eDJ Group

eDJ Brief: Everlaw - Plaintiff Driven eDiscovery

02 - 17 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Ever heard of them? I had not until they nicely persisted in trying to get on my schedule for LTNY. I was not able to accommodate them in New York, so we did a follow up briefing to get me up to speed. Everlaw unabashedly focuses tackling the traditional eDiscovery downstream from collections. They claim to be completely homegrown, but I have heard that too many times to give it credit for more than 'we are not reskinning a third party product'. They are one of the very few providers who acknowledge plaintiffs as a major part of their customer base. Plaintiff counsel needs good technology, but few have the budget to pay the market $/GB rates up front and most providers do not dabble in the contingency game for long. So how can cash strapped plaintiff firms afford Everlaw for matters like the Apple e-book antitrust matter or the GM ignition safety recall? With flat monthly pricing ranging from $20 down to $9 per GB, even David could process Goliath's production. I like seeing disruptive startups, even when I know that my service provider friends will feel the pain in their sale's quotas. It is good for the market. In my new-old leaner, meaner truth telling blog style, here are my take-away notes and some screen shots.

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Law Firm eDiscovery Platform
Processing-ECA
Review Platform

10 Things Not to Do at a LegalTech Meeting

02 - 13 - 2015

Greg Buckles

When I was wearing my 'analyst' hat, LTNY briefings with providers had a consistent level of marketing fluff and dancing around my questions while they did their best to get free market insight. Now wearing my consulting hat again, I filled my LTNY 2015 time arranging client meetings with potential providers for active initiatives. I did my best to proactively weed out sale's demos on autopilot by sending providers three key bullet points and limiting meetings to 30 minutes. Call it 'best intentions' while underestimating the seductive power of the temptation to spiel. I found myself making notes on what NOT to do while presenting to a prospect instead of my usual key take-away bullets. So here are some of my slightly tongue-in-cheek pointers. If we did a meeting in NY, just assume that I am talking about someone else for the sake of your ego.

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Markets

Headed to LTNY 2015? See You There!

02 - 02 - 2015

Greg Buckles

I hope that you have managed to justify the time and cost to join the rest of our eDiscovery peers in chilly Manhattan. I got a couple notes from clients and friends flying yesterday or this morning saying that their flights were delayed, but so far my Houston to Newark hop shows on time. So what do you want or expect to gain from LTNY 2015? My clients are laser focused on short meetings with potential providers of services and technologies for short term projects. I have blown off my traditional ‘analyst briefings’ to support these meetings and keep the providers on target and off script. We have banned actual product demos at the show, as those can be done much more effectively onsite or via Webex. For every meeting, I have supplied a very narrow set of topics to make sure that the clients leave with enough information to include/exclude that provider when the projects hit the RFP stage. The years have disillusioned me with the value of canned ‘briefings’ where a senior exec delivers a scripted deck packed with feel good marketing bullet points. The best source of information is frequently other customers at the evening ‘social networking’ events. My goal this year is to connect new, old and future clients and peers together as possible. LTNY means many things to the eDiscovery world. Some consider it the industry’s largest job fair, with resumes hidden about every exhibit booth. Investors and cash flush companies see it as an opportunity to speed date potential acquisitions. eDiscovery marketing staff see LTNY as their annual ‘make or break’ for branding and splashy product releases. Whatever it means to you, make the most of it, stay warm and flag me down to say hello.

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Markets

Business Intelligence? Recommind Review Dashboards

01 - 29 - 2015

Greg Buckles

LTNY has become THE season for major product and pricing releases. My search bots and daily Google digests are blowing up with press releases ahead of the show. I doubt that Recommind’s divestiture of their Decisiv email analytics product/IP to NetDocuments caught the eye of most Axcelerate customers. So today’s big show stopping announcement leads with the headline: “Recommind Adds Enterprise-Grade Business Intelligence to Industry-Leading eDiscovery Platform”

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Managed Review

Ipro – eDiscovery Wallflower Finally Hitting Stride?

01 - 28 - 2015

Greg Buckles

The eDiscovery market was founded on stories of rapid growth and big sales. Usually these kinds of stories come from mid-tier service providers who land a couple clients with those ‘bet the company’ matters that have unlimited budgets and incredibly short deadlines. Sudden growth spurts can stress small or young companies as they try to balance overwhelming demand against capacity. It is nice to see one of the earliest eDiscovery companies, Ipro Tech, announce record sales in 2014 based in both reseller subscriptions (service providers using their products) and direct software sales. Unlike a young startup or regional provider, Ipro has a mature infrastructure that has been selling imaging and eDiscovery tech for over 25 years. I know because my very first big consulting gig was a technology makeover of an energy company back in the early 1990’s. Jim King, Ipro’s founder, sold me on an Ipro 1.5 image management suite running on SCO Unix (yep, that long ago) with actual laser platters. What makes this revenue growth announcement interesting to me is that it appears to be based displacement technology sales to some very large and savvy providers; DTI, LSI and DOE Legal. At LTNY 2013, DTI’s CEO, John Davenport, briefed me on the increased performance and volume capacity from their conversion to Nuix for processing. Service providers can make fickle technology partners in a market with steadily falling commoditized volume pricing and massive virtual/cloud infrastructure that makes it relatively easy to switch brands behind the scenes. The national deployment of Eclipse SE (desktop version) by the U.S. Department of Justice is a feather in Ipro’s cap just in time for LTNY. Now the growth numbers:

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EDD Services
Processing-ECA
Review Platform

Veritas is Back!

01 - 28 - 2015

Greg Buckles

This is a strange time in the eDiscovery/IG market. While the giant software companies seem to be spinning off or splitting up, I am starting to see successful niche players attract funding to acquire or develop broader targeted solutions. Symantec announced today that the standalone information management business will be called Veritas Technologies Corporation, resurrecting the venerable Veritas brand that was acquired in 2005. It will be interesting to see if the old/new Veritas management can create a development/sales culture more appropriate to the still nascent IG marketplace. On a personal note, Veritas acquired KVS’s Enterprise Vault back in August 2004 and I definitely recall the distinct cultural groups coming from the start-up, the data center and the security companies. Having just been recruited to bring in the corporate eDiscovery perspective, I did not really understand how different their product/sales approaches were at the time. Although I did not remain with Symantec long, I always valued the ‘Big Software’ product management experience and the amazing customers that broadened my perspective and inspired me to return to consulting as a problem solver. I never enjoyed the whole sales cycle, but I hope that this spin off will enable the newly minted Veritas reps to get back to selling value over portfolio.

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Archiving

Collecting from the Cloud – eDiscovery Prerequisite?

01 - 27 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Last year’s eDJ Cloud adoption survey confirmed that our ‘early adopter’ consulting clients were not the only ones piloting or actively migrating email and files to Office 365™ and Google Vault™. My early research and the new Office 365 Collection category of the eDJ Matrix only found 3-4 products that could connect to and collect from Office 365 mailboxes and SharePoint sites. A year later that same category now shows 14 products with O365 connectors. I expected the ‘big box’ tech players like IBM, Symantec and Xerox to lead the integration efforts because their archiving offerings already had cloud infrastructure on their roadmaps. The old school forensic players, Guidance and Access Data, had to support the law enforcement collection requirements, so they would be right behind or ahead of the big boys. You know that a data source has become a ‘requirement’ rather than an option when the mid tier cloud Saas players such as @ Legal Discovery add Gmail™ and O365 to their remote collection capabilities.

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Office 365 Collection

Exterro –SaaS Legal Holds for $65?

01 - 26 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Exterro announced their new Legal Hold Foundation SaaS on-demand offering with 30/90 days free service for 1/5 year subscriptions. Phrases like “Issue Legal Holds within minutes of signing up” and a per matter cost “as low as $65 per hold” lead me to believe that Exterro has set up a relatively automated onboarding system for small-to-medium sized customers. Not that many years ago, there were only two options for a centralized enterprise class legal hold platform, Exterro and Atlas. Whether hosted or on-premise, these offerings required dedicated infrastructure and commanded price that put them out of reach on the SMB market. Launched in December of 2009 by Zapproved, Legal Hold Pro filled that void and was quickly copied by other providers. Recently, eDJ Group has seen global clients increasingly considering SaaS subscriptions in RFP engagements. With some or all of their key enterprise ESI moving to Microsoft’s Office 365, Google Docs or hosted virtual data centers, legal stakeholders seem to have lost some of their hesitancy of putting key discovery systems into the cloud. This Exterro offering let’s them compete down the customer size ladder and lowers the threshold for adoption, just in time for LTNY. Now let’s see what Zapproved announces for the show.

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Legal Hold Notification

PC/TAR Coming to Office 365 Customers? Equivio Bought by Microsoft

01 - 20 - 2015

Greg Buckles

After the early letter of intent was announced last October, Microsoft today announced that it has acquired the small eDiscovery analytics company, Equivio. A couple perspective points to mull over. Equivio was the only analytics solution provider in my 2014 Analytics Adoption Report with clear IG case studies and formalized offerings for using machine learning to categorize unstructured data repositories. I found lots of providers who talked the talk, but only Equivio seemed committed to finding practical applications of their technology to tackle corporate ROT (redundant, outdated or trivial files). Office 365 adoption, migration and integrations seem to come up in every 2014 eDJ strategic consulting engagement. The acquisition announcement was made by Rajesh Jha, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Outlook and Office 365. That tells me that Microsoft wants to add Equivio workflow and analytics to the new SharePoint eDiscovery Center. If Microsoft follows their normal adoption strategy, Office 365 customers may get the early Equivio functionality for NO cost for a time period. This is definitely a shot across the bow of the eDiscovery provider armada. My last point is the purchase price. Microsoft is not disclosing the final number, but the Wall Street Journal originally reported a possible $200 million offer and subsequent reports have the number in the $150-200 million range according to Venturebeat.com. If you give Hoovers or Owler revenue estimates any weight (and that is always tricky with privately owned companies), Equivio could have just pulled off a 15x or greater multiple. This kind of profit may finally inspire the venture funds to get off the fence and put real money into this market for players who have a compelling IG-eDiscovery solution story.

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Analytic Engine
Analytics
Office 365 Collection
SharePoint Collection
Markets

Indirect Evidence – Value and Risk

01 - 20 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Every Monday night, almost the weekly eDJ digest fires out to roughly 6,000 members. I expect to clean out 2-10 dead email addresses every Tuesday morning, not a bad rate for such a volatile industry. Occasionally I get a burst of dead addresses from a single company, which I interpret as a potential indicator of layoffs, downsizing or other M&A activity. As our industry increasingly uses analytics to spot changes in trends, chronological email gaps and other indirect evidence, we should remember the hard lessons learned by criminal prosecutors who have relied entirely on circumstantial evidence and inference. While bursts of bad addresses have previously enabled me spot layoffs by Recommind, I could not find anything on the web to explain the eight email addresses from DTIGlobal.com that went bad in the last week. Maybe their email administrator finally killed off inactive accounts or they migrated to Office 365 (like most of my corporate clients) over the holiday weekend. It definitely got me thinking about how our focus on analytics, trend spotting and indirect evidence can lead us down the wrong path if we do not validate leads with hard, direct evidence.

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Markets

When the Court Steps In – Search Terms and Sworn Statements

01 - 19 - 2015

Greg Buckles

When the bench has had enough discovery bickering from the parties, it can ‘divide the baby’ and impose it’s own discovery plan. In the case of Armstrong Pump, Inc. v. Hartman, No. 10-CV-446S, 2014 WL 6908867 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 9, 2014), the court appears to have lost patience with both parties and decided that a set of 13 search terms run on ALL of the Plaintiff’s corporate ESI will retrieve actual responsive content. I have served as an expert and defense strategist in too many cases to pretend that anyone outside of the matter can actually determine whether these terms will be effective. So my perspective on the case should be taken as a more general commentary than a professional, informed opinion on this specific case. The K&L summary is a fast read and has a couple interesting points.

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Office 365 Collection
SharePoint Collection
Corporate Matter Management

LexisNexis – SaaS or Software?

01 - 14 - 2015

Greg Buckles

In this pre-LTNY season, we expect every software developer in the eDiscovery market to launch their major product releases for the year. LTNY long ago set the product release schedule for maximum customer awareness and impact. LexisNexis launched version 11 of CaseMap today, touting a familiar, modern user interface modeled on Microsoft® Office 2013 and a customizable user ribbon. It is 2015 folks. CaseMap first hit the market in 1998. Are basic usability features like new tool tips, customized user ribbon and report menu really worthy of a major product version release? LexisNexis has acquired some decent products over the years and this made me curious about what has happened with them after their acquisition. It takes quite a bit of digging to figure out some trends. My interpretation is that some products come in to LexisNexis with a strong development team and keep their momentum. Other eDiscovery products coast without significant investment. This CaseMap presentation is probably the best indicator of consistent product management that is able to produce a major version every 1-2 years. The rest of the product line seems to be on a much slower cycle.

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Processing-ECA

LTNY 2015 – IG Taking Over?

01 - 12 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Are you ready to brave the NY weather and traffic in three weeks? I am certainly not ready. As an analyst firm, eDJ started booking LTNY briefings as early as November. This year I am just now nailing down our consulting client’s priority providers for meetings and looking forward to escorting them through the exhibit hall and social events. As I reviewed this year’s sessions, exhibitors and sponsors, it quickly became apparent that eDJ Group was not the only one adapting to the changing market. I have written a lot about the provider consolidation trend as we track M&A announcements large and small. The chart of published 2008-2015 LTNY Exhibitor counts below shows a steady 10% decline since the 2013 peak. ALM will be the first to tell you that the website exhibitor list is never complete, but it is a consistent indicator of the number of providers who committed the $8,000+ for a booth. Yep, our beloved, bloated, frozen eDiscovery job faire is changing. Just look at the Tuesday session tracks below and realize that only 2 of 8 tracks directly address eDiscovery. Information Governance is slowly taking a dominant role in the sales cycle, which is reflected by the themes, topics and speakers that providers select for the sessions that they fund.

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Markets

Recommind Out of the IG Market?

01 - 07 - 2015

Greg Buckles

Recommind continues to transform itself from a seller of traditional enterprise analytics software for eDiscovery and InfoGov into a pure-play SaaS cloud provider with the sale of the Decisiv Email technology and development team to NetDocuments. The Decisiv email filing recommendation functionality will give NetDocuments a strong differentiator after they have managed to get it integrated to their cloud infrastructure. I am curious to know how the Decisiv core technology relates to Recommind’s Axcelerate predictive coding technology and infamous patents. Will this sale have any impact on legacy Recommind Axcelerate installations? I doubt it. But on-premise customers should carefully watch to see if Recommind makes yet another major go-to-market about face. My wild guess is that investors from the last round of funding ($15M in Q3 2013) might have pushed for some kind of return on a lagging line of business.

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Analytic Engine
Archiving
Policy Management

A New eDiscovery Market Quadrant, Just Like the Old?

01 - 06 - 2015

Greg Buckles

eDJ Comment As a consumer and former creator of these over-simplified market mash-ups, I am always fascinated by how analysts pick the ‘players’ to profile. Radicati Group’s new eDiscovery Market Quadrant 2014 report features 13 providers with one common trait. Each and every one of them has a strong analyt/marketing budget and has a track record of spending it to make sure that they are well represented. I am not commenting on the content of Sara Radicati’s research or conclusions. Rather I am calling out a larger problem with the defacto ‘pay for play’ system that dominates market research. See current and past lawsuits against Gartner, Inc. that spell out the inherent ethical conflicts in doing for profit research on providers who are actively paying clients. I am frankly happy to be out of the analyst game and back to pure consulting. Most analysts work hard to fend off provider marketing pressure and deliver good work product, especially early ‘pure’ researchers such as John Bace. In my opinion, market analysts today are all too often isolated from real world customers and innovative startups in a classic ‘mushroom management’ trap. So be an educated, cynical consumer and read these mystical diagrams and reports carefully to extract the valuable nuggets.

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Markets

eDiscovery Blogs, Are They Worth Reading?

01 - 06 - 2015

Greg Buckles

I don’t know about your 2014, but it certainly presented me with lots of challenges. The holidays gave me a chance to think about eDJ, our renewed consulting practice and our goals from the site. Barry Murphy and I started blogging on the eDiscovery Journal during the 2008-2009 economic downturn in response to a blogosphere dominated by ‘experts’ with thinly disguised marketing agendas. Business was dead and we both wanted to ‘speak truth’ to eDiscovery veterans and neophytes alike. We founded the eDJ Group as a niche eDiscovery market analyst firm with the intent to sell research licenses and reports directly to corporations and law firms. Last year, we realized that our target audience needed practical strategic consulting more than pure market research, a reality confirmed by other former analysts who have left the market. The demands from corporate and law firm clients have cut into our time devoted to our ‘perspective blogs’ and forced me to re-examine whether they are worth the loss in billable time. My conclusion is that the market needs independent, expert perspective more than ever in a format that is easy to consume and fosters civil debate. So we will be playing with the format and content while opening the eDJ Group site to broader perspectives. Expect shorter, more frequent comments from eDJ and others, especially through the LTNY 2015 product release cycle. We solicit your perspectives, topic request and feedback as we work out how to keep eDJGroupInc.com valuable and relevant in our new/old role. Welcome to 2015 and I hope to see you all in New York!

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Markets

eDiscovery 2014, an eDJ Retrospective

12 - 29 - 2014

Greg Buckles

New Years and the rising tide of LTNY briefing requests tell me that it is a good time to look back at 2014. The year included a complete transformation of the eDJ Group from a niche market analyst team into a much smaller strategic consulting team. Mikki and I continue to conduct independent market research, but it is now driven by active client engagements and requests. I at least wanted to comment on several themes from my 2014 market overview decks. Most of these were created for corporate, VC or provider clients trying to better understand the rapidly changing market drivers.

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Analytic Engine
Analytics
Office 365 Collection
Cloud ESI Collection
EDD Services
Technology Assisted Review
Markets

Are You Still Paying Hosting Charges?

12 - 15 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Amazon and Microsoft cloud storage and servers have driven the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for online data storage down into the 10-15¢/GB/month range depending on whether you need a dedicated, encrypted appliance or other special security for your sensitive data. The bottom line is that this has eDJ Group clients challenging traditional $15-30/GB/month hosting fee proposals. Why pay 100x the market rate for a provider or law firm with a dedicated data center? The response to my fast survey on the pro-portion of evidence vs. collection size has been great (lots of folks wanting to download the 2014 Analytics Adoption Report), so with Mikki’s 2014 legal hold surveys wrapping up, I have created two fast surveys (consumer/provider) with a couple simple questions to get some insight into the changing hosting fee market. For more than a decade, monthly $/GB hosting fees have provided a surprisingly large portion of provider revenue and profit. AWS and Azure have challenged that model and we all want to understand how customer attitudes have changed. What is a fair price for the expertise and liability of managing cloud storage for discovery collections?

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EDD Services
ESI Sources

More 2014 eDiscovery Survey Results

11 - 30 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Kroll just released conclusions and limited data from a short eDiscovery survey covering trends such as Predictive Coding (PC/TAR) use, Social Media, BYOD, the ‘Internet of Things’ and Security. With over 550 law firm and corporate respondents, Kroll has certainly managed to get a statistically significant sampling, though they were the first to acknowledge that their questions were very basic data points. I just wish that they would publish the raw questions and response data so that readers could form their own interpretations with full confidence. I did find a couple of items interesting in light of my own recent research on analytic adoption. Without the full context/text of the original questions and response options we can only make limited observations. My interviews quickly pointed out problems with my own Analytic Adoption survey questions that I dissected in a blog.

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Analytics
Social Media Collection
Cloud ESI Collection
Mobile Device Discovery
Technology Assisted Review

Your ROI Is Coming Out of my Pocket

11 - 24 - 2014

michael simon

In my previous article for the eDJ Group I left you, my intrepid readers, with a challenge: . . . please do me a favor: look around at the technology you use in your work and in your everyday life (computers and toasters alike) and ask yourself, “Could I explain to someone else exactly how this works?” Had time to think about it? OK, now see if you can explain how the devices you use in your everyday life work: your computer . . . your car . . . your toaster. Seriously, can you explain how your toaster works? Can you explain it without using wooly mammoths in the explanation? I know I can’t. My point? Our modern lives are filled with black boxes, things that we understand in terms of the inputs they require (click the mouse, turn the wheel, insert slice of bread) and the outputs we receive (your computer beeps, your car turns, you get toast!). Yet between the input and the output there are a whole bunch of things happening that we can’t see, can’t explain, and – most importantly – don’t actually need to explain to accomplish our desired task. As long as the inputs are understandable and the outputs are what we expect, what lies in between can be completely opaque. I don’t need to know how my toaster works, as long as I get my toast. So why is the fact that machine learning (a/k/a “predictive coding”) is a black box such a problem?

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Analytics
Technology Assisted Review