e-Discovery Trends

As the sales force at Digital Reef engage more customers we learn a great deal. The number one trend that we have seen in the last six months is that the size of matters being undertaken by electronic discovery providers is large and growing. Given the general education that the customer has obtained (probably due to the maturation of products in the space and the publishing of the EDRM model so that everyone has a common basis of understanding) they are realizing how much ESI they should address for a given matter. We (Digital Reef) can handle vast quantities of content within hours of receiving it so we probably get involved in more discussions around multi-terabyte collections that need processing, analysis and production than legacy vendors.

It is clear that the legacy products and the appliance makers cannot handle the kinds of cases that are coming to the courts in a cost-effective way. The sheer volume of some of these cases makes it nearly infeasible to address them with existing (known) technologies. So scale is extremely important. This is surfacing other issues and trends that might have been tolerable in the past, but that now are intolerable.

Given that cases are getting larger, the other aspect of addressing them that is difficult with existing technologies is that most of them handle a part of the ECA function; making them rely on other tools (than their own) to handle an entire ECA workflow. Having a platform that can process large quantities of content (including images which need Optical Character Recognition), build an index and then cull information, subsequently analyze it for duplicates, near-duplicates, message (conversation) threads, and also produce it without having to load it from one system into another is a key element for success.

Last but not least; another aspect of large scale analysis of electronic information in an e-discovery context is that many different groups with different security privilege levels need to access certain "views" of the information pertinent to a matter. Most products cannot provide this "multi-tenancy" functionality. Our customers tell us that the ability to break out "views" of the data as they relate to technical expert witnesses for review, or other counsel aiding the case, or for opposing counsel to review is extremely valuable. Most products have to set up external security products with manual configuration being required before this can be achieved. It is generally so labor-intensive that most people only attempt this for very large cases that might go on for years.

As cases are tending to get larger, these attributes of an electronic discovery system become more evident. They are not commonly considered. These also tend to illuminate general enterprise requirements for electronic discovery "behind the firewall" where corporations are setting up infrastructure for governance functions.

As we engage more customers we hear that in addition to scale of the solution, a vision for integrated functions that allow full insight into data sources and then an ability to govern them is what they desire. We (Digital Reef) have produced this platfrom for total scale with a "one-flow" platform approach that minimizes the loading and un-loading of content from one tool into another.

We are hearing that this is extremely valuable in this day and age where large scale and ubiquitous functional workflow is required.

Steve