Information retention at e-Disclosure conference in Brussels

I demonstrated my own commitment to information retention by mislaying my notes of the sessions at IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe Conference in Brussels last week. As with all the best document retention policies, this means that I do not have to wade through masses of information and can focus instead only on that which is important – “important” in this context meaning what I can remember. It is reasonable to assume, perhaps, that the bits I remember are those which mattered most.

Patrick Burke and Judge Peck

We kicked off with a judicial panel moderated by Patrick Burke, Senior Director and Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software. Patrick is one of the relatively few in the US who “gets” the idea that, however sophisticated the US legal system may be in many respects, those who do business in a multinational context must take notice of jurisdictional differences. Rather too many assume that things are much the same over here if you shout and wave your arms about.

Learning in good company at IQPC e-Disclosure Conference in Brussels

I got back late on Thursday from IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe conference in Brussels. I was on three panels on the first day, attended several others, met or re-met countless people, and yet seemed in retrospect to have spent most of the time eating and drinking. You will forgive me if this post deals with impressions rather than detail.

It is hard to convey how enjoyable these conferences can be. The concentration of raw information and informed comment into two days is not incompatible with having a good time. No one goes just for the pleasurable side, but you do not need to be an information management junkie to enjoy it, whether in the session rooms, in the networking breaks between formal sessions, and in the restaurants and bars afterwards.

Chris Dale at IQPC Brussels

I will write about some of the sessions separately, and this post is just an overview to give a broad impression for those who have not yet attended one of these conferences. IQPC do them better than most, and months of serious planning goes into them. Of course, if your company has no electronic documents or if your litigation department clients foresee no need to sue, and no risk of being sued or being visited by a regulator, then an e-disclosure conference is not for you. For anyone else, it is a cost-effective way of catching up with what is going on, in pleasant surroundings and congenial company. If part of the appeal is hearing from those who do know about the subject – the legal, practical and technological aspects – another, and under-rated, aspect is the opportunity to mix with those whose knowledge, or lack of it, is no higher than your own.

Clearing the decks before going to Brussels

I do not pretend that this job is hard work in the way that trying to reach a sales target or managing a large project is hard work. It is far too enjoyable for that. It would, however, be good if all these interesting things could be spread out more evenly across the year.

Did I really agree to deliver 10,000 words for a book chapter on digital evidence by 1 October? Did that have to coincide with finishing off two white papers? Why do all the conferences end up bunched together (three conferences in three continents in three weeks starting this week in Brussels)? Are the Twitter eDiscovery lists always so full of interesting stories to follow up, or have I joined in at a particularly interesting point?  I could write ten stories a day entirely from the leads on there alone – but for the book, white papers and the conferences, that is.

The UK is well-placed between the EU and the rest of the eDiscovery world

The first big eDiscovery conference of the autumn is IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe conference in Brussels on 30 September and 1 October. I am going there mainly to take part in a panel organised by Guidance Software involving, amongst others, US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck of the Southern District of New York, and Senior Master Whitaker of the Queen’s Bench Division, Royal Courts of Justice in London. We are to be joined by three European judges, Judge Abeline Dorothea Reiling, Vice-President of the Amsterdam District Court, Judge Frank Richter of the Supreme Court of Hesse, and Judge Carla Garlatti of the Court of Appeal of Venice.

Although the UK is, perforce, part of mainland Europe for many purposes, one of the (many) differences lies in our respective systems of domestic law. The UK has a common law system very much closer to the US, Australia and Canada than to France, 22 miles away from Dover. The discovery of documents is a common law concept, and one which most of Europe has largely managed to avoid until recently.

Web demos allow interest without commitment

Technology companies make little use of technology to deliver their messages. Web demos may lack the personal touch of a face-to-face show, but you can reach many more people. They offer unparalleled opportunities to show off your products without the mutual commitment which a physical demo offers. The committed people will find you anyway – it is the others you need to reach.

The two web resources I talk about (from Anacomp/CaseLogistix here and Guidance Software in a separate article) are two I fell over (and the fact that I did so is perhaps interesting in its own right, since being found by people who are not looking is an obvious plus). I am sure they are not the only ones – let me know if you own, or have found, a web demonstration which is interesting as an informational medium.

I wrote recently about software demonstrations which I organised for Lord Justice Jackson (Jackson Litigation Costs Review consultation ends). Epiq Systems, Autonomy,  and FTI Technology each sent along their best demonstrators and compressed their shows into 30 minutes each. The result was one of the most illuminating sessions I have ever seen.

You probably need to be a Lord Justice of Appeal with a report to write to command such a luxury. It is difficult for lawyers to organise multiple demonstrations and for suppliers to send their best men to every firm or company which expresses mild interest in their product. Not the least of the problems is that lawyers are fairly wary of expressing even mild interest. Merely putting their head above the parapet will, they fear, lead to a constant barrage of calls from an eager salesman keen to convert that mild interest into a sale, preferably a big one and during the current quarter. That dreadful question “so how soon will you be making a decision?” is the biggest deal-killer there is, and fear of it puts off those who simply know want what is out there or even just to understand the concepts. The supplier, for its part, has finite resources and an obvious wish to focus on the key targets. The salesmen himself (and it usually is a him) has an obvious personal interest in spending his time with those most likely to reach a quick decision.

Equivio>Relevance Case Studies – men against machines

It is always helpful, when introducing something new, to be able to measure it against a familiar yardstick. When engines were first invented, their power was expressed as a multiple of the power of horses, and horses remain the comparator even now – highly sophisticated motorcars are still advertised by reference to the number of carthorses it would take to generate the same power output. We help each other to picture dimensions – height, length or area – by reference (in England at any rate) to Nelson’s Column, a London bus or a football pitch. I have heard document volumes expressed as “ESBs”, that is, the number of Empire State Buildings they would make if stacked (1 ESB = 7.57575758 Nelson’s Columns in case you wondered). We still refer to a “Gold standard”, although gold ceased to be the common medium of international exchange in 1971.

It is generally accepted by lawyers that the gold standard for accuracy of document review is reading by humans. For many lawyers, this is the standard to which they aspire and which they feel their duty requires of them. This is not the same as turning their backs on electronic review – they may be happy to conduct their review on the screen rather than on paper but are unwilling to delegate to a machine the task of deciding which documents must be reviewed and what decisions are made about them. It only when they get a case which cannot possibly be handled on this basis, that is, cannot be culled and filtered by humans, that they turn to technology.

Outsource edisclosure and share the load

The outsourcing of legal functions is suddenly topical as a result of Rio Tinto’s decision to set up an outsourced legal resource in India and Pinsent Masons’ plan to have first pass litigation review done in South Africa – see Do two outsourcing stories in one week presage a trend?

Those who think that this is taking outsourcing too far, as it were, should bear in mind that the principles, the potential savings and the ability to add e-disclosure skills and resources to their litigation armoury are available much closer to home. Furthermore, they need make no upfront investment beyond a little training, and can get started tomorrow.

The first generations of litigation support applications generally required that a law firm purchased the software for in-house use and that they employed staff to administer it. The world has moved on since then, and those tools and resources and are more usually brought on board by having the documents data hosted by a third party, usually the software provider. This has many advantages, not least the fact that someone else incurs the capital outlay and takes responsibility keeping the data available 24/7. The law firm simply gets a bill for the rental of the server space, the provision of the software and any consultancy or data services which are required. The bill can be passed on to the client as a disbursement.

Ark Group e-Disclosure Conference 2009

You can generate a lot of notes in six conference days in three countries in nine days and have little time to transcribe them. I am quite good at actually recording what people say, less so at the small but telling details like headings and page-numbering. I can generally rely on my memory to fill the gaps in my notes (and the bits I cannot read) but that is a tall order when information has rolled at me continuously for days like infantry at the Somme. Ark Group’s e-disclosure conference of the beginning of last week seems a distant memory on a cold, wet dawn in Sydney ten days later when I started writing it all up, still more in the dark aeroplane cabin surrounded by snoring travellers on the way home when I finished it off. There was lots of good stuff said at the conference, but I doubt you would read a verbatim account even if I could set it down. What follows is a summary.

The chairman on Day 1 was Lee Gluyas of DLA Piper UK LLP who, as in previous years, was well up to the challenge of keeping speakers to time. Lee’s opening comments identified a positive shift over the time he had been filling this role, a greater awareness of the issues and the need to grapple with them.

Labour’s fall may be matched by litigation’s recovery

I have just sent off my slides for my keynote speech at the Ark Group’s e-disclosure conference on Monday 9 June. Its title is The Empty Bear Garden, and it is about the decline of litigation since the CPR of 1999 and what we can do to stem that. My conclusion is that we are in a position to turn the tide and will do so if we pay more attention to the balance between rules and discretion, focus more on what really matters and what clients want, and be willing to challenge some of the existing orthodoxies.

Roughly the same period, since New Labour’s election in 1997, has seen the rise of what the Institute for Public Policy Research recently called “intolerant centralism”. The state has become ever more intrusive into our lives at several levels: vast databases record every aspect of our lives; cameras watch our every move; faceless bureaucrats have acquired powers way beyond their abilities; widely-drawn (and badly-drawn) laws give policemen and others in uniform the purported right to exercise a discretion unintended by Parliament; highways officers at the bottom of life’s intellectual pile clutter our roads with notices and urge us to “think”; ministers who appear on the surface to have been merely useless (Jacquie Smith) or deeply stupid (Caroline Flint) emerge as sinister, assuming powers over our lives thanks to their party’s majority which we would never grant them as individuals; MPs behave as if the norms of society do not apply to them, relying on the letter, but forgetting the spirit, of the law; rules multiply, each one having the effect of  nullifying our scope and ability to think for ourselves.

Everything and everyone at the IQPC Information Retention and E-Discovery Management Conference

I reached IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Discovery Management  Conference 2009 just as the first speaker stood up on Wednesday morning, feeling rather like Phileas Fogg as he burst into the Reform Club with seconds to spare. Although I had not been round the world in 80 days, it felt like it after the 4336 miles overnight from Orlando (see posts here and here as to why I was in Orlando). At least it was warm and sunny in London, unlike damp, dank Florida.

The IQPC e-discovery conference is one of the best in the London calendar, as much for the people one meets there as for the content. At my first, two years ago, I was introduced to three people on one day who have directly contributed to what I do now. Victor Limongelli, now CEO of Guidance Software, gave the first talk I had heard which drew attention to the similarities and differences between US and UK procedure and practice. Master Whitaker spoke rather pessimistically about the difficulties of persuading judges and practitioners that the proper court management of electronic documents was vital to control litigation costs. Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons talked about the need for lawyers to understand technology and to get to know some providers of software and services who could help them.

Clyde & Co selects Epiq Systems and Trilantic as preferred e-disclosure providers

Although the business of the e-Disclosure Information Project involves telling law firms and corporations about electronic disclosure technology suppliers, I avoid discussions about pending competitive tenders in the e-disclosure market. Given the range of people with whom I am in contact, the chances of hearing twice about the same contract from rival bidders are too high and, metaphorically at least, I put my fingers in my ears if I fear I might learn more than I want to know.

No-one, however, could avoid knowing that Clyde & Co has been working to identify preferred suppliers of electronic disclosure services. It seems ages ago that I first heard about it, in a remote country pub (life is not all glossy conferences and airports, you know) and it became clear that Kevin Butterill, Clyde’s litigation support manager, was extremely keen to get it right. The tender became the Moby Dick of the e-disclosure seas, each provider his own Captain Ahab on a mission to hunt it down.

Guidance Software survey for IQPC

The Information Retention and e-Disclosure Conference run by IQPC is usually one of the best in the calendar, with a better-than-usual mix of corporate users and information professionals. It take place this year on 20 and 21 May at Le Meridien in Piccadilly. As usual, Day 1 is concerned with information management and Day 2 with litigation and regulatory matters.

I have several levels of interest in this conference. I am on its Advisory Board and have been involved in much of the planning. I am doing two judicial sessions on Day 2, of which I will say more shortly. Several of the sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project are taking part, including Guidance Software, FTI Technology, Epiq Systems, Autonomy and Legal Inc.

Welcome to Equivio as new Project sponsor

I am delighted to welcome Equivio as a new sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project. As I wrote in November (see New integration and new web site for Equivio) I met CEO Amir Milo at the Masters Conference in Washington. Equivio’s name was already a familiar one, but that meeting and a subsequent read-through of Equivio’s web site emphasised why Equivio is subliminally omnipresent in the data management world.

If, as I do, you spend your time explaining to lawyers, judges and corporates why technology must be used to reduce vast volumes of data and documents to manageable proportions, you learn three basic propositions – rely on illuminating snapshots not lengthy explanations, focus on the things which equate directly to the user’s own functions, and emphasise the benefits of using technology and not just the risks of not doing so. Equivio’s web site does just that, crisply and clearly.

Epiq opens in Brussels

Epiq Systems, Inc. have opened an office in Brussels to provide support for clients involved in pan-European and global litigation and regulatory investigations. Epiq is best known for its DocuMatrix review platform and for corporate insolvency, as well as for litigation work.

An Epiq team will be permanently based in Brussels which, as International Managing Director Greg Wildisen put it, is “in the heart of the European Union and alongside policy-making institutions”.

An Epiq Christmas Party

Christmas parties are a bit thin on the ground this year. To judge by the many reports in the business press of party cancellations, doing without them seems either to be a sign that the petty cash box is empty or an empty gesture designed to show that the company is in tune with the grey zeitgeist.

You get none of that nonsense from Epiq Systems. Leaving empty gestures to the Government and bucking the zeitgeist, Epiq held a party at the City Golf Club.

E-Disclosure Information Project first birthday

November marks the first anniversary of what became the E-Disclosure Information Project. It did not have that name when I ran a half-day training session for judges in Birmingham last November but it was effectively launched with that event. This Commentary began a year or so earlier.

That first session was made possible by generous support from forensic collections expert FoxData whose Ian Manning has continued to back what I do, by turning out to speak and with useful information and introductions as well as financially. Tyrone Edward, now at Ernst & Young Forensic Technology & Discovery Services, made the suggestion for a business model which has allowed me to spend substantially all my time on spreading information about electronic disclosure. The Project is sponsored by the companies whose logos appear here, but on the basis that it is independent and product-agnostic.

The main outputs from the e-Disclosure Information Project are what I write here and on my website, and conferences. There are 228 posts on this site. None of them are simple regurgitations of press releases – PRs are invaluable sources of hard information, but I am more interested in the context and the implications of a software or services initiative than in the bare words of a press release.

New integration and new web site for Equivio

Equivio has reached the enviable position of being synonymous with de-duplication and data redundancy. It is not that no-one else does it, but Equivio specialises in it and has moved outwards from that specialist niche into the business functions which need it, whilst extending its reach into near-duplicates and e-mail thread technology.

I met CEO Amir Milo at the Masters Conference in Washington, and enjoyed my discussion with him. He implied that there was news in the pipeline, and a press release has duly turned up today. The item of most interest to me is that Epiq Systems have integrated Equivio e-mail threading into DocuMatrix. The Epiq web site has more details including the explanation that this enhancement (which is not the only one in Epiq’s latest upgrade) shows emails in the context of a conversation and highlights the “inclusive”, the last e-mail in a series which contains the complete text of previous messages in the thread.

Speaking and listening in Australia

Sydney feels familiar from the moment you step off the plane. It is not just its culture, language and architecture which makes you feel at home – its law, its information management issues, the remedies available to judges and the suppliers are the same or similar

Several decades ago, I lived and taught in Kenya on what was then not called a “gap year”. The gap was not optional in those days for those intending to go to Oxford or Cambridge.  I had until September to occupy, and arranged to spend the interval at a remote up-country school near Nyeri.

There was a boy amongst us who could see English parallels everywhere – you would be standing on a mud road looking up a valley of tea plantations at the mist hanging over the snowy peak of Mount Kenya and he would say “Just like the Lake District”. I have half a recollection that he compared a part of Nairobi to his native Croydon. This obsession with the similarities became slightly annoying for one whose pleasure derived from the geographical and cultural differences. In fact, although Kenya had become independent only ten years previously, pretty well every outward trace of colonial rule had been extirpated. The first signs of the new colonialism of the multinational existed in the form of a new Hilton Hotel.

I thought of this as I came in to Sydney over Botany Bay, whose sewage farm, oil refinery and container terminal jarred somewhat against my mental picture of Captain Cook picking daffodils beside gleaming sands. The first sign you see, over the starboard wing before your wheels touch the ground, are the yellow arches of McDonalds. One’s expectations of finding anything very different from Oxford or Washington diminish accordingly.

Birmingham barristers see e-disclosure applications

A seminar in Birmingham allowed an audience of lawyers to see some of the applications used to handle electronic disclosure topped and tailed by some explanation of the litigation context. It was not just a trade show but a visual way to convey that the solutions are gaining on the problem

The e-Disclosure Information Project originated in Birmingham when Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons introduced me last summer to HHJ Simon Brown QC, a designated Mercantile Judge at the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre. We brought it back there at the beginning of October when Edward Pepperall, a commercial barrister at St Philips Chambers, arranged for the Midland Chancery & Commercial Bar Association to invite us to give a reprise of a talk he had heard us give to solicitors a few months ago.

Ed Pepperall’s reasoning was that barristers are increasingly getting involved in the procedural aspects of Case Management Conferences. Birmingham may be ahead of other places because the judges there are known to practice the “active management” which the overriding objective requires and in which the parties are expected to take their part. The Commercial Court Guide, on which the Mercantile Court Guides are based, emphasises that the CMC is not just the old summons for directions. Judge Brown says of the CMC that is a “business meeting”.

If barristers are engaged at the CMC then they need to be aware – preferably well before they go in, and not just in the corridor outside – what the court will expect them to cover. Hands up all those who know about the obligation to discuss electronic sources of documents in Paragraph 2A.2 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. I thought not. What about Digicel (St Lucia) v Cable & Wireless? We did not mention that, because it had not been heard then. It has now, and we can expect many more orders requiring parties to discuss their sources and to take difficulties or disagreements to the judge.

Understanding transparent search for UK litigation

The US courts are laying increasing stress on the technology and the methodology used to find documents relevant to a case. Even US lawyers are pulling the blanket over their heads at the implications of this, and UK lawyers will do the same if we just leave them to read the US judgments. We have a very different set of aims over here, but the technology and the principles developing to meet the FRCP challenge are exactly what we need, just turned to different purposes. The key term is “transparency”.

I have shied away from writing about the judgments of US courts which are the all-consuming subject of the year in American litigation circles. US v O’Keefe, Equity Analytics v Lundin and Victor Stanley v Creative Pipe all deal with the importance of accurate and reliable searches – embracing both the technology and the skill with which it is used – and between them, in their slightly different ways, appear to raise the level of equipment, qualification and skill needed to engage in the business of giving discovery / disclosure of documents. Serious stuff, in a country where so much of the focus appears, to UK eyes at least, to be on the technology and the methodology at the expense of the search for justice – with the emphasis on the word “expense”.

No UK law firms at ILTA 2008

After this February’s LegalTech in New York, I wrote a piece called Why no UK lawyers at LegalTech? in which I suggested that UK law firms – partners and/or their senior IT staff – would benefit enormously from a few days in a place where almost every e-disclosure supplier and expert, including a large contingent of experienced UK litigation support managers, gather every year. There they could see demos of every application worth seeing, talk to pretty well everyone with knowledge and experience – and have a good time as well.

Project sponsors ranked by Socha-Gelbmann

It is probably a grave dereliction of duty to disappear on holiday just as George Socha and Tom Gelbmann publish their annual Electronic Discovery Survey provider rankings, but that is no reflection on the performance of those of my sponsors whose names appear in it.

Anacomp, Autonomy Zantaz, Epiq Systems, Guidance Software, LexisNexis and Trilantic all appear, some of them more than once, in a survey regarded as the most objective and authoritative report on an industry whose 2007 revenues, at $2.794 billion, were up 46% from 2006.

Catching up will have to wait

I had hoped by now to have written up the talks which HHJ Simon Brown QC and I gave to two groups of judges in the last two weeks, but time is against me and a short summary will have to do for now.

The audiences were first the Designated Civil Judges and then the Specialist Judges. The e-Disclosure Information Project, of which this site is the most obvious tangible output, began as an exercise in helping judges at the junction of two technical subjects – the CPR and technology. The first of these has been unchanged since 2005, but remains shrouded in a mystery which it does not deserve. The second changes all the time. My role is to try and unshroud the rules and to help introduce the technology to those who need it or who need to know about it if proportionate orders are to be made about disclosure.

Epiq Systems appoints IT Director for Europe

Epiq Systems, owners of the successful document review platform DocuMatrix and sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project, has appointed John Lang as IT Director of its UK office with a Europe-wide brief. His responsibilities will include the development of Epiq Systems’ IT infrastructure in the UK and the evaluation of new technologies to help maintain a high quality of customer service.

The role extends beyond the UK as Epiq takes on bigger and more complex projects which cross multiple countries. Epiq Systems Limited (the UK division of Epiq Systems Inc.) works with 4 out of 5 of the magic circle law firms – and at a global level with 48 of the top Global 50 law firms.

If I had known the cost was hundreds not thousands….

The reactions at an e-disclosure conference point up the value of getting an idea of the likely costs before deciding that electronic disclosure is not for you. You cannot assess proportionality without doing so, and may be surprised by the answer.

On my first slide at an all-day seminar for CLT Conferences this week, I had a quotation from the Commercial Court Recommendations.

“Automatic disclosure will not take place until after the CMC, which decides on the scope of disclosure” [Para 68a]

One of the delegates immediately asked “Is this just about the Commercial Court then?”, putting his finger straight onto the central difficulty in trying to raise understanding about electronic disclosure, even with an audience which self-selected as wanting to know about the subject.

No, it is most certainly not just about the Commercial Court, nor only about big litigation between big, technically-skilled firms. Indeed, the implied assumption that “big” and “technically-skilled” go together highlights another point here – there are many big firms who have no idea about electronic disclosure, and plenty of smaller firms who do.

Welcome to new Project sponsors

You will have noticed two new logos on this blog and my web site. Epiq Systems and Anacomp have agreed to support the e-Disclosure Information Project, and although I put their logos up at once, I have not had time to welcome them properly.

Guidance on benefits of e-Disclosure Project

If it was slightly embarrassing to find myself the principal subject-matter of a speaker session at the IQPC Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Conference last week, it is even more so to have the task of writing about it afterwards. But in giving over his speaker slot to a description of my e-Disclosure Information Project, Patrick Burke of Guidance Software neatly encapsulated the reasons why it is needed and why it deserves support, and it is perhaps easier to report what he said than to say it for myself.

It is also an opportunity to show that what is discussed at heavy-weight international conferences of e-Disclosure has a close bearing on what happens in UK courts and on what affects everyday litigation here.

Keywords not always the key to disclosure

How useful are keywords in refining document populations? They can be a blunt instrument, but it may be proportionate to use blunt instruments as long as everyone involved is aware of the method used. What does it all mean to the man on the Birmingham omnibus?

It may be reasonable to search some or all of the parties’ electronic storage systems. In some circumstances, it may be reasonable to search for electronic documents by means of keyword searches (agreed as far as possible between the parties) even where a full review of each and every document would be unreasonable. There may be other forms of electronic search that may be appropriate in particular circumstances.

This passage comes from Paragraph 2A.5 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR where it is part of the expanded definition of the scope of a reasonable search. It is all a bit clunky, really, in that this part of the PD was a belated add-on to Rule 31.7 CPR (the duty of search) and actually repeats part of that section. At the least, it is tiresome to have two overlapping sources for the same obligation. At worst, this is one of the reasons for the tacit agreement to ignore the whole subject which has been the norm hitherto.

Attracting readers for electronic disclosure

I do not have any sophisticated means of tracking the visitors to this blog, but WordPress shows me which pages have been read how many times and allows me to distinguish between real views and those made by crawlers and the like. The tracker which gives it its statistics is Google Analytics which is known to err (and sometimes seriously so) on the side of understating visitors. I am not here so much interested in absolute numbers as in relative ones – what posts encourage people in?

According to the under-counting Google Analytics, visitors have been running at an average of about 1350 per month or 45 per day. This is no doubt trivial compared with the Orange Rag, but Charles Christian writes on a wide range of subjects whereas I cover a very narrow niche (I also have a web site whose numbers I am not including here). I can assume that everyone who comes here intends to come here – you don’t wander into a site about e-Disclosure by accident. I can also assume that no-one reads the same article twice, and I can see that a reasonable number of hits derive from searches rather than from repeat visits by regular visitors.

Epiq Systems buys Pinpoint Global

Epiq Systems, who have recently released DocuMatrix 12, the international version of their document review software, have announced the further expansion of their UK business with the acquisition of Pinpoint Global Ltd. Pinpoint are best known for their proprietary processing / e-disclosure solutions. It is only a few weeks since Epiq acquired ECM, bringing its scanning, coding and general document-handling skills into the Epiq fold.

Summation back in the UK

Summation is one of the older litigation support software companies – it was founded in 1988. It has made a few attempts to break into the UK market but these fizzled out mainly (to my eye) for lack of a local team and the follow-up which that brings. Now it is back here, and this time with proper backing.

I have not seen it properly for a long time – my attempt to do so at LegalTech in New York last year was defeated by one of those glassy-eyed salesmen who look over your shoulder whilst they talk in the hope of seeing a more important customer, and I did not bother to go back this year. Memo to all litigation software salesmen: the very big UK firms already have preferred systems, and the market which will grow lies in the tiers below them. If someone says he speaks for those firms, don’t ignore him, just in case he runs a blog and an information project which reaches out to that market.

Anacomp captures new sources of information

Anacomp announces new alliances which bring hosted capture to its already broad range of services. The trend towards a one-stop shop will appeal to many.

Anacomp, best known until last year for its docHarbor document repository, has taken a further step towards offering a full service solution for data handling. It first came to attention on my patch – litigation and regulatory disclosure – last year with the acquisition of the highly-regarded document review application CaseLogistix. This seemed a sound move, giving an attractive front-end to encourage data into Anacomp’s enormous storage capacity.

Earlier this year, it turned its attention to the other end of the process – getting data in – by an alliance with IPRO which integrated IPRO’s eCapture application into CaseLogistix. The aim was to provide a seamless data acquisition path from first import into IPRO through to display in CaseLogistix.

EPIQ Systems and ECM join forces

A long working relationships between Epiq Systems and Effective Case Management (ECM) reached a natural culmination on 1 February when the two businesses were combined. Tony Ratcliffe, the founding owner of ECM becomes a member of Epiq’s London office team.