Will Open Source Software Disrupt Law Firm eDiscovery Vendors?
August 25, 2011
The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is about to gather in the heart of Opryland for their annual conference. As discussed in “ILTA Open Source Panel Focuses on Bates Stamping, E-Discovery” their agenda includes a discussion about the growing trends in open source software (OSS) for law firms.
The Open Source Gurus panel will be weighing in on several legal applications including their Bates Master software which is aimed to replace the tedious, hand-operated page numbering system used by firms. They will also take a look at FreeEed which is the only open source e-discovery software available to the public. Discovery, which is a fact finding process leading up to trial, traditionally leads to voluminous amounts of documents being exchanged between the parties, but OSS is working to change that.
It seems that open source technology for the legal world is not a big business, but certainly could be a niche opportunity for software developers.
Software for managing unbundled legal services such as document assembly and limited-scope representation could be good fits for the open-source model, whether the users are small firms with limited IT budgets or large organizations that hire contract counsel.
I don’t see open source legal software being used for much more than numbering pages until trusted developers join the fray. The legal community is regimented and until they are confident in open source products, they will not change. So ILTA has their work cut out for itsself if it plans to sway firms–especially the big, traditoinal law firms–to the exciting world of free and open source software.
Jennifer Wensink, August 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
ZyLAB eDiscovery Goes to Extremes
August 19, 2011
The field of eDiscovery is growing, with ZyLAB and Brainware both leading the pack in terms of the marketing buzz that flows through our Overflight intelligence service. Chris Dale reports on evaluating eDiscovery services in the most extreme circumstances in, “ZyLAB eDiscovery tools as a Prototype for Removing Discovery Bottlenecks.” He writes:
The . . . extreme in eDiscovery terms, apart from the ability to handle very large volumes, is a war crimes investigation and tribunal. The data sources are often far removed from the neat corporate environment of servers and laptops; the events took place in circumstances where data preservation was the last priority; the required standard of proof is a criminal one.
Underscoring this argument is the idea that if eDiscovery tools can handle the disorganization and intense pressure of a war crimes tribunal, the same tool can perform beautifully in the more predictable and ordered environment of the corporate and financial world. This logic seems sound. If the product is effective for firms in the context of war crimes tribunals, the same product is likely to increase the speed and productivity of firms operating in a much more controlled environment.
Our view. Work flow is a hot sector, and it seems to be paying dividends for ZyLAB and for Brainware, a firm pushing into this sector with what looks like increasing determination.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Metadata Formally Recognized by Courts
August 7, 2011
Meta-Cognition, meaning to think about thinking, is a term psychologists love to throw around to discuss intelligence and the capacity to learn. Now, it seems the legal community is going to jump aboard the thinking-ship with their own term – metadata, to think about data, or more precisely, data thinking about data. The article, Technology: Recent Cases Help Evolve Guidelines for Producing Metadata: Keeping ESI Load Files in a Forensically Sound Manner that Preserves Metadata is Key, on Inside Counsel, examines the nature of metadata and tries to pin down a practical use for it.
The first part of the problem – what is metadata? – is universally agreed upon now days. Metadata is any non-visible data, such as author, word count, title (including changes), time/date stamps, etc…, connected to documents or other Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Lawyers can use this valuable information to nail down time lines, prove who monkeyed with a document, and which custodians did what to ESIs, in general.
As the legal community catches up with technology, more and more judges are ruling that metadata is not hearsay, but rather falls under the protection of ESI. Most recently, a judge set some practical guidelines for metadata:
“Judge Shira Scheindlin emphasized that metadata is an integral part of an electronic record. Although it is not legal precedent, her list is a reasonable set of guidelines for in-house counsel responding to ESI requests, as follows. Earlier this year, in National Day Laborer Organizing Network v. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, 2011 WL 381625 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 7, 2011) (opinion withdrawn upon agreement of the parties), Judge Shira Scheindlin emphasized that metadata is an integral part of an electronic record. Although it is not legal precedent, her list is a reasonable set of guidelines for in-house counsel responding to ESI requests, as follows. The metadata that should accompany the production of any text-based ESI includes: File Name…Custodian… Source Device…Source Path…Production Path…Modified Date…Modified Time…Time Offset Value…Identifier.”
Now that metadata is being recognized as a legitimate resource for information, indexing becomes even more vital than ever.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 7, 2011
Sponsored by Quasar CA, your source for informed financial advisory services
Symantec Snaps Up Clearwell to Enter E Discovery Market
July 20, 2011
I do some odd jobs for Enterprise Technology Management. Among them is hosting podcasts on various topics. Last week we did a podcast with several luminaries in the e discovery market. E Discovery is a term used to describe the content and text processing required to figure out what is in unstructured content gathered in a legal matter. There doesn’t have to be a law suit to trigger a company’s running an e Discovery project, but unlike search, e Discovery beckons legal eagles.
We read the article “Symantec acquires Clearwell Systems for $390m.” Perhaps best known for their antivirus software, Symantec also offers an array of information management solutions. Clearwell Systems specializes in e-discovery tools, used in response to litigation and other legal/ investigative matters.
Symantec gains much with the acquisition:
Symantec notes the acquisition will add archiving, backup and eDiscovery offerings to its existing offerings, enabling it to offer a broader set of information management capabilities to customers. The deal will help Symantec provide future product integration opportunities with Symantec backup and security, Symantec NetBackup, Data Loss Prevention and Data Insight, the company said.
This acquisition moves e-discovery to the cloud, while continuing the appliance approach.
On the podcast I learned:
- There will be a push for more hosted services. Autonomy has done a good job with its Zantaz acquisition and its hosted services, so Symantec is going down a route that leads to a pay off.
- The Clearwell approach will continue to feature its rapid deployment model. I associated the phrase “rocket docket” with Clearwell which connotes speedy service.
- The Clearwell report and user audit functions will be expanded and enhanced. I saw a Clearwell report and watched an attorney pop it in an envelope for delivery to another attorney. The system impressed me because the report did not require any fiddling by the attorney. Good stuff.
Naturally, other new services are planned. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell July 14, 2011
D4 and RiverGlass Join eDiscovery Forces
June 27, 2011
As announced on PRWeb in “D4, LLC, Partners with RiverGlass, Inc. Enabling Progressive Enhancements to D4’s eDiscovery Service Offerings,” the two companies have signed an agreement to form a strategic partnership for D4 to distribute, install and host the RiverGlass solutions.
D4 focuses on litigation support and eDiscovery services to law firms and corporate law departments. RiverGlass, Inc. is a provider of advanced information collection and analysis solutions focusing on government agencies, as well as eDiscovery and risk management applications to major corporations. The write up said:
D4’s highly technical method to eDiscovery and digital forensics leverages the maximum benefits available from the RiverGlass application.
With the solution:
Customers can harvest from many different types of data stores and ingest ESI in native format without having to have it processed. This includes network stores, SharePoint sites, websites, social media as well as structured databases.
This type of eDiscovery is blurring the lines between search and text analytics, creating a powerful tool for lawyers. It markedly improves the labor-intensive and mistake-prone legal discovery process.
Will eDiscovery go the way of customer support. What looks like a trivial exercise in using traditional search and retrieval for customer support is tough. Some of the vendors chasing customers in this segment are learning that customer support is more difficult than it appears. eDiscovery strikes me as having a higher level of complexity.
It is interesting to watch the shape shifting that is underway in the content processing sector.
Stephen E Arnold, June 27, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Recommind and Predictive Coding
June 15, 2011
The different winners of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont horse races cast some doubt on predictive analytics. But search and content processing is not a horse race. The results are going to be more reliable and accurate, or that is the assumption. One thing is 100 percent certain: A battle over the phrase “predictive coding” in the marketing of math that’s in quite a few textbooks is brewing.
First, you will want to read US 7,933,859, Systems and Methods for Predictive Coding.” You can get your copy via the outstanding online service at USPTO.gov. The patent was a zippy one, filed on May 25, 2010, and granted on April 26, 2011.
There were quite a few write ups about the patent. We noted “Recommind Patents Predictive Coding” from Recommind’s Web site. The company has a Web site focused on predictive coding with the tag line “Out predict. Out perform.” A quote from a lawyer at WilmerHale announces, “This is a game changer in eDiscovery.”
Why a game changer? The answer, according to the news release, is:
Recommind’s Predictive Coding™ technology and workflow have transformed the legal industry by accelerating the most expensive phase of eDiscovery, document review. Traditional eDiscovery software relies on linear review, a tedious, expensive and error-prone process . . . . Predictive Coding uses machine learning to categorize and prioritize any document set faster, more accurately and more defensibly than contract attorneys, no matter how much data is involved.
Some push back was evident in “Predictive Coding War Breaks Out in US eDiscovery Sector.” The point in this write up is that other vendors have been offering predictive functions in the legal market.
Our recollection is that a number of other outfits dabble in this technological farm yard as well. You can read the interview with Google-funded Recorded Future and Digital Reasoning in my Search Wizards Speak series. I have noted in my talks that there seems to be some similarity between Recommind’s systems and methods and Autonomy’s, a company that is arguably one of the progenitors of probabilistic methods in the commercial search sector. Predecessors to Autonomy’s Integrated Data Operating Layer exist all the way back to math-crazed church men in ye merrie old England before steam engines really caught on. So, new? Well, that’s a matter for lawyers I surmise.
With the legal dust up between i2 Ltd. and Palantir, two laborers on the margins of the predictive farm yard, legal fires can consume forests of money in a flash. You can learn more about data fusion and predictive analytics in my Inteltrax information service. Navigate to www.inteltrax.com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 15, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Freeze That Page before It Goes Dark
June 12, 2011
Have you ever wondered how social media websites meet the regulatory record keeping requirements put into place by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)?
Yeah…me neither.
Oh well, we’re all going to find out. In TMCnet.com’s article “PageFreezer offers FINRA-Compliant Social Media Archiving” we get to learn about the software that helps them to do that.
PageFreezer is a global provider of media archiving and offers regulations compliancy solutions as well as litigation protection. We learned:
It’s not just the large financial companies and institutions that need to consider their social networking activity from a compliance standpoint,” noted Riedyk. “The individuals in the financial sector — investment advisors and the like – must comply with their firms retention policies. PageFreezer is a solution and it gets the job done perfectly.
PageFreezer.com is the solution for preserving Web content. It is important that archives be able to be reproduced quickly and kept in a format that will allow said reproduction because the archives must be kept for up to seven years and they must be tamper proof. It can create a lot of mess and backlog if done improperly. PageFreezer creates a tamper proof system by stamping each page with a signature and a timestamp then filing it in a fault proof database.
Leslie Radcliff, June 12, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
eDiscovery: Mindseye and dtSearch Connect
June 1, 2011
We saw a couple of news items and a news release about the infusion of dtSearch by Mindseye for Tunnelvision.
Mindseye Solutions, developer of the e-discovery software Tunnelvision, announced recently two major releases coming over the next six weeks. 7th Space Interactive describes the version 2.9 Flexible Search in this way:
end users [will have] the ability to select which index and search technology will be used. This allows for selection of a fully configurable implementation of the well-known dtSearch technology and assists in creating consistency for downstream processes.
Readers of dtSearch’s product description know that the company asserts that its technology can instantly search terabytes of text across a desktop, network, or an Internet site.
dtSearch also offers versions of its systems which can be used to make content on DVDs searchable. Further, one of the new releases includes improvement in the utilization of Lotus Notes in exporting speed.
Mindseye suggests that the tie up with dtSearch will enhance eDiscovery.
We had heard that Iron Mountain’s acquisition of Mimosa used dtSearch technology. (Autonomy acquired some of Iron Mountain’s online asserts earlier this year.)
dtSearch may be poised for a broader thrust into eDiscovery on an original equipment manufacturing basis.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Search Appliances for Archive Searching
May 23, 2011
“Index Engines Extends e-Discovery Appliance to Data Domain” reminded us that appliances, archives, search, and e-discovery are best friends forever. Archives are a hassle. Who knows what’s on a back up? Who knows which version is the “right” version? Who knows how to span paper, tape, near line, offline, online, and cloud repositories? The answer, which may irritate you, is, “No one.”
Companies like Index Engines and EMC are working to create a viable solution. The write up explains how Index Engines is integrating its data collection software with the Data Domain storage system from EMC. We learned:
The Collection Engine appliance sits in the Data Domain backup box and automatically indexes backup images, identifying the useful content, collecting what is relevant and writing it back to allocated disk space on the Data Domain storage, making it available for compliance and litigation purposes. The Index Engine also indexes the content of backup images so that they can be searched and analyzed for business relevance. The searches can be high-level metadata such as user mailboxes, or detailed queries based on file or email content, location and date ranges. Searches are saved as stored queries that run automatically once a new backup is executed.
Another advantage cited by the article is a reduction in archive requirements, because the software filters the data before backup. The product should be available on July 1, 2011. We think this niche will become increasingly hot due to the proliferation of digital information and the problem companies have paying expensive humans to sift through information looking for smoking guns or misplaced info nuggets.
Cynthia Murrell, May 23, 2011
Autonomy Mines Iron Mountain
May 16, 2011
I have written about Stratify in the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report which I wrote when “search” was hot, and in my Gilbane report named after this blog. Since late 2010, Stratify (originally named Purple Yogi which got some In-Q-Tel love in 2001) has gotten lost within Iron Mountain’s labyrinth of organizational tunnels. Now Iron Mountain seems to face significant financial, technical, business, and management challenges. The details of what Autonomy snagged are fuzzy, but based on the sketchy information that flowed to me since May 12, 2011, here’s what I have been able to “mine”:
Autonomy mines Iron Mountain for revenue, customer, and upsell “gold.” Image source: http://www.davestravelcorner.com/articles/goldcountry/article.htm
- Autonomy will get the archiving, eDiscovery, and online back up business of Iron Mountain
- No word on the fate of Mimosa Systems which Iron Mountain bought in early 2010. (My recollection is that Mimosa used a mid tier search solution obtained from a third party. I want to link Mimosa with dtSearch, but I may be mistaken on that point.)
- Autonomy will apply is well-honed management method to the properties. Expect to see Autonomy push ever closer to $1.0 billion in revenues, maybe this calendar year.
You can get some numbers from the news item “Autonomy Acquires Some Iron Mountain Digital Assets for $380 Million.”
Stratify’s technology was the cat’s pajamas years ago. More recently, the technology has lagged. Iron Mountain’s own difficulties distracted the company from its digital opportunities. My view is the Iron Mountain made an all to familiar error: Online looks easy but looks are deceiving.
Some of the former Web masters, failed “real” journalists, and self appointed search experts will enjoy the opportunity to berate Autonomy for its acquisitions and growth tactics, but I think those folks are wrong.
Autonomy does manage its acquisitions to generate stakeholder and customer value.
In fact, Autonomy’s track record with its acquisitions is, in my opinion, better than either Google’s or Microsoft’s. As for Endeca, that company has fallen behind Autonomy due to different management strategies and growth tactics. Don’t believe me?
Just look at Autonomy’s track record, top line revenue, profits, and customer base, not tweets from a yesterday thinker at a lumber-filled, pay to play meet up.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
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