Plenty happening in eDiscovery for the beginning of 2012

If Friday’s flurry of activity on my Google+ page and on Twitter suggests catch-up and deck-clearing then that is exactly what it was. The Google+ page was set up for short snippets which, whatever weight they actually deserved, were not going to get a lovingly-polished and fully hyperlinked blog post. They are a way of expanding on my tweets, re-tweets and favourites; the full rationale for this is set out in my post New eDisclosure Information Project page on Google Plus for short eDiscovery posts.

The deck-clearing was needed for two reasons in addition to the obvious wish not to miss good content. The planning calls have started for forthcoming webinars and conferences, and I wanted the weekend clear for follow-ups to them, for other things which need prolonged concentration and for planning for that annual quart-into-a-pint-pot, the LegalTech calendar – I know I will not make it to most of the sessions I mark down, but it seems respectful to try. As today’s posts show, Friday morning’s catch-up was rather defeated by Friday afternoon’s new announcements.

It is perhaps worth setting out what January’s events are, pulling together posts which I have already written about them.

ESIBytes podcast on the New York Model Rules

I am taking part in a podcast recording on Monday 9 January organised by Karl Schieneman of ESIBytes. The subject is the Pilot Project regarding Case Management Techniques for Complex Civil Cases in the Southern District of New York. The more important participants are Ariana Tadler from Milberg and Maura Grossman from Wachtell Lipton who were involved in the Pilot Project.  My role is to talk about the UK’s eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B and the Electronic Documents Questionnaire annexed to it. Whilst the UK was the first to formalise the structured exchange of information in advance of a case management conference, those of us who drafted it were influenced by the lessons, positive and negative, coming out of the FRCP meet and confer process. This iterative exchange of ideas is valuable beyond the two jurisdictions taking part in this podcast.

FTI’s take on 2012 – fewer eDiscovery suppliers per company and more people with “Discovery” in their job title

I talked on Friday to FTI Technology’s Mike Kinnaman, to catch up with FTI’s view of the eDiscovery market in the coming year. FTI takes what you might call an evidence-based approach to prediction each year, asking Ari Kaplan to collect, aggregate and comment on the views and experiences of in-house counsel at the higher end of the eDiscovery market. That approach, Mike Kinnaman said, tells FTI where the market is going and “takes a bit of the fuzz off the crystal ball”.

Most of what emerged in 2011 is consistent with earlier trends and unsurprising: early case assessment as a process continues to be important as a way to get better control of cases and their costs; there is a sharp focus on the cost of the legal review; and the use of managed review services has remained consistent after a steady rise, appreciated not just for keeping costs down but for making them more predictable.

LexisNexis sells Applied Discovery to Siris Capital

I noticed at the end of last year that Applied Discovery’s avatar on Twitter had changed, the big red ball of its LexisNexis owner being replaced by a parallelogram with an @ symbol in it. The same symbol appeared at the top of Applied Discovery’s Weekly eDiscovery Snapshot  published on Friday. I filed that unread because I was in the middle of a run of conference calls, and so missed the significant announcement which modestly appeared below the commentary by Jon Resnick, who featured recently in these pages as eDiscovery’s equivalent of Stakhanov.

During my first call, I noticed that Twitter had become unusually active. When I looked at it in between calls I learnt that LexisNexis had sold Applied Discovery to Siris Capital Group. It takes a certain amount of style to tuck an announcement like that at the end of what appeared to be a routine summary of eDisclosure developments.

I dashed off a quick congratulatory e-mail to Jon Resnick and by the time my next call had ended, there was further news – Ramana Venkata, who founded Stratify in 1999 is to be the CEO of the newly independent Applied Discovery.

I have arranged to speak to Jon Resnick next week, something which was on my list anyway – last summer’s integration of Equivio Relevance into Applied Discovery’s Leverage suite has been running long enough for a status update. More on this in due course.

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Equivio near duplicate and e-mail threads integrated into Relativity

Equivio and kCura have got in ahead of the LegalTech announcements flurry by launching an Equivio tab In Relativity. “Integration” means just that – Relativity users access Equivio’s analytic functionality without either they or the data leaving Relativity.

The words “efficient” and “seamless” appear in the press release from Equivio and in Relativity’s product information page. Quite apart from the benefits to the user experience, the integration should mean that future developments by both companies should be easily absorbed.

This is one of kCura’s growing number of Ecosystem Applications which include Digital Reef, EnCase eDiscovery by Guidance Software, Nuix , Trident Pro from Wave Software and audio and video forensic search by Nexidia. The Ecosystem was only launched last July, and Relativity’s pulling power continues unabated, with further integrations promised shortly.

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