LegalTech Roundup: New E-Mail Archive Software And More

Posted by Andrew Conry-Murray on February 5, 2010

Tags: Clearwell Systems,  E-discovery,  Guidance,  Kroll Ontrack,  LiveOffice,  StoredIQ

Channel: Data Protection, E-discovery

A pile of new e-discovery products and services were announced around the LegalTech show this week. E-discovery is now a core concern for IT operations because of the importance of electronically stored information (ESI) in today's lawsuits, and it's the responsibility of IT to find and store this information. We summarize five products below, including the launch of a new e-mail archive product with an e-discovery focus, Kroll Ontrack's Ontrack Compass.

E-mail makes up a large portion of the ESI that companies are required to find, preserve and analyze in a legal matter, so the product is targeted at organizations in highly litigious and regulated markets, such as financial services and pharmaceuticals. Kroll says the archive can scale to over 100,000 mailboxes. Ontrack Compass includes common features found in other archives, such as the ability to stub messages so that users can have a pointer to archived e-mail in their inbox. It uses single-instance storage and compression to conserve disk space. As you'd expect with an archive aimed at the discovery market, it lets administrators apply legal holds, exports messages in a variety of formats and conducts extensive searches. The company also plans to release modules that let administrators and legal counsel conduct early case assessment on archived messages.

Kroll may have a hard time gaining significant traction with this product. The market is saturated with archiving products, and there are few greenfield installations among the company's target market. If companies want to take advantage of the discovery-centric features promised by Kroll for the huge volumes of mail in a legacy archive, that will require a complex migration job, particularly since legal cases aren't going to be put on hold while IT pumps old mail into the new system. That means potential customers will have to manage--and pay for--both a new product and a legacy archive. E-discovery budgets tend to be juicy, but that's a still a tough sell.

Also in the e-mail archive space, LiveOffice, which provides SaaS-based archiving, announced a partnership with Zapproved. As a SaaS provider, Zapproved offers a legal-hold management application, Legal Hold Pro. Under the terms of the partnership, companies that use Live Office Discovery Archive can get Legal Hold Pro as an add-on. Because both services are SaaS, pricing is per user per month, but Live Office did not provide specific figures. Legal Hold Pro provides an interface for legal counsel to send legal hold notifications to appropriate persons, track responses, manage all active legal holds and provide an audit trail. The combined services are available now.

The e-discovery process consists of numerous phases. In early stages such as identification, collection and preservation, large volumes of data are gathered. In later phases, attorneys and paralegals review that data to weed out irrelevant material, find and review relevant ESI and decide how to proceed with the case. The review phase tends to be the most expensive because most organizations over-collect in the early stages, resulting in a large pile of files and documents to be reviewed (usually at very high billable hours).