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Litigation Readiness for Corporations - How Prepared Are You?

Tight budgets, heightened scrutiny by the courts, and an ever-increasing volume and global distribution of potentially relevant information are making compliance with legal requirements more challenging than ever before. How can companies optimize the right combination of search expertise, process, and technology to lower e-discovery costs and risk while improving ROI?

In a webinar, industry experts from Kazeon and H5 will share best practices for addressing e-discovery challenges, from identification, collection, processing, analysis and review to legal hold management. Specific topics will include the following:

1. Optimizing the integration of search expertise, process, and technology to lower e-discovery costs and risk while improving ROI

2. Identifying the necessary technology - and when it is needed - for identification, collection, processing, analysis, review and legal hold management

3. Developing a well-documented and executable process, including a quality assurance framework that incorporates measurement and sampling techniques

4. Reducing the document review and production burden through automation

5. Implementing proactive strategies for ensuring that information is appropriately assessed prior to a discovery request

For more details on the webinar, please visit Kazeon.

CEIC…Great Show and Excellent Release v4 launch!

Did you know Kazeon participated at the Guidance CEIC show (annual user conference) in Orlando, FL this month? The conference was in the beautiful Loew’s Pacific Resort…unfortunatly the weather was not typical Florida sunshine. However, the rain storms did not dampen the spirits of the ediscovery diehards.

Announced on Monday, Kazeon’s new products for Analysis & Review and Legal Hold Management fit into any environment, e.g., in an environment where Guidance’s EnCase is being used for collection. Kazeon can take the collected data, cull it down and provide fine-grained analysis, review, Early Case Assessment and legal hold on that data. Further, if enterprises have numerous laptops/desktops and remote offices where having agents on these devices is hard or impossible, Kazeon can provide agent-less Collection & Culling capabilities to augment or replace Guidance.

Kazeon Unleashes Fourth Generation Software for eDiscovery

Kazeon Systems, Inc., a leading provider of innovative eDiscovery solutions, announced the availability of its fourth generation eDiscovery software for use by corporations, legal service providers and law firms. Kazeon’s solution solves a wide range of customer challenges such as in-house eDiscovery, internal investigations, audits, legal hold and retention management, and GRC.

Kazeon’s Fourth Generation software maintains a modular version providing three best-of-breed products; Analysis & Review, Collection & Culling, and Legal Hold Management. All three eDiscovery products are integrated within a single, underlying software platform to ensure a smooth workflow while eliminating hidden costs that exist in a multi-vendor or disparate product strategy. Further, Kazeon has developed an entirely new distributed, collaborative legal application, the eDiscovery Case Manager, that manages legal cases from ‘womb-to-tomb’ and is geared toward the legal counsel and litigation support staff.

Kazeon is a TIE50 WINNER in hottest software startup

Kazeon has been named a winner in the Software category of TiECON’s TiE50 contest based on voting by customers, partners, investors and others. This is a testament to Kazeon’s excellence and leadership in innovation, ingenuity, and management excellence. Kazeon’s independently validated solution provides the most accurate, scalable, legally defensible and court-proven ediscovery to perform both in-place as well as target Analysis & Review, Collection & Culling, and Legal Hold for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) across the enterprise. The TiE50 award is presented by TiE at TiECon2009 to the top 50 start-ups from close to 1200 nominees.

TiE is a global organization dedicated to fostering entrepreneurs across its international network sponsored by top venture capital firms and Fortune 500 corporations. TiE is spread across 53 chapters in 12 countries comprising of 1,800 experienced entrepreneurs and business executives as charter members, 12,000 aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals as members.

TiECon2009 and TiE50

TiECon 2009 is two action-packed days of rich dialogue, networking and deal making with thousands of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, industry executives, and thought leaders. TiEcon 2009 is themed “The BOLD Entrepreneur”, focusing on dynamic individuals who are able to adapt to changing conditions and create their own future despite downturns and uncertainties.

TiE50 winners are diverse in terms of size, progress, maturity and location. They share a common thread of innovation, ingenuity, strong management teams and overall quality of ideas.

“All of this year’s winners embraced TiE’s message of the bold entrepreneur,” said Mateen Syed, TiE50 Chair. “The judges were impressed by the quality of ideas and execution across each vertical segment. These fifty companies represent the finest in entrepreneurship and serve as role models, encouraging and inspiring emerging start-ups to succeed as Bold Entrepreneurs stimulating the economy.”

“Being selected by TiE judges is a great honor.  The Kazeon team, which is made up of the finest and most creative engineers in Silicon Valley, has worked tirelessly to deliver new capabilities and functionality to Corporate Counsel, Legal Service Providers and Law Firms to streamline the eDiscovery process,” said Karthik Kannan, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Kazeon. “At Kazeon, we strive to push the boundaries and create innovation with our eDiscovery suite and sincerely thank TiE for the recognition.”

The TiE 50 judging process was designed with meticulous planning, screening and judging by a list of over forty prominent entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, corporate executives and other domain experts. TiE is also pleased to acknowledge the nominee companies and those who publicly voted from around the world who contributed to the TiE50 selection process.

TiE50 winners presented their companies in a live showcase over the two days of TiEcon 2009, on May 15th and 16th in Santa Clara, CA.

George Socha and Tom Gelbmann on eDiscovery

Based on overwhelming demand, George Socha and Tom Gelbmann are back with Kazeon and will be discussing Successful deployment of In-house eDiscovery: How to save money and ensure complete, accurate, defensible eDiscovery on April 23rd at 10:00 PST.

George and Tom are the experts behind the annual Socha-Gelbmann eDiscovery Survey. They will discuss the essentials of eDiscovery and key considerations while implementing eDiscovery processes. Please attend this once-only webinar to understand how to be successful with your eDiscovery practices whether you are a corporation, a law firm or a legal service provider. Bring your questions to the webinar, or submit them beforehand.

Welcome to Kazeon’s eDiscovery Blog!

Kazeon, a leading eDiscovery software vendor recognized by Gartner, Socha and other industry experts, is proud to bring you this knowledge and opinion-building forum through which we would like to communicate with the ediscovery and broader legal community. We encourage you to read and comment on our blog postings - we would like this to be a meaningful, informative knowledge-base for our readers.

The eDiscovery Landscape

The eDiscovery landscape consists of pure-play eDiscovery software vendors (like Kazeon, Autonomy, Guidance etc.), legal service providers, hosting service providers and law firms. All these entities sell their product and services to corporations. Increasingly, we have seen a trend wherein corporations are starting to adopt eDiscovery in-house for reasons of cost, risk management and information control. The current economic climate is aggravating the situation and will be the death of legal service providers - $300/GB and above is not sustainable.

As a result, the role of legal service providers has been declining since last year and there is ample evidence of that trend accelerating this year. Take a look at the recent bankruptcy declaration of Onsite3 (powered by the expensive, niche player - Clearwell Systems who is known to charge upwards of $300/GB). And consider some other examples, Attenex was bought by FTI for a relatively small amount for its Patterns product offering, Stratify was absorbed by Iron Mountain, MetaLINCS by Seagate, Discovery Mining by Interwoven, Applied Discovery by LexisNexis and the list continues to grow.

Legal Service providers, whose business models are built on expensive tools and vast numbers of people, cannot sustain their businesses as the economic climate has changed. These unnecessary costs have been rejected by Corporations lately, and even though they have come down from their exorbitant levels of $2000/GB to $900/GB since last year, they are still unjustified costs. Cost-effective and defensible End-to-End eDiscovery software options for in-house deployment have become available. Change is necessary and is inevitable.

Our prediction for this year - eDiscovery software adoption in-house within corporations is going to rise exponentially. A large part of this growth is going to be attributed to the new deployments corporations are going to undertake, and partially to the decline of the legal service provider market.

Here’s to the corporations who want to keep their costs in check and want to take control of their eDiscovery process. We are with you!

The Need for eDiscovery is Further Validated by Autonomy

Everyone saw the recent acquisition of Interwoven by Autonomy for a whopping $775M. In this tough economic climate Autonomy has been able to raise capital and gain shareholder approval to make such a hefty acquisition. This can only mean the involved parties are extremely bullish about the combined opportunity for the two companies and that the acquisition will pay off handsomely over time (a short period of time, we might add).

We believe that the eDiscovery market is taking off especially as corporations are investing in litigation support software in-house. The market has been seeing a shift in the spending - away from Legal Service providers and consultants, and toward in-house software. For obvious reasons, we support this trend; seriously, corporations are going to save substantial amounts of money in this process, and it’s going to make life easy for legal professionals who discover, collect, process, analyze and review data, and for IT professionals who manage the infrastructure and help in the eDiscovery process, especially collection and legal hold.

It’s going to take Autonomy a while though, to deliver an integrated End-to-End eDiscovery solution for in-house deployment. It’s not an easy task to integrate massive applications like Zantaz, Interwoven etc. Let’s watch them unfold over the course of this year.

Guidance Struggles with eDiscovery

It is surprising to see vendors in the search and eDiscovery space struggle with their own litigations! Guidance, in particular, has been having a rather unfortunate recent past, the latest blow coming from a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by an ex-employee. Guidance lost the case as a result of being unable to produce the required data for the lawsuit - relevant emails.

Without going into the details of the case, let’s objectively discuss what went wrong - it really boils down to one thing: the inability of Guidance to discover and produce ALL relevant data pertaining to the case. The takeaway for corporations and law firms must be the fact that simple searches and lack of enterprise-wide reach into all data can be disastrous to defensibility. End-to-End eDiscovery capabilities are needed for all corporations to achieve defensible, accurate and transparent eDiscovery.

Guidance is a collection tool if one wants to collect an image of a laptop. Period. It is NOT an eDiscovery product nor a Legal Hold product. A corporation that wants an in-house solution for their eDiscovery challenges should be looking at an End-to-End eDiscovery solution with the ability to perform all aspects of eDiscovery such as identification, collection, processing, preservation, analysis, review and legal hold. Buying point products that solve one or two aspects of eDiscovery will lead a corporation down an expensive and unsatisfactory path to solving their litigation support needs.

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Google has its Share of eDiscovery Woes

Many corporations have been having public challenges with their litigation support and eDiscovery capabilities. Recently, it came to be known that Google had its own share of issues by being unable to produce all relevant material for an investigation.

Google makes a great search product, amongst the many things they make, for the Internet. However, the point to be made here is the fact that eDiscovery is much more than search. This extends to other applications too that may have built-in search mechanisms that masquerade as eDiscovery products but that’s a recipe for disaster for corporations if they were to rely on these simplistic search capabilities for their eDiscovery needs.

eDiscovery involves advanced analytics and review of enterprise-wide repositories which means discovering, analyzing, collecting and preserving a relevant set of data from TBs of data from multiple sources. Further, the capability to put content under Legal Hold in an integrated fashion is important. eDiscovery requires a powerful, scalable platform with integrated End-to-End functionality, and cannot be a simple application.

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