Keeping up with Equivio

Equivio illustrates the maxim “less is more” in ways which go beyond the purpose of its software, which is “the management of data redundancy in content-centric business processes” . There is something appropriate in the way that a company whose business  is identifying the fewest possible documents manages to describe itself in the fewest possible words.

Equivio’s technology, in its own words, zooms in on unique data…With products for grouping near-duplicates, capturing email threads and determining document relevance, Equivio powers a broad range of business applications, including e-discovery, data retention, records management, email archiving and intelligence.

Equivio is generally found built into something else, and this unshowy role is matched by marketing which is low-key and much the better for it. Its web site and other promotional materials state in simple terms what the products do without screaming at you. Because other providers build Equivio’s products into their own applications and processes, they have an interest in spreading the word, and even Equivio’s rivals are publicly respectful of it. I use its illustrations in some of my slides, and it has turned up in my articles in side-references (my recent Australian round-up, for example) but other things have been going on there whilst I have been engaged in my recent tour of the world’s airport lounges.

Iron Mountain completes the assimilation of the Stratify brand

What do you do as an acquiring company when you buy a strong brand?  At one extreme, you swallow it whole and relabel everything on Day One, risking the loss of goodwill and brand-awareness which is part of what you paid for, but boosting your own presence in the market. At the other, you carry on as if nothing has changed except the ownership, preserving the name with which your market is familiar. Car manufacturers, banks and law firms provide examples from other areas of business where judgements have been made one way or the other. Quite often, iconic names are preserved in a division or a product line. Sometimes it is not evident that there is a strategy.

It was always clear what Iron Mountain’s strategy was with its acquisition of ediscovery company Stratify and its subsequent addition of email archive specialist Mimosa Systems. Iron Mountain already dominated the paper archive market, and the two acquisitions fitted neatly into a presumed plan to bring corporations’ entire archiving and document-handling under one roof and one strong brand. More than two years on from the Stratify acquisition, we are seeing that logic working through into the branding. The Stratify and Mimosa web sites still occupy their former domains, but the sites are clearly branded as Iron Mountain sites. My messages from people at Stratify now bear Iron Mountain email addresses; the Stratify tagline “Know what you have” is disappearing, and we wait to see what use is made in the future of the familiar name on the company’s products.

SharePoint 2010 is the next dumping ground for lawyers to understand

Larry Briggi of FTI Technology describes Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 as “the next dumping ground”. SharePoint is already here and now and having stuff dumped in it daily. FTI’s SharePoint Harvester is one of the new products aimed at meeting the problems which SharePoint raises. Technical comparisons fall outside my remit, but Larry’s blunt description of the problem caught my eye, so I asked him to explain what the problems are in terms which a lawyer would understand.

Parallel  announcements from different vendors induce a kind of writerly paralysis in me. The press releases roll in, many accompanied by invitations to speak to someone authoritative about them. The fact that several companies have addressed the same problem indicates that the subject is an important one, but the vocabulary for describing it is finite, and five articles in succession covering the individual ways in which the problem has been tackled is not an audience-winner. I am not much interested in just passing on press releases, nor am I technically qualified to compare the merits of each (which would, in any event, require exhaustive hands-on testing in a live environment), so rival claims about relative capabilities leave me cold. Any list is bound to omit someone with a claim to a mention, so there is a temptation to avoid the subject altogether for fear of offending someone. Last but not least, May and June are always crazy times when product releases and industry announcements flood out over a period when I am either at a conference, packing to go to a conference, or sitting in an airport lounge in a cold, grey dawn when my body thinks it is tea time.

Really, though, I am interested in market trends rather than products – the problems which are being faced by companies and lawyers and what sort of solutions the providers are coming up with to help them deal with them, with a particular focus on the UK. My role is not so much reportage (that is Charles Christian’s job) or analysis (I leave that to the The 451 Group), but helping lawyers to understand what implications arise when they have to collect their clients’ documents and data for disclosure. Given that most UK lawyers are still struggling with the idea that Word and Excel files are “documents” at all, and since I write for the long-term not for tomorrow’s deadline, I am let off the production of “news” and do not feel too embarrassed if time elapses between an announcement and my coverage of it.  My piece of a few days ago about a $25 million ediscovery sale is a rare example of a story which (thanks to Twitter) I had  before almost everyone else and which warranted some instant journalism.

Applied Discovery + EMC + Kazeon offer combined services for collection, ECA and Review

It used to be quite easy to explain to lawyers what was the role of each player in the discovery process. It was easiest, of course, in the days when the only application was a photocopier. Many lawyers, I think, got stuck at the next stage when litigation support meant scanning paper and setting teams of people to enter information about each document by hand. The only technical expression around then was “coding” which acquired a mystique disproportionate to what was actually involved.

Then came electronic documents. You will still hear the uninformed saying that handling electronic documents is just like dealing with paper. Fortunately, electronic documents bring much of their own coding with them – I say “fortunately” because their volumes increased at a rate which made manual coding of basic identification information an impossibility. Different specialisations grew up – companies became known for their skill at collecting data, for their capacity to store it, or for their ever more sophisticated applications for analysis and review. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) became the standard definition of the stages through which documents passed, giving rise to the idea that the process flow moved from information management on the left to presentation in court on the right, with other stages between. The goal of most providers was to embrace the stages which lay to left or right (or both) of their starting point.

It confuses the punter – the putative buyer – no end. Those who have lived with the market as it has developed can have no idea what it looks like to someone who comes at it from scratch. The apparent simplicity of the EDRM goes for nothing once they find that market players who appear to specialise in one area have plausible aspirations to others, and that grey areas develop where it is far from clear whether the ancillary expertise – the review capabilities, say, of a data collection specialist – are fully developed products or merely gestures.

Australian ediscovery round-up

My conclusion after my recent visit to Sydney was that every jurisdiction which engages in ediscovery thinks that it is behind the others. This is certainly not true of Australia, and  Master Whitaker and I were not merely being polite when we said that we had come to find out what is happening there for our own benefit, as well as bringing news of developments in the UK.

There is enough going on down there at the moment to warrant a quick summary. My own accounts of our visit to Sydney are here and here,  and I wrote before I went of the Attorney General’s Terms of Reference for a Discovery review.

Since then, Geoffrey Lambert of e.law has tipped me off about a further development, the Civil Dispute Resolution Bill 2010 (Bill) which, if enacted, will require a “Genuine Steps” process by which parties must show formally that they have tried to settle a dispute, with costs implications if they do not do so. I am slightly chary of developments like this – the experience in England & Wales of court-driven settlement is that the mechanics of managing the dispute take second place to attempts to impose a rapprochement which is itself expensive and not necessarily what the parties want.  There is a distinction (for which we must thank Professor Dame Hazel Genn QC) between “a just settlement” and “just a settlement”, and there is a difference too between mediation to resolve a dispute and co-operation to conduct it efficiently.  If judges spent less time on the former and more time imposing the latter, we might see the costs of litigation come down whilst allowing the parties to have their day in court. It will be interesting to see if Australia can take the benefits of alternative dispute resolution without losing the drive towards more efficient procedures for managing contention.