I just left NYC where I had roughly 20 vendor meetings at LegalTech and attended some of the educational sessions.  Leaving the meetings, there were a few things that really caught my eye and because NYC’ers and Bostonians swear too much, I thought I would incorporate it into my title – just to pay homage to my east coast roots.

So, the best vendor / solution I saw at LegalTech was Legal Hold Pro from Zapproved.  Unlike most technologies that I see, this is an offering that solves a real problem – it’s not a technology looking for a problem.  In a nutshell, Legal Hold Pro enables attorneys to manage the notification part of the legal process – a task that is currently done via spreadsheets, email receipt management, or $500,000 on-premise software.   The problem it solves is simple – many companies hate the existing methods and they cannot avoid this aspect of legal hold (Archiving, records management, tape and content management systems address the “data preservation” aspect of legal hold).  And, many of the electronic discovery sanctions in 2009 involve companies failing to meet their duty to preserve requirements.  To me, this is a no-brainer for companies!!  Good stuff.  More good stuff:

• FTI announced a combination of technology and services solution called Acuity to help customers process and review data much faster while maintaining defensibility.  What completes the offering is the flexible pricing model – customers pay per document or per gigabyte.  It is refreshing to see a solution that has multiple new parameters to it as opposed to just a technology upgrade.  In case you are wondering, FTI has the latter covered with an update to the Document Mapper solution.
• Clearwell introduced version 5.5 of its electronic discovery platform that customers deploy onsite to help facilitate initial case assessments and cut review costs.  The big thing on this announcement is the performance boost – they can now process 40GB per hour and get it ready for an initial review.  Yes, I know, people might say 40GB per hour, we can process faster than that.  It may be true, but it is likely you will need a bunch of servers and a clustered index to do it – neither of which can be implemented in less than a day.  That’s Clearwell’s biggest value proposition – easy to install, minimal IT burden and attorneys get what they need to get done.   My experience tells me, those characteristics are just as important as speed.
• Kroll Ontrack entered the email archive business.  Yes, it’s a crowded market, but this is the first entry by someone who actually has electronic discovery experience (and scars).  I am not sure if they can unseat the likes of Symantec, IBM, EMC, Autonomy and Mimosa – but if a customer has been through a painful discovery of email and trusts / has experience with Kroll, they have a shot.
• Symantec and CaseCentral teamed up to eliminate processing fees. Customers can now feed data stored in Enterprise Vault directly into CaseCentral’s processing engine.  And, if they do it now, CaseCentral waives the processing fees.  This is a great example of minimizing the chain of burden when shifting data to a service provider to review.

Read Brian’s other blog entries at IT BULLETins.