“Why Not eDiscovery?": The Emerging Utility Model for Services

The craze over “Cloud Services” has reached a fever pitch so we grow used to the moniker. The ease of getting access to applications and compute or storage resources within hours or days justifies the hype however. It used to exclusively mean “Cloud-based On-demand Computing” (with your own applications being hosted in a utility environment) but now has expanded to Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Salesforce.com for hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Hubspot for Marketing Relationships and Web Presence/Content Management.

There are also any number of storage as a service vendor (Amazon S3, Nirvanix), email hosting providers (Gmail, Microsoft) and storage collaboration hosting providers (Google Docs, DropBox). We routinely rely on the safety and security of Cloud Services to expand our business capabilities as they are needed. Furthermore we can easily consume services that would have taken an internal IT staff months if not years to get running within private infrastructure (had we been able to get capital dollars appropriated to support it). So Cloud Services have opened up a number of opportunities for productive enhancement of business capacity without the need for large capital outlays.

Please see Figure One for a “landscape” of some cloud services that are routinely accessed as a regular part of the business delivery platform.

Figure One – Cloud Services Landscape

Notice how the mobile device has made the location of data independent from the use of the data by an application. With the cloud the data can reside anywhere; we are also no longer bound by time and space when we think of accessing and mastering the use of data objects. This is truly a brave and productive new world. The new “Cloud Based” approach to “knowledge worker tasks” (as Peter Drucker; famous business theorist would say) has made the worker independent of any particular location and allows the power of flexible computing and storage resources to come to bear on any particular business problem at any particular time.

Why Not eDiscovery as a Utility based Service?

Until this point in time when ubiquitous, cheap and plentiful network bandwidth has been married to flexible computing resources, legal discovery was always a manual, arcane and laborious task undertaken by a few “blacksmiths” in their own data center hideaways. These blacksmiths have been surrounded by their metaphorical forges represented by racks of Windows-based personal computers running batch processing jobs on documents. Like medieval blacksmiths next to their belching furnaces with black smoke, the legal discovery technicians sit at their Windows PC’s whacking away at pile after pile of documents as the medieval blacksmith did with iron, hoping to make a horseshoe out of the pig iron that lay before them.  Historically one has taken boxes of documents to a place where the legal discovery “forges” burned day and night to reduce the boxes of documents into the equivalent of swords and armor or horseshoes that could carry a case into court and hopefully win a legal argument. There was no alternative; businesses were not going to invest in their own “forges” and set up “legal discovery shop” so small inefficient “discovery blacksmith shops” proliferated the landscape of the electronic discovery marketplace. Now there is an alternative and it is present in the utility model for providing computing and storage resources and software service instances that comprise a modern electronic discovery process.

Now that there is a bright and modern utility computing model for nearly everything else, why should we not have one for eDiscovery? Why not use a glistening on-ramp over a wide highway of network bandwidth, secured with encrypted file transfers that can carry data to powerful servers ready to process Terabytes of data (image or electronic document formats) within hours and still produce the relevant documents that matter to lawyers?. Again, using the power of the utility model, why can’t we have analytic processes running in multiple software instances on virtual computers that identify for us what documents are relevant to a given matter and send us an email when the results have been obtained? This flexible utility model could expand to meet the timeframes required for a given case and allow the discovery processing tasks to be expedited as the needs of the case dictate.

Beyond the obvious time compression advantage due to blindingly fast processing, this approach would also enhance overall productivity by allowing a team of legal professionals to “log in” to the “cloud” and review the most relevant documents first; enhance their overall productivity. Lawyers from any geographic locale could leverage the power of the network to bring resources to bear on the documents that have been identified for eventual legal linear review. Further tagging and validating the results of the automated machine-based analytic operations would be necessary and would still require linear review, but this process would be greatly enhanced by the power of the utility model and the flexibility that network-based secure review would bring to bear on any legal matter.

This is a service offering that makes too much sense to avoid or ignore. The days of the old “medieval blacksmith” approach are numbered. Service and support will of course be necessary so a blend of professional service and advice and technology must be applied to the problem, but the leverage of the scale of the cloud is undeniable.