e-discovery 2.0

Last fall, when Transparent Concept Search was still in development, we showed an early version of it to a group of our customers. Their excitement was palpable, and they spent most of our session together comparing notes about the varied ways they will use it. But at the end of the discussion, one of them asked the question which was on everyone’s mind: “how much will you charge for it?”, or as someone else immediately said “I get charged $200/GB for plain vanilla concept search, so how much of a premium do you think you will get for this?”

Our answer surprised them: there’s no charge. Transparent Concept Search is included in Clearwell for free. Here’s why doing that makes sense:

There are two business strategies in the technology industry which are proven to work. One is to be the low-cost provider and compete on price. These companies, such as Chinese PC manufacturers, do not spend anything on R&D or marketing. Instead, they ruthlessly squeeze out cost savings and pass them on to their customers. The other proven strategy is to be the innovation-leader, whereby you continually delight customers by giving them more and more functionality at the existing price. Players following this strategy are never the cheapest, since they charge a little extra to fund new product development. For example, iPhone is by no means the cheapest smart phone, but its price did not go up when, with the iPhone 4, Apple added video, a forward-facing camera, better battery life, and a retina display.

It is worth noting that either strategy can work, and companies sometimes move between the two, although making that transition is incredibly hard. Staying in the PC industry, Dell started as the low cost provider, but has more recently tried to move up the value chain by investing more in the design of its products. The results, so far, have been mixed.

At Clearwell, our strategy is to be the innovation leader in e-discovery software. We tackle really hard technical problems, solve them in innovative ways, and then seek to delight our users by providing them with breakout, new capabilities at no incremental cost. Transparent Concept Search is a perfect example of this.

Rather than just integrate with concept analysis plug-ins, as pretty much every review platform does, we asked ourselves: if we were to create concept search from scratch specifically for e-discovery, what would we build? As part of that process, we tapped into the latest academic research in semantic analysis coming out of UCLA, University of Pittsburgh, and other universities, and discovered that it offers a solution to the biggest single problem users have with concept search: the heavy computational burden traditional approaches require. By using a variation of the semantic space model which is explained in that new research rather than, say, latent semantic indexing, we can deliver concept searching to much larger legal matters.

Beyond the core technology, we also wanted to change the user experience, by bringing the same level of visibility and control that our users enjoy in keyword search to this domain. Our goal is to enable users to balance both precision and recall in a way that was not previously possible. The result – Transparent Concept Search – is completely seamless within Clearwell in a way that simply cannot be matched by concept search plug-ins to a review platform, which are essentially two separate products from two separate vendors. In summary, it’s a vastly superior user experience – at no incremental cost.

This is the first of many things you will see from us this year. Our team could not be more excited about the new products and ideas that we have in the pipeline.