Entries Tagged 'eDiscovery' ↓

As you may have seen from recent announcements, The 451 Group is expanding and both organically and inorganically.

As part of that  we’re looking for a bunch of new analysts, two of which are within the information management and storage areas, both of which are US-based.

Information governance and e-Discovery analyst

• More details in the ad here

Senior storage analyst

• More details in the ad here

In both cases the email to contact is careers@the451group.com

We basically look for very smart people who can write and who are passionate about their chosen area. If you have those three attributes, you’re a long way to becoming a 451 analyst.

This year’s main LegalTech show is now over – three days in wintry New York City and all the challenges that brings. Before I head back to London, here are my quick thoughts.

I managed to shoehorn 24 meetings into my time at the Hilton and only managed to see one session, Chris Dale’s judge’s panel at the end, which was performed as a play, and very good it was too!  Not sure if anyone managed to get a picture of Judge Simon Brown brandishing a copy of e-Discovery for Dummies (he was making a point, rather than consulting it for advice, obviously!) but it would make for an amusing image.

I initially was swamped with vendors showing me new user interfaces rather than underlying innovations in their engines, however there were a few innovative things to note. I’ll put more of that in a longer note for our clients shortly.

I was struck by the number of software and service providers landing or expanding in the UK. They clearly see it as a growth opportunity in itself and of course a bridgehead to the broader EU market. They’re also curious about the risks and opportunities caused by the introduction in April of the UK Bribery Act.

Service providers are placing a bit less emphasis on self-built technology in the past, more settling on the best of breed tools.

Billing by the hour is passé it is almost all volume based pricing, or at least volume-based or flat rate pricing is almost always offered.
On the technology front, if your processing engine can’t process 1TB a day, you’re falling behind the curve.

And coming back to the user interface point at the start. It’s worth remembering amongst all this technology that for many lawyers, a new UI is what they really need right now. They are finding it hard to keep up with the latest text analysis tools and are being assaulted from so many angles with technology, competition, the threat to their business caused by in-sourcing of e-Discovery that some really do want just a well-designed user interface on their review tool that clearly shows how much the review will cost and  how far along its progressed.

Our clients will have seen our preview of 2011 last week. For those that aren’t (yet!) clients and therefore can’t see the whole 3,500-word report, here’s the introduction, followed by the titles of the sections to give you an idea of what we think will shape the information management market in 2011 and beyond. Of course the IT industry, like most others doesn’t rigorously follow the wiles of the Gregorian calendar, so some of these things will happen next year while others may not occur till 2012 and beyond. But happen they will, we believe.

We think information governance will play a more prominent role in 2011 and in the years beyond that. Specifically, we think master data management and data governance applications will appear in 2011 to replace the gaggle of spreadsheets, dashboards and scorecards commonly used today. Beyond that, we think information governance will evolve in the coming years, kick-started by end users who are asking for a more coherent way to manage their data, driven in part by their experience with the reactive and often chaotic nature of e-discovery.

In e-discovery itself, we expect to see a twin-track adoption trend. While cloud-based products have proven popular, at the same time, more enterprises buy e-discovery appliances.

‘Big data’ has become a bit of a catchall term to describe the masses of information being generated, but in 2011 we expect to see a shift to what we term a ‘total data’ approach to data management, as well as the analytics applications and tools that enable users to generate the business intelligence from their big data sets. Deeper down, the tools used in this process will include new BI tools to exploit Hadoop, as well as a push in predictive analytics beyond the statisticians and into finance, marketing and sales departments.

SharePoint 2010 may have come out in the year for which it is named, but its use will become truly widespread in 2011 as the first service pack is release and the ISV community around it completes their updates from SharePoint 2007. However, we don’t think cloud-based SharePoint will grow quite as fast as some people may expect. Finally, in the Web content management (WCM) market – so affected by SharePoint, as well as the open source movement – we expect a stratification between the everyday WCM-type scenario and Web experience management (WEM) for those organization that need to tie WCM, Web analytics, online marketing and commerce features together.

• Governance family reunion: Information governance, meet governance, risk and compliance; meet data governance….
• Master data management, data quality, data integration: the road to data governance
• E-discovery post price war: affordable enough, or still too strategic to risk?
• Data management – big, bigger, biggest
• Putting the BI into big data in Hadoop
• The business of predictive analytics
• SharePoint 2010 gets real in 2011
• WCM, WEM and stratification

And with that we’d like to wish all readers of Too Much Information a happy holiday season and a healthy and successful 2011.

I knew that as soon as I wrote my updated look on which company Autonomy might buy next something would come along to diminish the value of all my hard work. 😉 I had expected it to be an acquisition, but instead Autonomy surprised me yesterday afternoon with an announcement that after being in talks regarding an acquisition for “several months,”

Recent developments within these talks have given rise to an additional opportunity that warrants further examination which could give rise to an acquisition process that exceeds our original planned time scale.

In other words, it’s not going to happen any time soon.

As an announcement it’s a bit opaque and strangely structured, coming as the second part of an announcement that also told announced its Capital Markets Day would be on Monday, November 29.

It could mean:

• Autonomy is attempting to buy part of a business and instead is now looking to expand into another part or perhaps all of the business. For that to be the case ther first part must have been quite a small deal as Autonomy’s kitty is limited to about $1bn in total.
• Autonomy has identified a different company that it wants to buy.
• Autonomy itself has had an offer to be acquired.

This is all of course speculation. But one thing’s a bit more certain: it will probably make a dent in the company’s Q4 results, which were expected to include a boost from an acquisition that now doesn’t look like happening. Whether that means the company will miss the revised expectations it set in the Q3 call, we’ll have to wait and see.

In our report we wondered whether the company’s health care announcement, including a new product called Auminence may be used as some sort of alternative kicker in the quarter, in lieu of an acquisition. As we said, the product came out of the blue, as do many Autonomy products and appears to us to be a repackaging of IDOL with some added diagnosis checklists on top.

The shares fell 6% yesterday after the announcement came out, all of that coming late in the day as the announcement was made at 3.51pm London time. Again, that’s slightly strange timing. The shares were creeping back up this morning.

UPDATE: Autonomy clarified its statement with this Q&A:

Would it be right to interpret from today’s announcement regarding the acquisition timetable (Update on Acquisition) that the deal you are negotiating has got larger?

No, the deal remains the same size. The statement clearly refers to the timescale.

So it’s the same company, it will just take longer, which makes most sense, I guess.

The regulatory climate has been a hot topic, even eclipsing litigation for some companies as a driver for e-discovery and litigation readiness. In this post I’ll round up some recent and upcoming coverage and events for those looking to stay on top of the rising regulatory tide (or at least avoid falling victim to it).

• Those attending Nick’s webinar last week with ZyLAB will note that regulatory investigations are a global problem, leading companies worldwide to adopt new standards of readiness in order to comply with potential data retrieval for initiatives like the UK Bribery Act, among others.  Failure to meet these standards can result in penalties, in some cases, even if the company is innocent of malfeasance.

• As business becomes increasingly global, different national data privacy and security standards come into play as well, often bedeviling efforts to collect and transfer data between countries.  I moderated BrightTalk‘s webinar last week on Cross-Border E-discovery, which offers a good idea of the issues and best practices for this problem.  In the marketplace, we’ve recently seen vendors like FTI Technology marketing more on-the-ground services with their on-site Investigate offering to fill this need, particularly around investigations stemming from the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

• In the US, we’ve seen a number of regulators given new autonomy in pursuing investigations in the wake of the financial crisis – a recent law.com article detailed new developments at the FTC, SEC, Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, taken from a panel I attended this fall organized by Recommind, featuring David Shonka, Principle Deputy General Counsel of the FTC, John Davis, partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, and Mark Racanelli, partner at O’Melveny & Myers.

• Mr. Shonka also appeared at last month’s Masters Conference, speaking on the subject of how investigations are evolving in response to the cloud and data outsourcing.  He is scheduled to present at IQPC’s upcoming 4th E-Discovery for Financial Services Conference in February, as well – my write-up of the 2010 event is here.  The 2011 event will highlight The Dodd-Frank Act, plus the challenges of social media and exposure from the cloud, including best practices in developing an action plan as the landscape of e-discovery continues to change.  As a special offer, Too Much Information readers can receive 20% off the standard all access price to the 2011 event by entering the code EDFTMINFO when registering online. For more info, call 212-885-2738.

• Lastly, I’ll plug our latest reports on cloud e-discovery and cloud archiving, both of which touch on how enterprise customers are meeting compliance and regulatory demands proactively with cloud offerings.  They are available for download now, or as part of the 451’s Information Management and CloudScape subscriptions.

Yesterday I attended the 6th Annual e-Disclosure Forum at Canary Wharf in London, organized by the globe-trotting triumvirate of Chris Dale, Browning Marean and George Socha. It was a good program, with an audience comprising a mix of lawyers, litigation support professionals, IT practitioners, tech software and service providers and other assorted folks, like myself. It’s the second year I’ve attended and these were the key themes I picked up on:

• Practice Direction 31B – not surprisingly this was a major issue throughout the day, considering may of those present for instrumental in drafting it, including Chris Dale and Senior Master Steven Whitaker (among others) and it only passed into the rules on October 1.  For those that don’t know, 31B amended the rues of civil procedure in the UK (the rough equivalent of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the US), as they pertain to the disclosure of electronic documents (which can of course include email and other forms of communications). One aspect of the changes is a questionnaire to be used in more complex cases that involve a large number of documents. Not only does it sound to us like a sensible way of helping to to contain and get parties prepared for the case management conference (meet and confer in US parlance), but quite frankly it could be useful starting point  for organizations simply to looking to get their house in order to get prepared for future litigation.
• Another key theme was the effect on recent UK cases on the way parties are now cooperating in case management meetings. One speaker, Jeremy Marshall, head of commercial litigation at Irwin Mitchell said that in his experience there’s a vast difference in terms of what happened before landmark cases such as Earles vs Barclays Bank in 2009 and the Digicel vs Cable & Wireless case in 2008 and what happens now. Companies know that if they don’t cooperate to make sure the necessary documents are disclosed, they could be penalized by the court, even if they win the case. For more on the Earles case and what it means regarding the destruction of documents see Chris Dale here.
• Cloud. I had a lot of conversations with IT and legal people at the conference and they’re still not seeing the necessary granularity in service level agreements (SLAs) from cloud service providers. If you need to search your data for the purposes of e-Disclosure, it’s not clear in what format the data will come back to you or even if such a search is possible. That’s a bit of a deal-breaker, over and above any trepidation firms might feel about using cloud for any perceived security issues.
• In general I detected a much clearer understanding on the part of US attendees of the issues in the UK market. Gone are the days it seems of assuming that the exhaustive e-Discovery process in the US is suitable without any alteration in the UK. The two countries obviously share a common law tradition, but like so many other things, there are distinct differences in the way litigation is done and that – aided in part by Chris Dale et al’s work – is now getting through to US vendors, which after all, dominate the market from the technology point of view.
• Tips for next year to the organizers?
  • come up with a hashtag so we don’t write out ‘6th annual #eDisclosure conference’ in our tweets 😉
  • make the sessions a tad shorter
  • get a couple of additional panelists to mix it up a bit

But overall it’s the best way I know for taking the pulse of the UK e-Disclosure market in a single day.

We’ve also been active in this area ourselves recently with webinars on litigation readiness with Zylab and Katey’s participation on a Brighttalk webinar on cross-border eDiscovery. But most importantly, we have new e-Discovery research out in the shape of our cloud e-discovery [PDF]and cloud archiving [PDF] reports.

This week we publish a new long-form report, Cloud e-discovery: litigation comes down to earth – download an executive summary here.

In cloud e-discovery we see two major market shifts: corporations in-sourcing e-discovery to lower costs, while outsourcing IT infrastructure and services around it through hosting.  Still in early adoption, it is a leap of faith on some level, and carries both risks and benefits.  While most users in our 2010 e-discovery survey were bringing the e-discovery process in-house, only 16% were using cloud to do it, for a variety of reasons including security, data loss, regulatory concerns, and ease of retrieval.

But consider that hosted e-discovery has actually been around for over 20 years. What’s more, while some enterprises are resisting the cloud, their law firms, service providers, and other outsourcers entrusted with their data are not.

Witness this month’s 2010 Am Law tech survey – 80% of law firms are using hosted technology, 60% of those for e-discovery.  In fact, e-discovery tops all hosted software usage, far surpassing HR (21%), spam filter/email (21%), storage (6%) or document management (5%).  And while 79% report a positive experience, 30% said the savings were not what they expected.  Limited customization, diminished data control and security were even greater concerns.

And what of the bigger-picture risks?  Cloud topped the agenda last month at the Masters Conference as well: the growth of public and private cloud data from mobile use and social media, potential regulatory pitfalls, the benefits and risks of hosted e-discovery, and growing cross-border issues.  No blue-sky thinking here, just hard truths on the cloud from those on the front lines.

From e-discovery lawyers and consultants:

• “[Public] cloud providers can’t meet the needs [of e-discovery] today.”
• “Your data, your problem.”
• “Data privacy in the EU is like free speech or freedom of religion in the US. . . they will give up the cloud before they give this up.”

From Microsoft General Counsel, speaking on cloud regulation:

• “Things will move quickly, and if something bad happens, things will move faster still.”

From an enterprise buyer on procurement:

• “It will take 19 months to work out e-discovery issues once you start talking about it.”
• “Every dollar they save on cloud will be three dollars in legal.”
• “I hate when people say ‘it’s not gonna stop – it’s already there.’ It makes customers think there is no choice but to comply.  But maybe ‘cloud’ will go away?”

And for the last word, a characteristically common-sense admonition from UK expert Chris Dale (speaking on ECA):

• “The best technology lies between your ears.”

So, how to navigate it all?  For a succinct analysis of the cloud e-discovery market, our report is available to 451 CloudScape or Information Management subscribers, or get an executive summary here.  It offers a market overview, benefits and risks of cloud e-discovery, adoption trends and inhibitors, market drivers, current vendor and service-provider offerings, and the future direction of the market, particularly for enterprise customers.

Also note a complementary report, Cloud archiving: a new model for enterprise data retention, by Simon Robinson and Kathleen Reidy.  They estimate the market will generate around $193m in revenues in 2010, growing at a CAGR of 36% to reach $664m by 2014.  This report covers growth drivers, the competitive landscape and the outlook for consolidation, featuring detailed vendor profiles and end-user case studies.

The cloud archiving market will generate around $193m in revenues in 2010, growing at a CAGR of 36% to reach $664m by 2014.

This is a key finding from a new 451 report published this week, which offers an in-depth analysis of the growing opportunity around how the cloud is being utilized to meet enterprise data retention requirements.

As well as sizing the market, the 50-page report – Cloud Archiving; A New Model for Enterprise Data Retention – details market evolution, adoption drivers and benefits, plus potential drawbacks and risks.

These issues are examined in more detail via five case studies offering real world experiences of organizations that have embraced the cloud for archiving purposes. The report also offers a comprehensive overview of the key players from a supplier perspective, with detailed profiles of cloud archive service providers, with discussion of related enabling technologies that will act as a catalyst for adoption, as well as expected future market developments.

Profiled suppliers include:

• Autonomy
• Dell
• Global Relay
• Google
• i365
• Iron Mountain
• LiveOffice
• Microsoft
• Mimecast
• Nirvanix
• Proofpoint
• SMARSH
• Sonian
• Zetta

Why a dedicated report on archiving in the cloud, you may ask? It’s a fair question, and one that we encountered internally, since archiving aging data is hardly the most dynamic-sounding application for the cloud.

However, we believe cloud archiving is an important market for a couple of reasons.  First, archiving is a relatively low-risk way of leveraging cloud economics for data storage and retention, and is less affected by the performance/latency limitation that have stymied enterprise adoption of other cloud-storage applications, such as online backup. For this reason, the market is already big enough in revenue terms to sustain a good number of suppliers; a broad spectrum that spans from Internet/IT giants to tiny, VC-backed startups. It is also set to experience continued healthy growth in the coming years as adoption extends from niche, highly regulated markets (such as financial services) to more mainstream organizations. This will pull additional suppliers – including some large players — into the market through a combination of organic development and acquisition.

Second, archiving is establishing itself as a crucial ‘gateway’ application for the cloud that could encourage organizations to embrace the cloud for other IT processes. Though it is still clearly early days, innovative suppliers are looking at ways in which data stored in an archive can be leveraged in other valuable ways.

All of these issues, and more, are examined in much more detail in the report, which is available to CloudScape subscribers here and Information Management subscribers here. An executive summary and table of contents (PDF) can be found here.

Finally, the report should act as an excellent primer for those interested in knowing more about how the cloud can be leveraged to help support ediscovery processes; this will be covered in much more detail in another report to be published soon by Katey Wood.

Katey and I are doing a few webinars at the moment and I’m also speaking at a conference this week, so I just wanted to round them all up here:

One webinar is already in the bag, which Katey did with Digital Reef & legal service provider Precise-Law, entitled ‘The challenges of a  reactive vs. proactive EDRM in the Enterprise.’ A replay is available here.

I’m speaking at Search Solutions 2010 this week  on Oct 21. It’s a one-day event organized by the British Computer Society, which I attended last year as a non-speaker and it was very good, so I hope to be able to contribute to maintaining that high standard! I’m speaking at 11.45 am on ‘The trends shaping the future of enterprise search 2010-2013’ and then I’m participating on a panel at the end of the day on what search will look like in 2015. As I’m already making predictions through 2013, I’m three-fifths of the way there! Oct 21 is also the day of Autonomy’s Q3 results call so the place should be full of lively discussion regarding that.

Come November I’m doing a couple more webinars:

On Nov 11 I’m participating on one with Zylab, the focus of which will be litigation-readiness, moving beyond just eDiscovery to insuring organizations have their information in a state such that it can be easily searched, accessed, locked down, deleted or produced to an opposing party.

Also in November I’ll be participating in a webinar with Attensity Group, which will be focused on social media and the application of text analytics to that space. Date TBC and links to follow, most likely on my Twitter feed.

ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) 2010 kicked off with attendance around 1100, up almost 40% from last year according to some attendee estimates, in spite of an emergency venue change following May flash flooding in Nashville.

Even in the August desert heat of the new Las Vegas location there was an encouraging “after the flood” spirit of survival and rebuilding – a look at the 7^th annual ILTA member technology purchasing survey indicates greater financial stability in the sector following last year’s weaker recessionary economy, law firm layoffs and hiring freezes, and stagnant corporate legal budgets: 45% stated their firms are “back to normal financially” (vs. 45% in 2009 reporting that it would take another 12 months – evidently they were right).  Likewise, ILTA’s survey showed that IT spending is slowly recovering from 2009, and 33% report an increase in IT budget, albeit most spending has been in core hardware, infrastructure, computers, and SAN’s – see the InsideLegal write-up for more details.

Many in the e-discovery market claimed strong growth in h1 2010 after a lean 2009 as well, although recent M&A shows the market is still maturing both in technology and go-to-market.   Most vendors and providers continue to build out their lines to be more comprehensive in functionality and interoperability – Clearwell released v. 6.0 of its appliance with enhanced search and more review load file export, Guidance Software made its latest EnCase eDiscovery platform release this week with stronger  search and data analytics, IPRO announced Allegro ECA to integrate with eCapture, Nuix announced an “eDiscovery Supercomputer,” and AccessData Group is busily integrating its own forensic platform with its newly-merged CT Summation assets, as is Unify with its new Daegis DocHunter SaaS review platform and existing archive.

But “end-to-end” claims have subdued somewhat, either from some hard-earned humility or better recognition of a highly variegated customer base with individual pain points.  The messaging tone was commensurately more mature and less reliant on scare tactics of threatening sanctions and crushing reactive discovery costs, instead emphasizing more actual product differentiation, addressing customer pain points, more aggressive pricing, and preparation and risk management.

The theme for 2010 was “Strategic unity” – one that I think emphasized this theme of survival in the industry and more receptiveness (even enthusiasm?) for joint technical and business evolution– I expound on this further for subscribers in our full write-up of the conference and software/service provider releases here.

A few other themes stood out:

• Cloud technology evangelists got a sizeable platform (sorry) through a user panel and a number of vendor sessions, including Microsoft Azure, Autonomy, and Smarsh for social media compliance archiving – a matter of particular interest as we ready upcoming reports on cloud archiving and e-discovery.  Please get in touch with your own story or for more information on the research.

• Review tools (often in SaaS or hosted versions ) got more search and analytics, bigger-scale seat support, and more customizable project set-up for large, distributed cases, with new releases from AccessData (CT Summation CaseVantage 6.0, the first since the merger), Applied Discovery’s new Leverage tool, Catalyst Repositories’ CR 9.0, Clearwell’s afore-mentioned enhanced review module, recent updates from CaseCentral, and iCONECT’s integration with PureDiscovery for semantic search.

• Major vendor releases emphasized not just cutting costs or ROI, but even competitive advantage through gains in business opportunities and productivity – a word that has sometimes been a double-edged sword for sales to the legal sector (no surprise given its emphasis on human expertise).  Thomson Reuters’ West appeared on the back of its CaseLogistix acquisition for the West Litigator line (including LiveNote) for attorney case analysis, and demoed Engage for law firm resource management planning, while LexisNexis made its second integration with Microsoft for the year with Interaction CRM for Outlook, a CRM tool for tracking contacts and client interactions.

• In review tool automation, Recommind had a major rebrand and marketing push behind its Axcelerate predictive coding technology (now integrated in v.8 of its CORE categorization engine for “predictive analytics” across its product line), while Equivio boasted more direct sales for its Relevance review prioritization technology, and Kroll Ontrack announced “Intelligent Prioritization” in its Inview hosted tool.  Autonomy, however, seemed to have backed off its July “meaning-based coding” announcement for IDOL, opting for a risk management platform for attorneys as its release for the event.

• Defensibility had more practical applications with strong turnout among legal hold notification– kCura’s new Method Legal Hold, Exterro’s Fusion Cloud Legal Hold and Zapproved were all on hand – and from forensics vendors and service providers emphasizing collection that will hold up in court, including growing service provider D4, and Integreon’s new Seek and Collect tool used in tandem with services.

• In data management and analytics, Digital Reef announced an open software benchmark for clocking performance along phases of the EDRM, StoredIQ recently released v. 6.0 of its e-discovery and information governance appliance on a 64 bit architecture, and announced integration with Microsoft Data Classification technology for ILTA, while EMC-Kazeon turned up in partnerships for collection and ECA with Applied Discovery and Merrill Corp, as well as recent EMC-Source One releases, of course.

Finally having just returned from VMWorld (hence the delay) I’m struck by the intersection of information management / e-discovery with storage, security and GRC, as all of us grapple with (and continue proliferating) Big Data, both in scalability and manageability.  NetApp was on hand at ILTA and came up by name with e-discovery vendors, as did BlueArc, while at VMWorld, EMC announced plans for a FISMA-compliant VMWare and RSA alliance to trace exact “geolocation” of virtual machines and prevent violating international data privacy regulations, potentially alleviating a major concern of companies transferring data for e-discovery in the cloud.