It is a great pleasure to welcome kCura as the latest sponsor of the eDisclosure Information Project. The connection goes back a bit, and the arrival of their logo on my sites is part of a continuing if intermittent strand of connection-points.
Scene 1
It is years ago – 2004, I guess, in my prior life before the eDisclosure Information Project. Mark Dingle, then at Simmons & Simmons, points me to a small software company which, he predicts, will do very well with its document review platform Relativity. Mark’s recommendations are usually worth following up and I drop kCura a line, getting a reply at once. I knew nothing of US eDiscovery in those days, and no one in the US had heard of me, so the quick response gives a good impression. Other things intervene and I am not in a position to pursue the connection.
Scene 2
Four years have passed and it is the summer of 2008. kCura and Relativity are becoming well known on the strength of some high-profile sales and an unmatched reputation for the quality of the support given to customers. Its CEO, Andrew Sieja, visits me in Oxford. Andrew proves to be about 20 years younger than most CEOs and bursting with enthusiasm for the market and for his software’s place in it. Having never met before, we describe our respective ambitions to each other as we walk up the river. His aim is to make kCura a world-class player within two years; mine is to be seen as authoritative in every jurisdiction requiring discovery over the same period. Our respective ambitions probably seem rather fanciful to each other as we wander along English country paths with the dog. I use our conversation as the springboard for an article Meeting People is Right, my fullest articulation to date of the fairly simple proposition that lawyers need to know who the providers are and what they offer. I wanted, I said, “to make suppliers allies in the collective fight to help lawyers see what is possible”. Apart from references to named people who have moved jobs since then, I would write the same article today. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
