Stratify Tells You What You've Got

Posted by Christine Taylor
October 07, 2009

In this morning's announcement, Stratify used a catchy phrase for their integrated ECA/review platform: "Know What You Have." They are not the first vendor to use a phrase instead of a coined name to identify a product's function, especially when the function combines multiple products or services.

This initiative is dedicated to a more efficient working of corporate GC and their outside law firms. Good thing too: this relationship that has been fraught with difficulty and control wars for many months now. Enabling GC and outside counsel to use the same eDiscovery ECA and review platform, along with providing consistent data and project management, can help to relieve that pressure. The Stratify process remains largely hosted in order to avoid data movement between internal and external counsel, which risks spoliation. Stratify earlier added an on-premise ECA piece for those corporations who prefer to analyze their collected data on-site during the early stages of eDiscovery.

This particular announcement expands Stratify's early case assessment (ECA) capability to integrate with its existing review product. The movement underscores what I have been saying for a few months now, that the right-hand EDRM vendors are moving back to add meaningful (as in actually early) software-driven ECA to their review capabilities. It's a natural move of course, but truly early ECA requires a different technology set from review platforms. It's not surprising that it takes review makers a while to develop (or acquire) the technology underpinnings for ECA, which is highly dependent on analytics and algorithms.

Stratify has also added an expanded consulting team for collection and preservation. The Iron Mountain name certainly explains something about this increased attention, but Stratify is right to do it. These processes are important for building the foundation of a strong data set for ECA and later processing and review. Collection often gets treated as the poor stepchild of eDiscovery, but poor collection will yield poor review results. This is why I often push vendors who provide strong collection like StoredIQ, Guidance, and ADM for tape. I'm glad to see a review maker like Stratify paying attention to this critical stage of the game.

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