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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