Enterprise Strategy Group X eDiscovery

Guidance Software Buys CaseCentral

Katey Wood — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:33:54 +0000

Guidance Software announced its acquisition of SaaS review provider CaseCentral today. Let’s look to the happy couple’s future. Now that they’ve found love, what are they gonna do with it?

Existing synergies

The companies’ recent roadmaps seem to have been on similar courses.

Guidance has been adding support for the cloud: available in March 2012, Encase eDiscovery 4.4 collects from cloud-based sources. New Collected Data Re-use (CDR) allows users to search data previously collected in EnCase from prior matters.

CaseCentral has long had evidence and work-product reuse from its unified repository as a value proposition, along with process analytics to clock productivity in case review – see ESG’s brief on its Q3 R5 release here. In December 2011 it added more self-service with CaseCentral CloudConnect, letting users securely upload data directly into its e-discovery platform (rather than packaging, shipping, and processing it).

Integration plans

Guidance plans for the products to be integrated in 3-6 months, eventually allowing users to send data seamlessly to CaseCentral for review through FTP. This raises questions about the viability of transmitting the largest e-discovery data volumes over a wire in an adequate timeframe, though Guidance points to its EnCase filters’ ability to winnow data down considerably prior to review.

Moreover, all “data about the data” from EnCase – such as legal hold status, collection time, etc. – will be mapped to CaseCentral’s platform and available to outside counsel, to improve collaboration between enterprises and law firms. This builds favorably on CaseCentral’s existing process analytics capabilities, for added transparency in project management and reporting.

Rationale

Cross-selling opportunities abound. Guidance is a well known quantity, boasting EnCase Enterprise usage by 60 of the Fortune 100. CaseCentral’s revenue base is largely made up of enterprise litigants doing repeat cases, unlike many other review vendors (but similar to an increasing number of service providers). According to a recent press release, “strategic enterprise eDiscovery revenue has been growing with a CAGR of 45% since 2009 and now represents over 75% of CaseCentral revenue versus single event, ad hoc business.” Both, too, have law firm traction: Guidance was used by 13% and CaseCentral by 8% in the 2011 AmLaw Tech Survey (competitor Clearwell Systems, at 46%, was the most-cited).

Other potential benefits:

The possibility of combined evidence re-use and end-to-end process analytics adds “stickiness” for Guidance (and potentially an up-sell from its “on-demand” offering), as enterprise companies reap added benefits from working with a single provider across cases.
Guidance now wins on both ends, collecting from the cloud and putting it back up in its own through CaseCentral. In the event of push-button cloud promotion or CaseCentral’s self-service capabilities proving inadequate, Guidance has a well-equipped services arm to pitch in.

Financial details

A look at the numbers from the press release:

“Under the terms of the agreement, Guidance Software will acquire CaseCentral for upfront consideration of approximately $17.1 million, consisting of approximately $8.3 million in cash, $8.3 million in Guidance Software common stock, and the assumption of $0.5 million of debt, net of cash. Depending on CaseCentral’s SaaS revenue growth, Guidance Software may pay up to an additional $33 million in cash over the next three years. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the first quarter of 2012. Guidance Software expects the transaction to add approximately $10 million in SaaS revenue in 2012, and to be slightly dilutive to slightly accretive to 2012 non-GAAP EPS and accretive to 2013 non-GAAP EPS.”

A possible long-term price tag of $50m (depending on revenue growth for the next three years) would provide more return on the total $22m in funding the company has received, but still puts the deal only a bit above Interwoven’s July 2008 acquisition of Discovery Mining for $36m, and well below more recent transactions.

CaseCentral’s revenue details are not available as of this writing to calculate a multiple. Guidance, which reported 2011 revenues of $104.6m, expects the deal to add $10m in SaaS revenue for 2012.

Summation Aims for a Second Act

Katey Wood — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:44 +0000

After 25 years in the market, AccessData has put its acquired review tool, Summation, on steroids in the hope of locking in its market leadership.

Overview

AccessData is reintroducing an industry classic—Summation—to its traditional and loyal attorney-review customer base, and, it hopes, to a new generation of customers looking for integrated functionality and improved usability. Summation has been streamlined, made more intuitive and user-friendly, and enhanced with integration to a powerful processing engine: AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit (FTK).
Summation is offered in three new configurations that are distinguished by capacity rather than features.
Summation, in its new guise, seems to offer strong price-performance benefits and a compelling integration story with AccessData’s in-house e-discovery platform.

What’s Old Is New

Long a favorite because of its client-driven development, Summation suffered from a lack of R&D through several acquisitions. Although highly functional, its complex user interface obscured some of its capabilities. That complexity created a love/hate relationship among users, who will appreciate the overdue overhaul. Besides better usability, Summation boasts new front-end processing and early case assessment (ECA) at a flat subscription rate with no per-gigabyte rate.

AccessData hopes this will help Summation regain footing against long-time rival Concordance (now under LexisNexis) and kCura’s Relativity—a product that leapfrogged both historic market titans in recent years through an aggressive channel strategy, agile development, and an emphasis on high usability. Roadmap integration with AccessData’s in-house e-discovery platform aims to result in an end-to-end stack to rival established enterprise platform players as well.

Release Details

Technology

The redesigned Summation has new ECA functionality, including integrated front-end processing with more comprehensive final review and production features. New web-based deployment parallels the capabilities offered with AccessData’s iBlaze and WebBlaze, including an offline feature that automatically updates to the network case once a user rejoins (much like an Outlook PST).

Until now, Summation did not have a robust forensic processing capability built in, although it could be used with several of AccessData’s products. The new Summation has been upgraded with built-in processing from AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit. FTK is recognized as a standard in computer forensics software. It provides massive processing scalability, works with more than 700 data types, and offers many modifiable processing options.

New ECA includes search with real-time status, filtering, threading, and dedupe. Summation now includes what AccessData calls 4D search, namely: indexing , filtering, and keyword searching on filtered data sets, then on column-level Excel-like filters “at the top” to reveal every value in the columns.

Classic Summation functionality such as transcript management remains. But it now resides on a completely rewritten code base with a more efficient, modern, and intuitive Silverlight interface. The company stresses that the focus of the recode was not simply on modernizing, but also on leveraging 25 years of user-focused development to make the functionality more accessible.

Summation features include:

Handling for process data (dedupe, index, expand, archive, and optical character recognition).
Filtering, tagging, and culling for effective first-pass review.
Export to industry-standard load files (Concordance, iCONECT, Introspect, Relativity, Ringtail, Summation DII, and Electronic Discovery Reference Model XML).
Advanced search and analysis for legal review.
Transcript support and production sets.
Mobile and offline capability.
Processing features, including the ability to import custodian evidence; modifiable processing options (OCR deduplication, and deNISTing); integrated near-dupe and e-mail threading; and reporting of processing, deduplication, export, and search with real-time status.
An interface that includes a new tagging and coding palette, which is customizable depending on permissions. This feature is both movable and dockable. Preconfigured layouts are available, or layouts can be easily customized.
New reporting dashboard to track jobs and progress.

In 2012 (targeting Q2), the company also envisions adding predictive coding based on internal proprietary development. In addition, look for more advanced review features, such as concept clustering and data visualization.

Product Line

The revamped Summation product line includes three versions. Unlike so many software offerings, they are not differentiated by features; all have the same basic capabilities. Instead, licensing is based on the volume of cases and data. For example:

Entry-level Summation Solo is targeted with a low price point primarily to single academic users and has a limit of 15,000 documents per case.
Summation Express is targeted at smaller teams with moderate data storage and handling requirements.
Summation Pro is targeted at the largest legal organizations and cases and can scale as needed, including scalable ECA. Summation Pro is also aimed at service providers with massive processing requirements and many CPUs.

Summation will be previewed publicly starting February 2012, and will be generally available soon afterward. Pricing is yet to be released. As a concomitant to the rework of Summation, AccessData plans to curtail further development of iBlaze, Summation Enterprise, and Summation CaseVantage. However, the company says it plans to support those products “indefinitely.”

Broader AccessData Integration

Still on the roadmap is full integration with the AccessData platform, including increased support of other DBMS systems. (Summation is now built on SQL.) The company aims to offer a modular system fully integrated in the AccessData product suite, but “database agnostic” with export at any phase of the process to play well with others.

With the addition of AccessData Early Case Assessment (AD ECA) in Q3 2011, the company now has three options in its e-discovery toolbelt.

AD eDiscovery, its in-house enterprise platform, covers identification through processing on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, with ECA, analysis, and export to further review.
AD ECA performs processing, ECA, and export of pre-collected data.
Summation performs processing, review, and production, with ECA capabilities.

Market Analysis

Competitive Context

AccessData acquired e-discovery vendor CT Summation from Wolters Kluwer in July 2010, with the aim of offering a fully integrated enterprise review stack. The purchase added Discovery Cracker processing and Summation’s review and production to AccessData’s existing FTK forensic technology and enterprise e-discovery platform. The company claims 300,000 customers overall (inclusive of forensics and Summation customers), and 60% of the Am Law 200 using Summation.

AccessData is well-known for its popularity with forensics experts and law enforcement due to its proprietary FTK Imager. The company introduced e-discovery and cybersecurity platforms in recent years as well. That effort is happening in parallel with that of archrival Guidance Software, which owns the popular EnCase image format and accompanying e-discovery and cybersecurity products aimed at the enterprise. Other competing e-discovery platforms for collection through data export or review include Autonomy, Clearwell Systems (now owned by Symantec), EMC SourceOne eDiscovery-Kazeon, Nuix, Recommind Axcelerate, StoredIQ, and ZyLAB.

On the review-tool side, Summation from AccessData competes for legal-sector sales against long-time rival Concordance (owned by LexisNexis). Both Summation and Concordance lost traction in recent years, first to iCONECT for web deployment, then to comparative newcomer Relativity from kCura, which boasts agile development for superior usability and a large indirect channel through service providers such as the Big 4 accounting firms, Applied Discovery, EPIQ Systems, Fios, RenewData, and dozens of others. Thomson Reuters’ 2010 purchase of CaseLogistix for its West Notebook could provide additional competition, as could Kroll’s introduction of SaaS-based option Verve for attorney DIY. Still, the old favorites maintain strong traction in desktop sales to small law practitioners—whom these vendors would like to upgrade.

Other review tools at varying price points and functionality include Autonomy Introspect, Catalyst, CaseCentral, FTI’s Ringtail, IPRO Tech, and Recommind Axcelerate. Service providers with proprietary tools of their own include Applied Discovery, EPIQ Systems, FTI, Kroll Ontrack, RenewData, Stroz Friedberg, and Xerox Litigation Services.

The Bigger Truth

Through several acquisitions, Summation has survived because of its early commitment to customer-driven development and the strong loyalty that commitment produced. AccessData has carefully distilled its strengths with long-overdue updates reflecting the shifting nature of the legal sector, specifically, the importance of the web and mobility, front-end processing and compatibility, commoditization of processing fees, and the influence of the enterprise and in-house use.

Executing beyond Summation’s existing loyal base will require the ability to out-maneuver titans of both the legal and enterprise e-discovery spheres: LexisNexis, Thomson-Reuters West, Clearwell-Symantec, EMC-Kazeon, Guidance Software, and, increasingly, Relativity. With a compelling price point, improved usability, front-end processing, and evolving platform integration, Summation is ready to be back in the game.

LegalTech 2012: The Eagle Has Landed

Katey Wood — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:33 +0000

A few of today’s releases (and some I missed!) for LegalTech 2012. Believe it or not, the best is (still) “yet to come.” …Think bigger!

Software

AD Summation upguns Summation with scalable ECA and new front-end processing from AccessData’s FTK engine, full AccessData integration and predictive coding on the roadmap–see our brief today for details.
BIA’s Cloud-based collection from TotalDiscovery.com adds support for iPhones and iPads, and social media.
Equivio, long an OEM-provider to other tools, releases its own unified Zoom platform for predictive coding and e-mail analytics.
iConect releases its HTML5-based Xera platform for better collaboration with support for iPad.
kCura releases Relativity 7.3 with native application-based imaging, Review Manager, a reporting dashboard application for forecasting the time and cost of review, an App Store, and, of course, Relativity Assisted Review, released last year for automated review.
Venio releases FPR 3.5 with statistical sampling.

Service providers

Daegis replaces DocHunter’s database for cross-matter management, adds support for Lotus Notes.
Integreon’s eView 4.0 adds predictive coding.
Orange Legal Technologies announces integration with OrcaTec’s predictive coding.
RenewData‘s RDC Analytics debuts its content analytics consulting offering, leveraging language experts and a large analytics toolbelt to tackle big data problems.
TCDI ‘s CV5 review and production software lets users automate and customize workflow.

See you at the show!!!

www.iconect.com/home.asp

Second Wave of E-Discovery Products Targets LegalTech

cwhitehouse — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:51:57 +0000

Overall, there will be several major discovery themes at the show, including the debate between on-premise software and its cloud-based cousins, how to collect data from cloud systems, usability, and product compatibility plus integration, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Katey Wood wrote in her Information Asymmetry blog Thursday.

“Consider your requirements carefully and arm yourself with information in exploring options, before and after the show,” Wood noted.

via Second Wave of E-Discovery Products Targets LegalTech.

LegalTech 2012 Pre-Game: Enterprise E-discovery and Information Governance

Katey Wood — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:59:02 +0000

Today we examine the terrain for enterprise e-discovery and information governance releases going into LegalTech 2012. My previous posts covered the e-discovery service provider landscape and attorney review software and SaaS.

Check back for show-time updates when more announcements go public Monday.

Recent M&A

First, an M&A catch-up. 2011 saw several major deals, and 2012 is off to a good start:

Symantec bought LiveOffice this month for about $115m, after buying Clearwell last May for $390m.
Autonomy bought Iron Mountain’s e-discovery assets in May for $380m, including Stratify, Connected, and Mimosa, followed shortly by HP buying Autonomy in October for $10.3B.

Recent Releases and Announcements:

Autonomy recently released three new appliances for e-discovery, search, and archiving built on HP hardware and leveraging Autonomy’s Digital Safe private cloud, as well as HP’s TRIM Records Management, now IDOL-ized on Autonomy’s platform.
Clearwell pre-announces predictive coding for attorney review in its e-discovery platform.
EMC-SourceOne’s Kazeon 4.6 release in Q4 2011 revamped with support for new languages and connectors, plus role-based management to improve user-friendliness.
Nuix releases Defensible Deletion, Visual Analytics, and Contract Discovery, as well as its philanthropic offering Proof Finder.
Recommind announces 95% growth for the company overall, with record revenue and deal sizes.
StoredIQ releases the Defensible Data Deletion solution for the StoredIQ platform, adding to its existing information governance solutions for e-discovery, RM, compliance and storage.
Symantec debuts the recently-acquired LiveOffice – giving SYMC both the popular Enterprise Vault 10 for on-prem archiving, and a major SaaS archive supporting many data types (not to mention Clearwell).

Trends to Watch

Based on these (and announcements we can’t talk about yet), look for these trends at the show:

Appliance or Cloud? Yes, please. On-prem immediacy vs. cloud-based capacity, pricing, and infrastructure relief? Users demand both and are getting them, as vendors seek entry-level sales and more potential for growth.

Cloud, Cloud, and more Cloud- Private or public. Collecting from it or sending data to it. Inevitable or inconceivable. Look past the hype and controversy for the best ways to leverage the cloud in e-discovery. Brace yourself for collecting from it. Identify fine print to negotiate (or run from) with providers.

Defensible Deletion -Nuix and StoredIQ tackle defensible deletion with tools for data indexing, classification, and analysis aimed at actionable engagements and reactive ROI – versus the big names marketing proactive information governance archives, ECM, and RM. A new “Pre-ECA” for Big Data?

Usability or Bust – Balancing 1. usability, 2. broad applicability, and 3. complex technical capabilities is an art-form, and also key to attracting a wide customer base in e-discovery. Apps, roles, languages, connectors, transparency – the more support the better. Many players are re-positioning from a channel of service providers to direct enterprise sales, realigning from IT strongholds to legal users, or going global. And any advanced technology must be adequately transparent and court-defensible, raising the stakes.

Integration and compatibility – or not - LegalTech is a venue for big marketing splashes, not reading the fine print. But note well that between point tool partnerships, acquisition rationalization, platform expansions, and the never-ending pursuit of “end to end,” one size rarely “fits all” in e-discovery.

Consider your requirements carefully and arm yourself with information in exploring options, before and after the show – for example, with ESG’s recent Market Landscape Reports on Initial Case Assessment and the Future of Review. As mama said, “You can’t hurry love.”

LegalTech 2012 Pre-Game: Attorney Review Tools

Katey Wood — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:59:27 +0000

Previously in our LegalTech 2012 countdown, we covered the e-discovery Service Provider landscape. Today we look at what’s likely to be top of mind at LegalTech 2012 in attorney review software and SaaS – based on trends from 2011, and the releases we can talk about so far.

2011 Developments and Pre-Announcements

CaseCentral recently announced CloudConnect for self-service data upload to its cloud e-discovery platform – see our latest brief on CaseCentral here.
Catalyst finalizes its move to the Amazon cloud with Insight, replacing its underlying Microsoft FAST search engine with MarkLogic, and with predictive coding integration on the way – see our brief on Insight here.
Clearwell pre-announces transparent predictive coding for review in its e-discovery platform.
kCura continues promotion of Relativity Assisted Review, boasting an early integration by service provider Fios (see our brief here). Look for a quarterly release and new apps.
Kroll announced SaaS-based Verve for attorney DIY outside of service engagements in 2011.
Recommind announces 227% revenue growth for predictive coding review tool Axcelerate On-Demand YoY, as well as 95% growth for the company overall, with record revenue and deal sizes.
Summation, acquired by AccessData in June 2010, has been undergoing a major R&D update and integration with AD’s FTK forensic engine and broader e-discovery platform.

Trends to Watch

Based on these (and announcements we can’t talk about yet), look for these trends at the show:

Predictive Coding Gains Critical Mass. kCura’s Relativity-Assisted Review, out last year, and Clearwell’s pre-announcement of predictive coding capabilities lend even more clout to the cause of better automating attorney review. Both companies have shown agility in R&D. Their accessible UIs and workflow with a focus on customer-driven development have won widespread popularity. Is this the shot in the arm predictive coding needs to garner mainstream adoption – even for in-house use and acceptance through Clearwell’s platform?

Cloud-bound and DIY. SaaS-based providers like CaseCentral and Catalyst have been working in the last year for better user self-service. Catalyst has moved to Amazon for additional scalability. Kroll has thrown its hat into the ring with Verve, its SaaS-based tool for use outside of service engagements. Meanwhile, Recommind boasts continued growth of its Axcelerate On-Demand offering.

Dashboards, Project Management, and Process Analytics. Process analytics reporting and project management dashboard have been heating up through tools like CaseCentral, and are also arriving in the latest version of Summation. These potentially offer better predictability for service providers using the tools, and transparency for enterprise customers into process and costs. Look for integration in more tools and applications.

Small Law and Mid-Market Heat Up. Will Summation and Concordance gain back ground against more agile competitor Relativity with their usability and R&D upgrades of the last year? Can kCura keep growing direct sales from Relativity’s strength in the channel against rivals with their own processing engines?

Aiming at the Enterprise. …Will Summation’s ongoing integration with AccessData’s enterprise e-discovery platform spell “sales synergy” with general counsel – especially against arch-rivals like Guidance and Clearwell? Watch for more review tool sales to the enterprise (even outside of platforms for internal response). Also look for more legal sector titans using general counsel’s leverage with law firms in their messaging.

We’ll examine the corporate market further with our next post, on e-discovery and information governance software for the enterprise. For more information on the review tool market, see ESG’s recently-published Market Landscape Report, The Future of Review.

Check back for more updates as they’re announced at show-time next week.

LegalTech 2012 Pre-Game: Service Providers

Katey Wood — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:09:40 +0000

The countdown to LegalTech is on. This week, I’ll review some major recent developments in software and services for the enterprise and legal sector, plus trends to watch out for at the conference, starting today with service providers. I’ll be able to write about more releases once they’re announced at show-time, so check back for our wrap up.

Consolidation in the Services Sector

First let’s recap some of the major deals in the space in the last year:

This month, Siris Capital acquired Applied Discovery from LexisNexis, bringing on Stratify/Iron Mountain alum Ramana Venkata as CEO.
EPIQ Systems bought De Novo, a legal staffing and managed review firm, for $68m in December 2011, after buying Encore Discovery Solutions in April for $100m.
In July 2011, DiscoverReady acquired ACT Litigation for $65m and Navigant acquired Ignited Discovery.

Does consolidation spell doom and gloom for the services sector? Disruption, yes. But there’s still plenty of room for innovation and differentiation in the market, as we’ll see in the announcements around predictive coding and managed review. Also note that 35% of corporate counsel are currently re-evaluating their service providers based on e-discovery experience, as discovered in ESG’s most recent corporate counsel survey. Only 6% of corporate counsel were selecting a primary national or global service provider.

2011 Developments and Future Trends

Many announcements are under wraps until show-time, but some interesting developments from the last year to keep in mind:

Applied Discovery is going best of breed post-acquisition, adding Relativity and Nuix in addition to its proprietary Leverage offering and partnership with EMC-Kazeon
Fios has gone for early adoption with Relativity Assisted Review, adding to existing integrations with Content Analyst, Equivio and Relativity Analytics – see our brief on the release here.
Kroll announced its SaaS-based review Verve for attorney DIY outside of service engagements in 2011.

Based on these (and announcements we can’t talk about yet), look for these trends at the show:

Software vs. Services: We expect big news from Applied Discovery as the dust settles on this deal. The awkward internal siloing between Lexis’s footprint in legal and e-discovery software and Applied Discovery’s own proprietary Leverage tool and services seems to have finally given way. Meanwhile, Kroll is betting that familiarity from service engagements will translate into productizing its proprietary tool in a SaaS form factor through Verve.

Best of Breed: Kroll’s move is bucking a trend towards best of breed, even among service providers with their own review tools. Note that Applied Discovery, Fios, and RenewData all now offer Relativity in addition to their own proprietary tools – as do EPIQ Systems and Ignited. Relativity continues its strength in the channel, as partner Nuix does for processing.

Managed Review: Early players in Managed Review like FTI’s Acuity have been using contract attorneys and advanced technology to streamline review for several years (look for customer results and success stories from FTI at the show). Many service providers have added it to their repertoire recently, either through partners with review services or acquisitions (as EPIQ’s of De Novo).

Predictive Coding: …And with kCura’s latest Relativity-Assisted Review release being integrated by partners like Fios, “predictive coding” continues its advance to an even broader potential channel of users. Look for advanced analytics and “automated review” in a number of new tools and services at the show.

We’ll cover more on predictive coding and other trends in posts on review tool and enterprise software announcements later this week. More releases and updates will be out during the show. Stay tuned.

Symantec Buys LiveOffice for $115M in Clearwell Cloud Plan

cwhitehouse — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:28:17 +0000

E-discovery analyst Katey Wood, of Enterprise Strategy Group, said Symantec’s plans are in line with what customers need. “This is not shocking. But it’s a good move because a lot of companies are moving their archives into the cloud. There’s a great cost benefit to doing so,” she said, in New York. It will be important for Symantec to communicate the details and not take too long to execute, she said.

via Symantec Buys LiveOffice for $115M in Clearwell Cloud Plan.

Symantec Announces Intelligent Information Governance To Mitigate Risks And Free Information – Dark Reading

cwhitehouse — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:47:30 +0000

“The governance of information is increasingly important to businesses. Companies need to simultaneously control and liberate information, letting employees freely access the information they need for maximum productivity without resulting in compliance risks to the organization,” said Katey Wood, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “By bringing together on-premise and cloud-based security, archiving, classification and eDiscovery, Symantec provides a solution that can help organizations proactively classify, retain and discover information while reducing risk and avoiding costs.”

“What were once disparate issues—information management, eDiscovery, and data security—are rapidly coming together due to the explosion of electronically stored information and the on-premise and cloud-based technologies that deliver and disseminate it. Organizations are increasingly demanding that these issues be addressed in a unified way through information governance,” stated Brian Dye, vice president, Information Intelligence Group, Symantec Corp. “As a market leader for storage, eDiscovery and security, Symantec continues to enhance its offerings and deepen its commitment to provide the most comprehensive intelligent information governance solutions.”

New Enhanced Governance Functionality Adding an information archive is one of the simplest steps an organization can take to improve its information governance. With an archive, organizations can systematically index, classify and retain information and thus establish a proactive approach to eDiscovery. Today, Symantec announces its plans to strengthen the integration of its leading archiving and eDiscovery solutions.

via Symantec Announces Intelligent Information Governance To Mitigate Risks And Free Information – Dark Reading.

Fios Goes for Speed, Best of Breed with Assisted Review

Katey Wood — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:26:22 +0000

Building on its core expertise in e-discovery processing, service provider Fios has expanded its ambitions in recent years to support and automate a broader scope of legal services. This effort has included significant innovation in attorney review (the most expensive stage of the e-discovery process) through best-of-breed technology and outsourcing partnerships. Its next technical advancement is tied to the early adoption of partner kCura’s Relativity Assisted Review. The tool’s more automated approach offers better retrieval of relevant documents, faster project turnaround, and greater cost savings.

Overview

E-discovery service provider Fios has made great strides in transforming its approach to e-discovery—and its underlying business model and organization—in recent years. With its transition to offering partner-supported document review services, the company now stands as a lynchpin of “managed review,” facilitating attorney reviews among corporate clients, law firms, and legal process outsourcing partners.

The leveraging of contract labor and the use of more automated methods both offer customers more aggressively priced legal services. Moreover, Fios claims its standardized e-discovery processes provide greater predictability and defensibility for clients. Fios’ latest review tool upgrade to partner kCura’s Relativity Assisted Review accelerates the identification of relevant documents—minimizing redundant effort, speeding project times, and cutting costs.

Service and Product Strategy

Fios’ over-arching goal is a more standardized e-discovery process, with greater predictability and cost savings for clients. Technology automation and outsourcing are only two ingredients in this greater overall process efficiency. The company’s unified approach to the process entails:

Understanding the needs of the case and the client’s priorities
Capturing data, culling it, and reducing it to the most relevant possible kernel for review
Loading data quickly to facilitate review, while providing personnel and technology to streamline reviewer operations

Technology

In recent years, the company has released several new products and services supporting these aims.

For pre-review data culling and case intelligence, Fios unveiled Clarify, its early case assessment tool, in January 2011. Built on top of partner Venio’s FPR electronic discovery software, the SaaS-based tool offers quick ingestion; advanced e-mail analytics; search; and culling to examine data, begin searching, and minimize volume. Its advanced visualizations and dashboards offer a snapshot of evidence contents to support case or project decision-making and resourcing. The tool can be utilized by Fios, or both corporate litigants and their attorneys can be trained to use it independently.

Further along in downstream attorney review, Fios leverages its ongoing technology integration with kCura’s Relativity Attorney Review software for streamlined and automated review. Relativity’s user-friendliness and popularity with reviewers offers a better user experience. And by building out Relativity’s extensible platform with its own customization and workflow, Fios has also sought to accelerate the adoption of analytics for better navigation and faster case insight during attorney review.

For example, Fios was first to augment Relativity for faster attorney review with e-mail threading and near-duplicate detection by embedding partner Equivio’s technology in May 2010. The company also developed its own Fios Viewer for Relativity which reveals hidden data in Excel and PowerPoint without having to download native Office documents. Fios also uses concept clustering technology from Relativity software partner Content Analyst to enable faster grouping of case topics, either for identifying relevant themes or culling irrelevant ones.

Relativity Analytics

In 2011, Fios began offering Relativity Analytics as part of its standard Relativity bundle—a strong differentiator because advanced analytics often incur an additional per-volume fee in attorney review tools. Fios has found that using analytics to group conceptually related documents both increases review speed and improves review accuracy. While the industry usage of Relativity Analytics is around 11% of all cases, Fios clients employ the technology in nearly 80% of cases.

Relativity Assisted Review

In 2012, Fios plans to release cutting-edge “Relativity Assisted Review” (RAR) integration with kCura’s partner, Content Analyst, for more computer-automated review.

Assisted Review involves not just new technology, but new workflow. In traditional review methodology, the most strategic reviewers typically conduct the final round of document review, or they quality-control (QC) the work of others. By contrast, in a computer-assisted approach, strategic reviewers locate and utilize relevant documents up-front to serve as a training set for mapping the document universe by concept.

In the case of Fios’ workflow for RAR, attorney reviewers train the tool to identify relevant documents, starting with an initial coded seed set of responsive or non-responsive documents. This seed-set of training docs can be identified through various methods—for example, through keywords, conceptual search, hot docs, key custodians, or other metadata—provided the person reviewing them is a domain expert.

As the computer is trained, it develops a model for retrieving similarly relevant documents, and it begins producing its own results with a high likelihood of responsiveness. Reviewers then check the categorization of these computer-assisted results using sampling, and calculate whether the results are sufficiently accurate. As reviewers review sampled documents, they continue training the system iteratively, changing or augmenting the fundamental document set to refine results. Iterations of computer-assisted review are continued for remaining documents in the collection until the results are within a desired accuracy and confidence range.

Fios’s computer-assisted review can be used in a number of ways:

In the “conceptual clustering ”methodology, users prioritize review documents according to their likely relevance, letting reviewers examine the most responsive documents first.
In another approach, reviewers can simply continue training the system iteratively until it results in a focused set that meets QC review criteria.
For case reviews continuing over an extended period of time, reviewers can use an initial training set to locate responsive data over the course of the review when, for example, new data comes in or additional custodians are added.

While computer-assisted automation speeds the process, Fios stresses that it’s not a push-button solution. In fact, computer-assisted methods actually require more planning and up-front preparation to build a training set.

Legal Process Outsourcing

In addition to technology enhancements, Fios’ and its legal process outsourcing provider partner, Special Counsel, Inc,. have initiated innovative pricing including more aggressive volume-based rates for review services from contract attorneys. By leveraging a “managed review” scenario, customers can pay per-gigabyte or per-document for processing through attorney review, rather than paying by the traditional billable hour.

Standardizing the process across these tools and services is critical to Fios’ goal of more repeatable, predictable, and defensible e-discovery. To this end, Fios has put significant effort into unifying its partner technologies and services with standard methodologies, customizable reporting templates, extensive reviewer training, and close project management.

Business Strategy

Spearheading Fios’s growth is CEO Bill Lyons, a board member who assumed the role of Chief Executive in February 2011. The company reported revenue growth of 20-25% in 2011, and it expects to exceed this in 2012.

Best-of-Breed Partners

Fios’s transformation to a deeper and broader provider has been facilitated by its best-of-breed partnerships. After leveraging its own proprietary review-tool, Fios Prevail, the company switched to partner kCura’s popular Relativity review platform in January 2010. Fios’s 2011 Relativity users are now up 150% year over year.

This doesn’t mean Fios’s R&D efforts are over. The company has a dedicated team developing applications and workflow on Relativity’s extensible platform, augmenting or extending it to achieve additional desired functionality. Fios’ commitment to early technology adoption often requires extra elbow grease in integrating or customizing cutting-edge features. Fios has also improved its own processing methods by an order of magnitude, using more automation to handle a higher volume of cases with greater agility.

Process Standardization

Better-automating e-discovery promises extensive cost savings for customers while maintaining reasonable margins for providers. More standardized processes and automation also enable greater repeatability and potentially a higher volume of business for Fios itself.

To this end, the Portland, Oregon-based company has rebuilt itself for scale and speed at a technical level. It has augmented its computing infrastructure with parallel processing to enable distributed rendering, loading, and production of large data volumes. Simultaneously, the company is adding more local processing sites supporting faster data ingestion and project launches in a broader geographic reach across the United States. By accessing new Fios sites in Santa Clara and New York (unveiled in August 2011), Fios customers can upload collected data into Fios’s environment directly, without shipping physical media.

Market Context: Legal Services in Flux

Fios’ shift to automate and outsource attorney review reflects the broader market competition and pricing pressures affecting legal services. In spite of clients’ great expectations for law firms, there is little real accountability for results in the document reviews the firms provide. In fact, ESG’s Corporate Counsel 2011 survey showed 86% of in-house counsels consider e-discovery an important competency for their outside counsel to some degree.[1] Yet 67% admitted they had never tracked their law firm’s accuracy or productivity related to document review (see Figure 1), offering clients little insight into efficiencies achieved.

But with rising evidentiary data volumes and recessionary pricing pressure on legal-services billing, methods and technology for attorney review are under growing scrutiny. Corporate clients are even exerting more influence on tool selection: Thirty-three percent of corporate counsel surveyed by ESG in 2011 reported asking that their law firm use specific review tools, with 41% planning to make similar requests in the coming year. This evolutionary change is due not only to individual preference or tool standardization, but also to the productivity benefits conferred by certain tools that offer increased automation—including process metrics, productivity reporting, data analytics, advanced search, and even computer-assisted or “predictive” coding.

Figure 1. Corporate Counsel Tracking of Document Review Efficiency and Accuracy

Even those clients not requesting particular tools for document review are demanding the more aggressive pricing, often facilitated through such tools and their innovative approaches. Seventy-one percent of corporate counsel surveyed by ESG planned to request an alternative fee arrangement in the coming year, i.e., a more aggressive billable-hour rate for document review, or even per-volume, per-document, or flat-fee pricing (see Figure 2).

In this market context, service providers like Fios are offering more advanced tools, labor outsourcing, new process methodologies, and different pricing models. These enhancements can potentially support better outcomes, faster results, and significantly lower prices for both clients and law firms engaged in attorney review.

Figure 2. Measures Requested of Outside Counsel by Corporate Counsel

The Bigger Truth

As the market for legal services become more cost-conscious, providers such as Fios are driving innovation to deliver new efficiencies and better results. The over-arching goal is a more sustainable model of e-discovery, one with the potential benefits of:

Faster case insight, more accurate review, and streamlined project completion
Cost savings and greater predictability for both clients and providers
Enhanced court defensibility in adopting new processes and technology

Greater automation, non-linear attorney review methods, and the tactical use of outsourcing are critical elements of this. But combining these new methods and technologies effectively takes a comprehensive approach with close oversight and greater focus on process.

Using its years of experience and best-of-breed partner strategy, Fios is well positioned to lead the charge. Its all-in pricing for Relativity analytics shows it’s doubling down on advanced technology to promote adoption and keep prices competitive for customers.

[1] Source: ESG Research Report, e-Discovery Market Trends: A View from the Legal Department, October 2011.