Huron opens document review facility in India

Huron Consulting Group has extended its global eDiscovery offerings by opening a document review centre and data operations team in India. As a result, Huron now has 1,500 review seats at nine locations in the US, the UK and India.

The press release is here. One obvious point of interest to Huron’s global clients is that their needs can be serviced around the clock whether these arise after hours in the Western Hemisphere or  derive from the growing amount of business coming out of the Eastern Hemisphere.

The other point of interest made in the press release is that this initiative reverses the usual sequence of events by bringing to India processes which have been developed in Europe and the US. Most such initiatives have begun in India.

If one wanted to pick out a single phrase from the press release which matters to clients it is this one: “predictable, upfront costs with measurable quality”. Few law firms, however good they are at other aspects of eDiscovery / eDisclosure, are able to provide these elements and, of course, the wider the availability of such services (and Huron is not the only big player who provides them) the less the need to depend on lawyers at all for the heavy lifting components of electronic discovery.

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Huron and Epiq expand managed review and legal staffing in Washington

Just as I pressed the Publish button on my article of last night (Discussing UK eDisclosure developments with Judge Brown and Huron Legal), which referred to Huron’s acquisition of Ascertus, a Huron press release came in about its next acquisition, of AdamsGrayson.

This merits a mention here partly because of its scale – AdamsGrayson has a review facility in the Washington DC metropolitan area with more than 200 seats – and partly because of the reference in the press release to AdamsGrayson’s specialisation in strategic consulting on information risk management, litigation readiness, and eDiscovery management.

Those of you who read my posts in the order in which I publish them will see the connection here with my article of this morning called Far from the Black Box: explaining Equivio Relevance to lawyers. That included the following suggestions to law firms:

….automated technology … is going to become the norm, side-by-side with outsourced providers of document review (and no one is yet saying that document review is dead, however sophisticated the technology) who can do the job more efficiently, more predictably and, frankly, better, than most law firms can.

And

If you doubt any of this, do three things – read Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers?, go and visit a provider of outsourced document review services and compare their offering to yours (or to that of your lawyers if you are a client), and arrange a demonstration of a range of modern technology solutions.

Huron Consulting goes with Nuix

I rarely pass on press releases without some accompanying context, focusing on a few big articles rather than many snippets, but this one headed Huron Consulting replaces Autonomy with Nuix caught my eye as it was published.

Nuix provides software for electronic discovery, investigations and for information governance. Huron Consulting Group provides a range of business consulting services including eDiscovery and related services under the banner Huron Legal. Huron recently acquired the well-known UK-based eDiscovery service provider Trilantic.

Nuix is a pure software company, making its applications available either in-house or through services providers like Huron and many others. To have someone in Huron’s league say of Nuix that “there really was no competition” is a good endorsement to have.

Both Nuix and Huron will be at ILTA 2011. Nuix is offering a “$1,000 giveaway” to those who follow it on Twitter and tweet the phrase found on their competition page. Judging by the number of hits I have found for “Nuix” whilst searching Twitter for a link to the Huron article, Nuix is gaining many followers with this idea.

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Filling the day and nearly getting filled with lead

One of the influential figures in US ediscovery gets very cross at references to the “ediscovery market”, as if the commercial connotations somehow sully the purity of the context of rules and judges and justice which the ediscovery / e-disclosure industry supports. I am pretty keen myself on the “pure” side of it, and more widely than my ediscovery remit, which is why civil liberties and the relationship between rulers and ruled turn up in these pages from time to time.

The “market” side of it, however, is both integral to the delivery of justice and interesting in its own right, both in the delivery of legal services and in the technology which is my own particular concern. What I do touches on several different aspects – business processes, technology, the law itself, and marketing. Periodically, I am asked: “What exactly do you do?”. One of my children, when asked this question recently, said “He writes a blog”, presumably leaving the questioner little the wiser. What I do is, of course, of interest to others only to the extent that it throws light on the market. If I describe my day in London on Thursday, as I am about to do, it is because it touched a lot of industry corners, and not because my own diary is likely to enthrall anyone for its own sake. It nearly included a rather closer interaction between rulers and ruled than I generally look for.

Huron Consulting, LDM Global, Hobs Legal Docs and Recommind all move home

In case you are setting off for a meeting in London with Huron Consulting Group, LDM Global or Hobs Legal Docs, you may care to note they have all moved premises in recent weeks. Recommind has also moved, though I think I am late in catching this piece of information.

Nigel Murray and his team have moved from Trilantic’s former offices to Huron Consulting Group offices in the verdant pastures of the West End. Nigel is keen to point out that they are only twelve minutes from Bank Station in their new offices at One Connaught Place, London W2 2ET. The telephone number is still +44 (0) 207 042 1000 and the new web site address is http://www.huronconsultinggroup.co.uk

After many years in Great Eastern Street, LDM Global has moved south and taken larger premises at 11 – 21 Paul Street, London EC2A 4JU. The new telephone number is +44 (0)203 463 8444. The web site address remains http://www.ldmglobal.com

Hobs Legal Docs has also outgrown its old home and can now be found at 58 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BP. The telephone number is +44 3217 0300 and the web site address is still http://www.hobslegaldocs.com/

I seem to have missed the announcement that Recommind was moving its offices – I knew it was happening to cope with Recommind’s significant expansion recently, but missed the moment. The new address is 6 Snow Hill, London EC1A 2AY. The telephone number is +44 0207 002 7735 and the web site is http://www.recommind.com

This sort of information is vital for those who, like me, use the iPad map feature. That allows you to enter the name of the person or company to be visited and see immediately where they are on a map and how to get there from your present location or elsewhere. Tell it that you are going, say, from LDM Global to Huron Consulting and, if both addresses are in the iPad’s address book, it will show you the route. All we need, really, is that when people in our address books move offices, the updates are pushed at us automatically. Think how much time that would save us in a year in an industry in which people move from company to company, or when, as here, whole businesses move together with several of your contacts. I can think of better occupations on a sunny Sunday than updating addresses and, in the case of those whose email addresses have changed, the Outlook rules which apply to them.

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Nigel Murray rides again for Help for Heroes

It is time again for that annual ritual known as “Shrink the Nigel”. It is a kind of cultural fusion, merging two French traditions – the making of Pate de Foie Gras and the Tour de France – with a variant on the traditional British stiff upper lip which in this case involves stiff lower limbs. Standing in for the goose used for foie gras, you take Nigel Murray, MD of Trilantic (now part of Huron Consulting) and fill him with fine food and drink from mid-June to mid-February – I myself have been privileged to observe this part of the tradition in restaurants around the world, from London to Hong Kong to several US cities. Phase 2, the stiff lower limb stage, takes place away from the public eye, when Nigel, by now suitably rotund, takes to his bicycle and starts burning off the weight with a punishing regime of exercise, building up the miles and the muscles as he prepares for Phase 3. This, the Tour de France stage, involves cycling for 350 miles – up to 80 miles a day – from the battlefields of Northern France en route for Paris along with 299 others.

The cause is a good one. Help for Heroes exists to provide support and rehabilitation for military personnel injured in war. There is information here about this year’s Big Battlefield Bike Ride, which begins on the Normandy beaches, and Nigel has his own web page here from which you can make a donation. Last year, he raised over £3,500 cycling from the Somme battlefields. His target this year is £6,000 of which, as I write, he has already achieved nearly £1700 including Gift Aid.

What the Trilantic-Huron combination means for clients

Well-known UK litigation support provider Trilantic was acquired by Huron Consulting Group last November. I went to see Trilantic’s Nigel Murray to find out how the clients will benefit from the combined fire-power of the two companies.

Although Trilantic seems to have been part of the UK electronic disclosure scene for ever, it was in fact set up only in 2005. The founder and managing director Nigel Murray, however, has been in the industry since it began – he and I started at about the same time. Electronic discovery has changed somewhat. Then it involved scanning paper and coding documents by hand; it generally required a capital purchasing decision and the employment of staff to run in-house systems; it had yet to be renamed “disclosure” in the hope that relabelling would somehow make it better. Of all the changes, the only one which most lawyers readily grasped was the change of name – lawyers are always good at terminology.

They can be forgiven for being confused about the provider market, which first diversified, then consolidated: some providers specialised in the collection of data; others had specialist applications for processing the data or for reviewing it, whilst others offered consultancy and project management. Companies broadened out from their original starting points by expansion or acquisition: collection companies now offer processing and review applications and host the data on a transactional basis; specialist software companies enhance their products with consultancy services; some companies offer “end to end” products and services whilst others remain best known for particular niches. Downward pressure on costs makes price a less useful discriminating factor than it used to be, whilst any one software application looks much like any other to the novice. It is hard enough to keep up for those of us who have watched this market evolve and develop. It is extremely difficult for those who approach it from scratch.

Trilantic has always been a front door to a range of software and services, with its own staff, infrastructure and services, but calling on a wide range of others’ specialist skills or applications appropriate to the clients’ needs. Its web site inevitably draws attention to its ability to handle major work for big clients, but that ability scales down to allow it to do smaller jobs, whether as a continuing provider of choice for repeat business or for one-off jobs. Nigel Murray may spend a lot of time at international airports, but much of Trilantic’s business remains domestic and the company has always felt accessible to those facing their first e-disclosure case.

Epiq Systems and Huron Consulting as Angels for US-UK e-disclosure play at LegalTech 2011

An “angel” in theatrical terms is someone who puts money into a play or film. Many productions would not happen without such support. I have already mentioned the judicial play which we are putting on at LegalTech and which consists of light-hearted scenes based largely on recent UK e-disclosure cases. Epiq Systems and Huron Consulting Group have kindly given the support which makes this possible.

The play – really a series of loosely-linked scenes – is an adapted version of something we did at IQPC in London last May and which, despite the levity, has the serious purpose of creating a better understanding on each side of the Atlantic of what happens in the other jurisdiction.

We have an all star cast. US Magistrate Judge Elizabeth LaPorte and US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck play a composite judge called Fluffy. Fluffy may sound a soft touch, but those who know the first Harry Potter story will know that Fluffy is extremely fierce and guards a mystery which no one else understands.

There is, in fact, a subliminal point about Anglo-US terminology here: that book was called the Philosopher’s Stone when published in England but was re-named the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US version, apparently because the US publisher thought that children would be put off by the word “Philosopher”. US distributors have a habit of under-estimating their public (is it really true that the film of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III had to be called The Madness of King George because of the fear that American audiences would think that they had missed the first two films in the franchise?). Much the same patronising logic underlay the 1999 UK rule change which abandoned the word “discovery” in favour of “disclosure”. The point is not that this jettisoned several hundred years of tradition, but that the word “discovery” embraced both the “uncovering” of your documents to opponents, and the prior, and very much bigger, exercise of finding out what you have. The proper term therefore became more, not less, appropriate as search became the dominant requirement. Those of us with feet on both sides of the Atlantic must refer continually to both terms.

The Trilantic Commonwealth Brunch on Sunday at LegalTech

The invitations to parties, receptions and meetings at LegalTech New York continue to roll in – my personal best so far is four assignations on one evening. The biggest issue, so far as I am concerned, is not fitting them all in, but getting them recorded accurately in a calendar which does not recognise the concept of time zones. My recent move to Apple’s products reveals an unexpected limitation – Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac lacks the useful function in Outlook for Windows which allows you to set up parallel time zones.

Four options emerged during a recent discussion on Twitter: a) look up the local time on www.timeanddate.com and use that, hoping that you transfer it accurately and that everything falls into place when you adjust your devices’ time zones; b) enter events twice and include the local time as part of the description to give you a clue if neither makes sense when you get there; c) buy a watch and leave all your devices (I have four) at UK time, entering appointments as if the time difference did not exist; d) buy a stout diary and a pencil (the suggestion made by Charles Christian, editor of the Orange Rag and American Legal Technology Insider, and a long-time Mac user). There is a fifth option, I suppose – I could revert to the PC, but I invested far too much of Christmas in the changeover to contemplate that. The final option involves a trip to California and an act of violence upon the insular geek who failed to deal with time zones in his pretty but defective software.

One event which I will not forget, not least because it happens at the same time every year, is Trilantic’s Commonwealth Brunch at 10.30am on Sunday. This used to be a sedate affair called the British Brunch. Last year, for the first time, it became the Commonwealth Brunch, reflecting the widening scope of Trilantic’s work and the increasing connections between the non-US common law jurisdictions. Last year’s Brunch was attended by people from Australia, India and Canada amongst other places, as well as by one or two US people with tenuous claims to Commonwealth ancestry. I have the impression that we will see many more Australian and Canadian people this year – both places are seeing interesting developments in ediscovery.

Trilantic is, of course, now part of Huron Consulting Group, and we can expect a yet wider catchment area as a result. Nigel Murray is always a genial host, and this is a good way to launch the week.

Laura Kelly is co-ordinating the event. Contact her if you think you are qualified to attend.

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Strong UK presence at LegalTech 2011

LegalTech 2011 is only a few days away and the programme is packed. Almost everyone whose name has appeared in these pages is taking part in something, and I will not attempt to list them all. Following on, however, from my recent piece about the Georgetown Advanced e-Discovery Institute (see International discovery, sanctions, ethics and US-UK comparisons at Georgetown) and the growing mutual interest in US e-Discovery and UK e-Disclosure, I thought it worth drawing your attention to the sessions involving UK participants. If I have missed any, please let me know.

Epiq Systems have two panels involving well-known UK participants. Greg Wildisen of Epiq moderates a panel called Navigating the Challenges of Cross-Border Regulatory Investigations with panelists including Professor Dominic Regan and David Cracknell of Slaughter and May’s London office. That is followed by a panel called Managing a Global Review while Minimising Risk moderated by Laura Kibbe of Epiq. The panelists include Senior Master Whitaker and Neil Mirchandani of Hogan Lovells in London. Non-UK participants known to readers of this blog include US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck (who has teamed up with Master Whitaker in various jurisdictions, including Brussels and Hong Kong), and David Kessler who has recently moved to become Co-Head of E-Discovery at Fulbright & Jaworski – an entertaining and informative fellow, David, as I discovered to my relief when he was on a LegalTech panel which I moderated for Epiq last year (I say “relief” because it can be an interesting business, moderating panels of people you have never met before). Anyone interested in global and cross-border matters should attend these sessions.

Andrew Szczech of Kroll OnTrack UK takes part in a panel called Trends in Social Media and Cloud Computing. Jan Durant, IT Director of Lewis Silkin is on a panel called Business Processes Utilising SharePoint. Alex Dunstan-Lee of KPMG in London is doing a session called The Clearwell E-Discovery Platform: did you know? UK solicitor Mark Ross, VP legal solutions at Integreon, is covering Legal Process Outsourcing: Ethical, Practical and Legislative Considerations.

Apart from the UK, the non-US world is represented by Michelle Mahoney, Director of Applied Legal Technology at Mallesons Stephen Jaques in Australia, talking about the Intersection of Project Management and Practice Support. She was anointed Practice Management Champion at ILTA last year, so knows what she is talking about.

A useful guide to sources on EU Data Privacy Laws

The Guidance Software Newsroom carries a new article by Denise Backhouse of the eData Practice of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, LLP headed Master European Data Privacy Laws. I refer you to it because it is expressly intended as a guide to useful sources of information on EU data privacy and data protection, a subject which exercises many US lawyers but not, apparently, to the extent that they feel the need to learn about it in advance of their next major EU data collection exercise. Denise’s article may help them to understand what the issues are.

One key to understanding the problem is to know that no one has all the answers, and Denise rightly draws attention to the need to take local advice in each jurisdiction in which the data may have to be collected. As she points out, a “jurisdiction” is not just the whole EU, nor merely any legal state within the EU, but can include smaller units like individual Länder in Germany. Knowing even that much is a good start for those who tend to approach EU data collections as if the writ of an American court runs everywhere.

Denise and I were on a Guidance Software panel at IQPC’s conference in Brussels last year, and were more recently on a London panel organised by Recommind. The subject comes up again on a panel I am on at Georgetown on 18th and 19th November, and Denise and I are covering the subject, together with Master Whitaker at IQPC’s Document Retention and EDiscovery conference in Munich starting on 29 November. I am moderating, and Denise is the main speaker, as befits her status as one of the few US lawyers who is authoritative on the subject. Master Whitaker will talk about the use (and misuse) of the Hague Convention, and I will talk about the cultural differences which lie at the root of the conflict between US demands for documents and EU unwillingness to part with them.

You need practical as well as legal help when stepping into the deep waters of EU data collection, and that means a technology supplier with experience in the area. Sticking to those who have come to my attention recently (so don’t all write in if I have missed you off my list), FTI have recently announced a new consultancy service FTI Investigate aimed at helping with EU collections, I have written a paper (not yet published) about Iron Mountain’s services on this subject, Epiq Systems has a fully-staffed office in Brussels, and Trilantic (now part of Huron Consulting Group) has a section of its website which links to the laws of every relevant jurisdiction.

Look, perhaps, at the list of those sponsoring the IQPC Munich event referred to above which, in addition to most of those already mentioned above, includes AccessData, Alvarez & Marsal, Clearwell, Commvault, Ernst & Young, KPMG and Symantec. They will be there because this is territory which they know, so ring one (or more) of them up before you pack your bags to set off on what may appear to be a routine data collection exercise. But perhaps read Denise’s article first, and follow some of its useful links.

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Changes in the UK eDisclosure market: Huron acquires Trilantic just after Grant Thornton acquires Legal Inc

The consolidation of the UK and international e-discovery market took a further step today when Huron Consulting Group announced the acquisition of Trilantic. This follows the recent announcement that Grant Thornton had added Legal Inc’s people and expertise to its range of investigative, forensic and litigation services.

For the moment, I have little to add to the press release, but I will be talking in due course to both Lisa Burton, co-founder of Legal Inc, and Nigel Murray of Trilantic, to find out more about what these acquisitions actually mean in terms of the range and depth of services offered to clients, particularly UK clients.

There is a temptation to assume that fees march in step with the size of the provider, that is, that it must necessarily cost more to involve a large organisation to help with e-Disclosure. This perception is derived from two things, neither actually relevant: firstly, this is almost invariably what happens when law firms get bigger, so lawyers expect a corresponding hike in fees when a smaller provider is acquired by a larger one; secondly, larger providers are able to handle larger jobs which necessarily involve fees proportionate to the work which is to be done. That does not mean, however, that an international software company or one of the big consulting firms such as Ernst & Young, KPMG, FTI or Grant Thornton is not willing and able to compete for smaller jobs.

You will only find out by making contact with a broad spread of providers and finding out what the cost implications are of jobs like yours. Quite apart from the point about untested assumptions, the engagement of a big ally allows mid-sized law firms to take on work which would otherwise be beyond them. You happily engage a big-name barrister (whose fees will indeed reflect his or her status) in order to play in the big game; why not find out what it would cost to team up with a top-flight technology supplier? You might be pleasantly surprised, but if you don’t ask, you will never know.

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