eDJ Group

eDiscovery Reference Materials Worth the Shelf Space

07 - 13 - 2015

Greg Buckles

You have heard my skepticism and concern about marketers in educational clothing. It is a nice change to call your attention to some solid reference material on eDiscovery developed for a formal, traditional law school program. Michael Arkfeld’s 3rd Edition now exceeds 1,700 pages (available in CD or through LexisNexis online). eDiscovery is a relatively young discipline and most courses, white papers or other resource materials are out of date before they are even published. Michael’s long term perspective tempers the usual overstatements made in the rush to ‘best practice’. His core reference book and four supplementary practice guides are a worthwhile investment for new practitioners and departments. Yes, Michael graciously sent me the latest release to review, but he took his chances on my somewhat acerbic feedback just like technology vendors who send me software to break. I could not find any discussion of the 2015 FRCP Amendments that will take effect at the end of the year, but we never really know how those will play out until argued before the bench anyway. As much as I shy away from spending educational budget on what are effectively ‘mail order certificates’, I will continue to recommend Arkfeld’s material to my corporate and law firm clients to help new personnel up to speed.

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Information Governance vs. eDiscovery

07 - 13 - 2015

Gary Wiener

Information governance (IG) is one of those things that every company talks about, most companies know they should do, but very few actually follow through with. IG, quite simply, is records retention and destruction, both of those tasks occurring according to an established protocol and schedule, and preferably with a minimum of subjective human interaction. And, of course, you can't govern your information if you don't know where all of it is, so IG presumes that the enterprise has control of its data as well.

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Corporate Matter Management

Jack Halprin – We Will Miss You Big Guy

07 - 02 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Bigger than life. That was Jack. The big guy lost his battle against cancer this morning and the eDiscovery world is a smaller, darker place. Others can rightly expound on his contributions to our rather esoteric calling as a leader at Guidance, Autonomy/HP and most recently Google. Right now I just miss my friend. He never let go of that irrepressible intensity, irreverence and honesty that we all brought to our first job. If you are up to it, raise Jack’s favorite Jägermeister shot in remembrance.

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Analysis According to Palantir Back In 2007

07 - 01 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Stephen E. Arnold caught this early (2007) Palantir blog entry attempting to explain what Palantir does (or did from a systems engineer’s perspective) to interview candidates. Although this is incredibly dated, the explanation of the functional components of ‘analysis’ and the human role in them still has merit in light of our eDiscovery relevance challenge. Worth a fast read. Here is my extracted interpretations: Three core disciplines for large data set analysis:

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Analytic Engine
Analytic Processing
Analytics

RIF’d? Join the Club and Dust Off Your Resume

06 - 30 - 2015

Greg Buckles

With all the VC money flowing into the eDiscovery market right now, why are providers, companies and firms cutting experienced practitioners? The combination of a large professional network, accessibility and independence puts me high on many people’s call list when they land on the Reduction In Force (RIF) list. The last month has had my Inbox bombarded with a wave of long term friends hitting the job market at the same time as I am seeing $400+ million in investor capital injected into our market. I get the energy company legal departments downsizing to show theoretical savings, even when I bet that they are spending MORE on outside services from case budgets to cover the lost headcount. I do not mind the time to mentor, make connections and review resumes. Others have helped me when I made my many transitions between law enforcement, law firm, provider, corporate, analyst and back to consultant. We should all remember those who found even one opportunity when it counted and pay it forward. As for the eDiscovery market, I believe we are experiencing a long delayed maturity catharsis in providers and consumers. Firm partners and corporate counsel have demonstrated a remarkable recalcitrance in the face of new methods, technologies and billing models. Many have clung to treating ESI review like 1980’s paper discovery. While outside investors see the maturation of eDiscovery as proof that it is time to get in the game, adaption to a mature, efficient business process requires massive reorganization for both providers and their clients. That puts good professionals on the street looking for their next employer. If you have found yourself suddenly unemployed, use that free time to catch up on market and send me a blog. I am happy to publish it and get your name out there IF it is genuine, relevant and entertaining – like I try to be. And if you are looking for an experienced eDiscovery professional who has worked with me at some point in my 25+ year journey, shoot me the job description. eDJ is not a placement agency and I don’t give recommendations/connections to folks unless I have worked with them.

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Markets

Certifying Analytics – Marketing vs. Substance

06 - 30 - 2015

Greg Buckles

As my 2014 analytics research demonstrated, analytics has become a marketing buzz word like ‘smart’, ‘intelligent’ or ‘predictive’ to imply new technology to make something easier or better. Press releases like “Mitratech Launches Certified Legal Analytics Partner Program; HBR Consulting Earns First Certification” make me ask hard questions like: “What does this actually mean?” – “What is legal analytics in Mitratech speak?” – “What does certification mean to customer? Guarantees? Standards?” I think you get the idea. My take after digging through the release and Mitratech’s public material is that Mitratech has a consulting partnership with HBR to help customers use their dashboard and reports. I get this and frankly Mikki and I do a lot of similar technology enablement projects following up on solution design and RFP engagements. Good for Mitratech, HBR and their customers. But it is not ‘Certified Legal Analytics’ in my book (based on public materials). Everyone wants to work smarter and needs analytic tools to visualize relationships, trends, clusters, differentials, averages, etc. Providers will insist that dynamic reports and dashboards featuring charts and graphs check this functional box. Maybe they are right. But we have checked that same box using Excel, Access and customer SQL apps for decades. Show me something new.

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Analytic Engine
Analytics

Palantir – $20 Billion Giant or Another VC Balloon?

06 - 25 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Palantir has been on my radar for a couple years after spending an hour at their LTNY booth. They have neat toys and a much higher level of sophistication regarding the practical applications of their visualizations and analytics than most start-ups. They throw around customer success stories from well known pharma and financial names along with ‘un-named’ government agencies. Their market valuations have shot through the roof since 2009, hitting $9B (yep, BILLION) at the end of 2013, $15B at the end of 2014 and now $20B in just seven months. If they are that successful, why are they still taking rounds of funding? If they want to play in the eDiscovery space, why not just buy up key IP from small players and produce a COTS eDiscovery platform that actually works in a large enterprise environment with their petty cash? The hype and tech mystique around Palantir remind me of Autonomy in their hayday. My only hope is that all those “failure is not an option” secret customers provide the Palantir team the motivation and funding to actually deliver on all the eye candy. The market has been hungry for a practical analytic platform that can tackle the diversity and scale of today’s corporate ESI.

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Analytic Engine

Another Desktop eDiscovery ECA Steal – Intella P.I. for $99

06 - 24 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Australian Vound software is offering a version of their Intella ECA/investigation tool with a 10 GB/case volume cap for $99. If their Solution Comparison Chart feels a bit redundant, it is. The only real difference that I could see in versions is about whether it is a solo desktop or a shared discovery platform with multiuser access. All the other versions are just volume caps and packages. So what does Intella do? Process, search and investigative review of collected ESI. Sounds a lot like where Nuix started out, an Australian forensic tool built for volume and speed. Maybe my friend Craig Ball spotted other up-and-coming Australian eDiscovery tools suitable for his EDna Challenge while he was down there recently. In the US market, we seem to have lost affordable desktop ECA tools in favor of enterprise class processing platforms with hefty price tags. The low entry Ipro Eclipse SE offer took me back to the old Summation iBlaze suite that allowed my clients to run small matters without a dongle or having to worry about billing back $/GB charges. The big boys may have the marketing money to buy their way into an analyst’s mystical diagram, but more nimble players are starting to bring right sized solutions to the SMB market for affordable and reasonable eDiscovery functionality. Keep’em coming and I will keep telling it as I see it.

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Processing-ECA

First Chink in Relativity’s Armor?

06 - 17 - 2015

Greg Buckles

kCura’s Relativity has dominated the hosted review market. But when EVERYONE has Relativity, how can service providers differentiate themselves beyond the race to the lowest $/GB? Think back just a couple years to when Clearwell seemed to own the channel market. Clearwell seized the consumer brand recognition and national service providers quickly had certified Clearwell PMs running searches and supporting small reviews. kCura captured that same brand recognition with a new level of scalability and review usability that gave legal process outsourcing (LPO) providers like DTI a non-proprietary platform to host large, multi-party reviews. DTI has invested heavily in Relativity (creating a custom redaction tool and being a Relativity Best in Service Orange partner). I am sure that DTI is not walking away from that investment and all those hosted cases. However, DTI is expanding their ipro partnership to offer PC/TAR review hosted on ipro Eclipse. Why would DTI offer TWO review platforms with CAAT powered TAR? I am guessing that ipro’s ‘all in’ pricing and new workflow automation are a strong motivation. Customers are tired of the analytic sticker shock (and yes, I am still seeing $200/GB fees for CAAT analytics). They want predictable costs and ‘one click’ processing. It will be interesting to watch the other big national players to see if they too expand their review platform options.

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Analytic Engine
Analytic Processing
Technology Assisted Review
Review Platform

Caustic Critique Better than Mystical Square on Enterprise Search

06 - 16 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Many market analysts covering enterprise search, archiving or other Info Gov technologies may have mixed feelings about search specialist Stephen E. Arnold and his completely unfiltered blog, Beyond Search. Mr. Arnold seems to have a positive disdain for the products and opinions published by what he calls the ‘azure chip’ consulting-analyst firms. Luckily for eDJ Group, we were too young and focused on the eDiscovery market segment during our tilt at those same institutional windmills to attract his attention and frequently caustic commentary with our research reports and perspective. Secretly, I always admired his style, even when I did not agree with Mr. Arnold’s conclusions. His blog rehashing Gartner’s 2014 “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search” is positively peppered with pithy counterpoints and observations. Retroactive criticism of a firm’s mystical square or wave is kind of like watching early reruns of the Daily Show, amusing but dated and out of context. These ranking visualizations are a good indicator of the competitors who have the funds and/or maturity to pay for a sufficient block of ‘analyst days’ to market their tailored messages to the captive analysts. Dig through the suits by ZL Technologies or NetScout for fun background. In the end, analysts publish opinions and I still believe that they are entitled to them, however arbitrary or biased they may be. It is the consumers’ responsibility to winnow the wheat from the chaff. I hope that you enjoy Mr. Arnold’s blog as much as I did. His unfiltered perspective helps remind me why we left the ‘market analyst’ field to resume full time consulting.

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Markets

Less than $400 for Desktop Discovery?

06 - 15 - 2015

Greg Buckles

If you are a legacy Summation iBlaze, LAW or even more esoteric desktop processing user, you should check out ipro’s limited time offer for 50% off of your first copy of their new Eclipse SE. The word on the street had a single user annual subscription starting around $750, so this offer brings it low enough for most to just expense it. As always, I am not a paid marketer and I have not done any analyst days for ipro since we shut down the market analyst group early last year. I just know that there are a LOT of old Summation iBlaze customers out there looking for a replacement and this might meet your requirements. Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

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Investigation Analysis
Corporate Matter Management

Vendors in Educational Clothing?

06 - 15 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Not sure if you heard about all the rain and flooding down here in Houston, but that is just one reason for my recent hiatus from blogging. Once life takes you away from your routine, it is hard to get back in the saddle, but press releases like this one from OLP give me all the incentive I need to write. Now you know that I hate to pick on any one vendor when my real concern is a broader trend that I want to call your attention to. In this case, it is the way that some for-profit providers effectively cloak their true nature and revenue source by presenting themselves as ‘organizations’, ‘associations’, ‘reference models’, ‘institutes’ or other labels intended to convey academic authority. eDiscovery is such a young and cross-functional discipline that many new practitioners indiscriminately consume ‘best practices’, certificates and purchasing guidance without understanding how the source of that self-proclaimed authority makes money. I happily include myself in that ‘self-proclaimed’ group, because in my opinion there were and are no classic non-profit or academic standards bodies out there to grant anyone eDiscovery authority. Others can and will disagree with me, but all I am asking you is to ask the question, “Show me the money!” before you allocate educational time or budget.

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Markets

My Take on Ipro Innovations 2015

05 - 05 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Downsizing eDJ from a market analyst firm back to boutique strategic consulting pretty much took Mikki and I off the speaker’s circuit for 2014. So besides escorting key clients through the LTNY maze back in March, this has been my longest hiatus from conferences in a long time. At last week’s Ipro Innovations event, I did a short 20 minute session on who is moving to the Cloud on the main stage and then a fun session on my key 2015 eDiscovery trends. Both slide decks have been uploaded to the eDJ Group site for members who have taken a survey in the last 30 days.

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Analytic Engine
Office 365 Collection
Cloud ESI Collection
Markets

IG vs. Discovery in the Cloud – 2015 Survey

04 - 20 - 2015

Greg Buckles

For the last several years, eDJ has conducted surveys that confirmed the accelerating trend of companies moving their messaging, collaboration and other IG systems to the Cloud. This year I am interested in whether consumers are starting to actually conduct discovery in the Cloud as well. My ongoing eDJ poll ‘Where do you conduct eDiscovery’ has yet to turn up anyone who ‘knows’ that their eDiscovery is being conducted in the public Cloud out of the 16 respondents so far. I know that many popular hosted platforms and well known channel providers use the public Cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, etc) for secured servers and storage. This makes me wonder if most customers are either not asking the right questions or if savvy providers have figured out ways to ‘rebrand’ the public Cloud with ‘private instances’. Sounds like I need to add some new features and categories to the eDJ Matrix to separate the apples from oranges.

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Office 365 Collection

Risk vs. Reward - Read Receipts

04 - 17 - 2015

Greg Buckles

We had a customer question on whether they should/could disable read receipts in corporate email. There was little business value in their vertical for active use of read receipts (i.e. they did not have a large sales division) and a smart attorney on the stakeholder team thought that they posed more risk than reward. Doug Austin’s blog about Fox v. Leland Volunteer Fire/Rescue Department Inc. is a good read on the potential risks of ‘automatically authenticating’ the fact that a custodian saw a specific message, even if I can think of a dozen scenarios where read receipts falsely report custodian awareness. Shutting down read receipt functionality on Exchange or Office 365 is a simple Powershell Cmdlet:

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Corporate Matter Management

Is IT Being Jettisoned in Cloud Adoption?

04 - 13 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Something occurred to me while working on my upcoming Ipro Innovations session on ‘Who’s Making the Jump to the Cloud & Why?’ The fundamental role of IT was to create and maintain the dynamic technology infrastructure that supported the applications, connectivity and storage required by the business users. Over time, simple server-client applications evolved into customized enterprise platfoms that made strong IT department essential for competitive corporations and firms. Long standing virtualization and centralized storage trends have made these enterprise platforms relatively hardware agnostic, a key requirement for migration to a public Cloud environment. Now that CIO’s everywhere seem to be sending pilot balloons into the Cloud, is there a role for the traditional IT administrator? Many traditional processing/hosting service providers are asking the same question about their future role in the eDiscovery lifecycle. Are they needed when the ESI is created, collected, processed, reviewed and produced in the Cloud? Because that is the direction that companies small and large seem to be headed. It will be a couple years before Microsoft is giving away fully integrated Equivio Zoom functionality to all Office 365 customers, but sharp providers and IT should be looking at that road map and redefining their own roles if they want to stay relevant and employed. I will share some high points from my session or you can participate in person if you happen to be in Phoenix next week. Meanwhile, here is a fun graphic from my deck.

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Office 365 Collection

Iris Acquired for $134M by Epiq

04 - 08 - 2015

Greg Buckles

A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that Iris Data Services was acquired for a roughly 3.5X multiple ($134M / $38M revenue) to Epiq. That is neither good nor bad for a services business when compared to the rumored 8-10X multiple Microsoft paid for Equivio. Iris certainly jumped early into the managed services market and has kept their marketing focused on that. Epiq has seemingly struggled to break out of the golden ‘big case’ trap into a business model with better growth potential. It will be interesting to see how this culture marriage works out. I see it as ‘bet the company cases’ vs. ‘everything you can eat eDiscovery support’. I will be looking for health reports from current Iris managed services customers in 6-9 months to see if the wheels are still on the cart.

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Markets

Gartner Leader HP Bails on Cloud? Reality Checked

04 - 08 - 2015

Greg Buckles

I love it when my search engines turn up evidence that the left hand rarely knows what the right is doing. This morning brought me contrasting articles with the HP press release announcing ‘Gartner again names HP Autonomy a leader in eDiscovery software’ and the NY Times blog indicating that HP is ceding the public cloud market to Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Of course, it is very easy to misconstrue even a media-trained executive’s statements instead of just echoing them without a bit of diligence. The first distinction to draw is the difference between HP’s attempts to convert their physical hardware business into a direct competitive offering to Microsoft Azure/Amazon S3 VS. HP Autonomy software-as-a-Service offerings such as cloud backup, HP LiveVault, etc. Not directly competing with Amazon S3 is very different from shutting down their relatively nascent Autonomy-as-a-service offerings. HP’s quick clarifying press release trying to make it clear that ‘not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players’ does not mean that HP is leaving the public cloud market. With HP hardware due to split with Autonomy enterprise software later this year, the HP play in the cloud infrastructure market does not really matter that much to the typical eDiscovery/IG consumer.

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Markets

Desktop LAW Replacements? Good Luck

04 - 07 - 2015

Greg Buckles

I had almost thought that the venerable Yahoo LitSupport list had finally died when a classic question arrived this morning seeking replacement options for LexisNexis’s LAW. Although the poor poster will now undoubtedly get a wave of sales rep responses, they were probably prepared to deal with the spam. The good news is that there are LOTS of processing/EDA/ECA tools on the market, but most are server based platforms instead of desktop apps. The main difference is the sticker shock you will get looking at ‘modern’ Processing/ECA tools compared to the old school LAW flat purchase price. LAW’s low cost and lack of volume caps/costs is why it is still around. Responding to the request (yes, I still answer posts on the list and direct questions) got me thinking about how the classic small firm or private company solo lit support power user has been caught in the market transition.

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Processing-ECA

DTI Acquires Merrill Legal Solutions Group – But Can They Convert Customers?

04 - 06 - 2015

Greg Buckles

I hate to say that it is not surprising that Merrill Corp. decided to sell their legal services group while the international customer base still held significant value. This lets Merrill drop a division that felt like it had lost momentum and market differentiation. As the eDiscovery service market evolves, traditional providers must either grow, innovate or die. DTI has steadily acquired stalled regional providers for their clients and talent, but this is their largest acquisition to date. DTI moved early into outsourced discovery managed services and now I am watching to see if they can convert these acquired litigation customers into long term management subscriptions.

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Corporate Matter Management
EDD Services