Guidance Software Q4 results – a guide to the wider market?

Guidance Software, Inc., which is amongst the sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project, has posted Q4 2008 results which are its best quarter’s results in its history, with revenue of $25.2 million. CEO Victor Limongelli was on bullish form in an analysts’ discussion, whilst retaining a sense of caution wholly appropriate to the uncertainty of the times.

Guidance’s results may be a straw in the wind, an indicator of the way things are going. I say that because its market is up at the front of the process which ends in a discovery exercise, a regulatory inquiry or an internal investigation. If you are in mid-case, then you need a review application. If you are starting down that trail, you are collecting data, probably with Guidance’s forensic tools. If you are a large company which thinks you are going to face a need for collections in the near future, then you are buying Guidance’s EnCase eDiscovery or something else whose purpose is anticipatory rather than merely reactive. The report to which I point you above sets out the numbers of Q4 sales relative to previous periods, as well as the interesting statistic that Guidance taught 25% more students how to use its products in 2008 than in 2007.

Law Society Disclosure Seminar in London

I am presenting a two hour seminar in London next Monday 9 March under the auspices of the Law Society.

Sponsored by Legal Inc and Millnet, both well-known suppliers of electronic disclosure solutions, this is a nuts-and-bolts review of everything from cases to rules, from a survey of the problems to a look at solutions, from points of detail to a review of the wider context. It includes a look at some applications.

The title of the seminar is Disclosure – the risks after Hedrich. Most of it is about electronic disclosure, but that is because most documents now in existence were created electronically, still exist electronically and therefore ought to be disclosed electronically – that is, their electronic existence should be disclosed even if it is not practical or cost-effective to handle or exchange them electronically.

As the sun sinks slowly in the West we say farewell to LegalTech – or do we?

You are all too young to remember the clichéd ending to those American travel documentaries which always ended with the sun sinking slowly in the West. So am I, despite being old enough to remember telexes and carbon paper as the must-have office equipment. The expression lives on, in the UK at least, because of the Peter Sellers parody “Balham – Gateway to the South”, which itself dates from 1964 – a cliché kept alive by a parody which is itself too old for most to remember.

My photograph was taken on the Queensboro Bridge as we left LegalTech for JFK this year, made possible by the generous windows of the large black limousine which Nigel Murray had commandeered at a good rate with a degree of resource doubtless acquired in his army years. This combination of clichés, parodies, sunsets, New York and LegalTech was brought to mind by a slight sense in some quarters that this Leviathan of a show may have had its day.