini?
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
ZyLAB and Deloitte
July 21, 2010
The Deloitte Discovery Platform has chosen a partner that well known in the world of e-discovery and information management solutions. With the new partnership with ZyLAB, Deloitte will be able to reduce costs in the critical areas of discovery and compliance for the modern business.
The new collaboration promises to be extremely effective when it comes to the complex searching and review of large amounts of data. The idea behind the partnership according to one official at Deloitte’s Forensic and Dispute Services (FDS) is a better analysis and search capabilities combined.
Deloitte is a well known provider of audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services in several different industries. ZyLAB’s modular e-discovery and enterprise information management solutions have been helping a variety of industries for the last 25 years. They also offer multi language support.
The goslings in Harrod’s Creek need a scorecard. Brainware does document management and search. ZyLAB does search and document management. Iron Mountain does everything. EMC is on the law firm horse as well. What’s happened to good old search?
What’s interesting is that law firms are cutting back and other service firms and internal legal departments are the new market. More cracks in the traditional market dividers perhaps?
Rod Starr, July 21, 2010
Social Media Gives eDiscovery Indigestion
July 10, 2010
It seems everyone loves Facebook, Twitter and all the social media tools at our disposal. Everyone except e-discovery, that is. A recent ZD Net article, “Social Media a Nightmare for e-Discovery,” detailed growing difficulties for litigation discovery, which requires all relevant documents be submitted in court and reviewed. According to one electronic discovery representative, social media is, “creating phenomenal difficulties because you have employees creating information in pockets that are not controlled by general corporate governance policy, on servers that are generally not owned by a company and can often really skirt the edges of a company’s IP or relevant business documentation.”
This news isn’t surprising, since it seems every time technology opens a door for people, that same technology slams some windows shut. But, problems like this are what makes technology exciting because it often sparks innovation.
Do we need more evidence that casual assurances that social content is not big problem for search and content processing systems. Will an azure chip consultant endorse eDiscovery products that lack essential functionality? Does a byte reside on a solid state disc?
Pat Roland, July 10, 2010
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