Monday, March 30, 2009
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.
Friday, March 27, 2009
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!
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!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
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.
Monday, March 9, 2009
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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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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Friday, March 6, 2009
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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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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