e-discovery 2.0

Anyone reading today’s announcement from Kazeon could be forgiven for doing a double-take: did someone misplace the decimal point? Kazeon claims that it can perform “processing of ESI in preparation for eDiscovery matters as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte.” Assuming that’s not simply a typo, it begs an obvious question: If Kazeon really can process information at a tiny fraction of what e-discovery service providers are charging, how come every e-discovery service provider isn’t going out of business? Why wouldn’t everyone take this incredibly good deal?

The answer (in press releases, as in politics) lies in definitions. Exactly what sort of processing would you be getting for your four dollars and change?

You’ll have to ask Kazeon to get the answer to that one, but give a venti latte to a bleary-eyed e-discovery service provider who’s just pulled an all-nighter preparing for a meet-and-confer, and they’ll tell you all about the nuances, complexities, and risks inherent in e-discovery processing that may be difficult for enterprise search/information lifecycle management vendors to grasp. Quite likely, they will refer you to EDRM’s processing node overview, which outlines the basic goals of robust processing:

• Capture and preserve the body of electronic documents;
• Associate document collections with particular users (custodians);
• Capture and preserving the metadata associated with the electronic files within the collections;
• Establish the parent-child relationship between the various source data files;
• Automate the identification and elimination of redundant, duplicate data with the given dataset;
• Provide a means to programmatically suppress material that is not relevant to the review based on criteria such as keywords, date ranges or other available metadata;
• Unprotect and reveal information within files; and
• Accomplish all of these goals in a manner that is both defensible with respect to clients’ legal obligations and appropriately cost-effective and expedient in the context of the matter.

And that’s just the high-level overview. After the caffeine from the latte starts to kick in, they’ll tell you it’s also absolutely critical to:

• Provide statistical count tie-outs that reconcile every incoming email, loose file, and attachment with the processed document set
• Automatically scan critical large container files (such as PSTs) for errors and problems prior to processing
• Automatically perform custodian mapping to track ownership of all documents
• Maintain detailed reports on every anomaly encountered during processing, down to the individual email, loose file, and attachment
• Automatically handle common metadata anomalies (with logging) so that the maximum number of documents are made available for review
• Provide robust and thorough handling for container files regardless of container format
• Support non-email content types such as contacts, calendar entries, tasks, and notes
• Robustly handle embedded objects
• Provide full visibility into exceptions encountered during processing, along with an integrated exception handling process to allow repaired/decrypted data to be easily added back into the document set

All that for under five bucks? That’s quite a deal! But remember, if you drive by your corner gas station tomorrow morning and they’re advertising regular unleaded for 20 cents a gallon: It may be cheap, but it’s probably not gas you’re getting.

Regular readers of E-Discovery 2.0 will notice a new look to the blog today (thanks Sean!). But that’s not the biggest change. As we enter the blog’s second year, I have decided to take your feedback to heart and invite 3 exceptional people to join me as regular bloggers.

In the 12½ months since I wrote my first post, it has been exciting to see the blog’s readership grow rapidly (see charts for trends in page views and email subscribers). I would like to profoundly thank everyone who has either read this blog, linked to it, submitted comments, or even just come up to me at various parties and events to say that you have been reading it. Without your input, I would have nothing to write. It is tremendous fun to interact with a community of people who share my interests, and I’m grateful to you all for engaging.

As part of my ongoing dialogue with readers, I consistently got 2 requests: can you post more often, and cover a broader set of e-discovery issues? True, over the past year, I have covered the big deals that mattered, the small ones that didn’t and the ones in between; I wrote about analyst rankings of different e-discovery vendors, prompting a lively discussion involving the analysts themselves; I highlighted shifts in the landscape, such as enterprises bringing e-discovery in-house, partnerships with archive vendors, and the changing role of service providers. I even had a little fun, every now and then.

But there’s no denying that e-discovery presents far too rich a set of legal, business, and technology issues than I can cover alone – especially given the demands of my day job. That’s why I decided that the best way to develop the blog as a resource for the e-discovery community is to have more people writing, especially if those people are both more intelligent than me and have their own perspectives on e-discovery.

So it is with great pleasure that I welcome three new bloggers to E-Discovery 2.0:

• Dean Gonsowski is a lawyer who has spent the past 10 years advising corporations and law firms on how to improve their e-discovery processes. He teaches a series of continuing legal education courses on e-discovery, and is a member of The Sedona Conference Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production (WG1).
• Kurt Leafstrand is a rocket-scientist from MIT (I’m not kidding!) who is now very active in EDRM, and was a key contributor towards the recently published XML standards. He spends his days designing e-discovery solutions and has posted before on several topics.
• Will Uppington is also active in EDRM and Sedona. His particular passion is developing new search, analysis and web 2.0 technologies and applying these to reducing the costs and risks associated with e-discovery. He has also posted before.

I am thrilled to be joined by such a bright bunch, and hope you enjoy the new “e-discovery team” approach!

Craig Ball’s visibility and prominence in the e-discovery space is akin to Brangelina’s in the world of pop culture. So, chances are that those of you who track the space closely have already read his recent post on XML and its still-unproven potential in e-discovery.

Craig does a fantastic job of summarizing why XML has huge potential to ease the exchange of e-discovery content — as well as why significant challenges still lie ahead before we can all leave our custom load files formats, conversion tools, and scripts behind and head to the beach.

Why are standards efforts in general, and the e-discovery effort in particular, so complex? There are two reasons: one is about people and process, and other is about technology. To borrow a page from Google, and quote the person (Joe Kraus) leading Open Social, a standards effort in the social networking world: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

How true. Those involved with the EDRM XML effort are well aware that it took two full years of hard work and many, many iterations just to get to the 1.0 version of the specification, which, as all involved would readily acknowledge, primarily just addresses the biggest pain point that customers and providers face today: load file interchange. Ironically, some in the blogosphere have accused the EDRM effort of not being connected enough with larger international standards bodies. The truth, as usual, is far more complex and nuanced. Not much was happening on the wider standards front, and after repeated attempts to help jump-start those efforts, George Socha, Tom Gelbmann and a host of EDRM participants decided it was time to move the ball forward on their own – and were remarkably successful in that effort, achieving compliance across most of the major players in the industry. Now, with the wind at their backs, the EDRM group is planning the next iteration of the spec and will certainly be reaching out to other interested standards bodies as a part of that effort.

On the technology front, the bottom line is that there’s still a long way to go to figure out how to incorporate actual document content into the EDRM XML schema. There are also a lot of interesting open questions around areas such as interoperability that the XML group plans to take up at the big annual EDRM meeting in St. Paul in May.

In the most general sense, XML’s a done deal: The world is moving toward one in which all content is digitally encoded and marked up with metadata. It’s inevitable. However, in the e-discovery specific sense, our industry is just getting started, and it’s going to take unified, concerted effort across the spectrum of e-discovery providers and end-users to make Craig love XML.

HP announced today that it has signed an agreement with Clearwell to resell the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform. The two companies have been partners for some time and have many joint customers such as Constellation Energy, Del Monte, and Universal Music. But, under this new agreement, thousands of HP sales people will now be compensated for selling Clearwell, giving them a powerful incentive to introduce their customer base to Clearwell’s e-discovery solution.

To my knowledge, this is the first time that a major archiving vendor has agreed to resell a partner’s e-discovery solution, and it raises a couple of interesting questions: why did HP do this deal? And, what does it mean for HP customers?

Ask anyone who tracks the email archiving market, and they will tell you that e-discovery is a major driver of archive purchases. As Gartner’s Carolyn DiCenzo observes: “Legal discovery is being mentioned by almost every client evaluating an e-mail archiving solution.” That’s because whenever a company has litigation, regulatory inquiries or internal investigations, IT is required to provide relevant electronic information to legal or information security. Far better to have it in one repository than spread out on user desktops, email servers, and file shares. So, CIOs are partnering with General Counsels to deploy email archives, much as they did – in years gone by – with the VP of Sales to implement CRM systems.

The problem is that, when you look at archives as e-discovery solutions, they only solve 50% of the pain. In EDRM terms, archives are a very effective solution for collection and preservation, but awful for processing, analysis, and review. They provide a bulletproof way to capture and preserve every message, but do not make it easy to perform early case analyses and cull down data to the very small set of documents relevant to the case at hand.

That’s why enterprise customers find it so compelling to pair up an archive, such as HP’s Integrated Archive Platform, with an e-discovery solution, such as the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform. So to summarize, HP is doing this deal because it’s the best way to provide HP customers with an end-to-end solution for e-discovery. The two products integrate out-of-the-box, have been proven to work together at several large enterprises, and can be purchased from a single supplier (HP). That’s a much easier, lower risk decision for many enterprises than purchasing separate point solutions and cobbling them together.

Very few companies have as much mindshare with corporate CIOs as HP. It can only be good news for the e-discovery market as a whole to have one the largest technology companies in the world out there educating its customers on the value of lowering the costs and risks of e-discovery.

Prior to working in e-discovery, I (Aaref) always thought standards bodies were a waste of time – or, at least, nothing more than an excuse for free travel to exotic locations. But George Socha and Tom Gelbmann’s EDRM project has changed my mind. In the second of a series of posts, our e-discovery guru – Kurt Leafstrand – explains one of many ways in which EDRM will have a big impact on e-discovery in the years to come:

Last week, I once again had the pleasure of participating in the (now biannual) EDRM conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. For those unfamiliar with it, EDRM is a fantastic collaboration between e-discovery software vendors, service providers, and consumers committed to addressing practical problems associated with e-discovery.

Looking back on both formal sessions and informal conversations with many participants, the one key theme that came across loud and clear is that the days of traditional, “throw-it-over-the-wall” (TIOTW) e-discovery are numbered.

I am sure you’re familiar with the TIOTW approach, that endearing process whereby an enterprise gathers up a muddle of electronic data in all shapes and sizes, ties it up in a big bundle, rolls it in bubble wrap, and catapults it into the waiting arms of a service provider. They unwrap it, chant some incantations and perform other black magic for a few days (or it is weeks?) and throw a bundle back over the wall to their corporate client. In-house counsel takes a look and promptly realizes that the search terms she thought were sure things were completely off the mark, and that she missed a couple of custodians, and then… well, it’s back over the wall again.

What’s going to tear the wall down? The EDRM XML schema, the first version of which is unveiled today by Clearwell and a large group of other vendors and customers. This will have the same impact on e-discovery as web services have had on e-commerce, enabling systems to pass data to one another over the internet, just as Travelocity passes information to American Airlines when you use it to make a reservation online.

What difference will this make? Well, I boil it down to 3 main things:

1. Litigation risk will decline as early case assessment finally becomes a reality in the enterprise—making it feasible to process, analyze, and do first-pass review of documents in-house, and then transfer those documents and tags to service providers and outside counsel without having to start from scratch.
2. E-discovery timeframes will shorten as enterprises become able to craft comprehensive e-discovery strategies more easily by executing and refining searches closer to the source of the data, and eliminate time-consuming back-and-forth exchanges between enterprises and service providers. And that’s a good thing, with the new FRCP (and coming soon, state rules!) pressure.
3. E-discovery manageability will improve as enterprise-based e-discovery systems are able to integrate seamlessly with downstream litigation management systems. Previously, you were forced to either channel data into a complex external litigation management system too early — making it difficult for internal counsel and other constituents to have access to the documents — or pay for costly and time-consuming custom data conversions to migrate data between document “silos.”

What to do with all of those unused CDs gathering dust in your office? I’ve heard they make great coasters…