Image: Shane Deleers
Editor's note: This is the first of a series of stories on news, analysis, and product reviews from LegalTech New York 2013. - sd
At LegalTech New York, there were plenty of new products and services, enhancements to existing products and services, and more ways to conduct computer-assisted review, technology-assisted review, or predictive coding than fortune tellers at a carnival.
There were upwards of 12,000 attendees, according to Henry Dicker, vice president of events and executive director of LegalTech. That would make for another record-breaking LTNY, not counting the untold number of tree people" at the show who quartered in surrounding hotels to demonstrate products and woo potential customers.
Many people have asked me "How was the show?" and "What was the coolest thing you saw at the show?" Let's take a look:
NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES
Mountain View, Calif.-based Advanced Discovery launched two new free electronic data discovery tools for its customers who use kCura's Relativity review platform: Advanced Visibility and Advanced Review. Both run in Relativity's web interface with a single login, but do not impact Relativity's performance because they run on a separate platform and use their own version of Microsoft SQL.
Advanced Visibility tracks all phases of discovery projects, including the input of data from forensic programs such as Guidance Software's EnCase Forensic and AccessData's FTK. Features include real-time information and visual, drill-down case and document review tracking. Visibility offers general counsel drill-down, dashboard views of document review projects, including cost breakdowns and review statistics. Reports can be exported in .csv format — more export options are expected in version 1.2 that will be out in March.
Figure 1 shows Advanced Discovery's dashboard view in kCura Relativity's web interface. Click image to enlarge.
Advanced Review is designed to analyze and report on document review projects to improve predictability, performance, and quality. Features include the ability to create budgets and time lines and surface review metrics and analysis to make staffing decisions and improve the defensibility of sampling and testing in computer-assisted document review.
Figure 2 shows Advanced Discovery's view into document review within kCura Relativity. Click image to enlarge.
Bridgeway Software, which offers software and services to manage legal services, unveiled a new service: Law Department Maturity Assessment Tool. It aims to empower law departments to assess their operational maturity and measure how well they are contributing to the organization's mission.
Catalyst Repository Systems Inc., a cloud-based provider of document repositories, announced its EDD predictive coding tool, Insight Predict, which is integrated with the company's XML-based EDD product, Catalyst Insight. Insight Predict facilitates the review process to find relevant documents. The company distinguishes its predictive process from others with "contextual diversity sampling," which ranks documents based on a sample or "seed set" from a document corpus using an iterative, self-correcting process called "Predictive Ranking" — Catalyst's process feeds additional samples to a document expert to test or validate the Insight Predict's output, the company says.
Cicayda: Nashville, Tenn.-based Cicayda unveiled the first component of a cloud-based e-discovery application. At the show, the startup company launched Fermata legal hold management software. Former CaseLogistix CEO, Roe Frazer, now CEO fo Cicayda, said that the legal hold software will be followed by more products that ultimately will provide an end-to-end e-discovery system. Out of the gate, Fermata appears comparable to Zapproved Legal Hold Pro, with the promise of adding more applications that will crescendo into an end-to-end e-discovery platform.
Epiq Systems, an e-discovery and document review software and services provider, introduced its new web-based EDD dashboard, Epiq Portal 2.0. It provides real-time project information and dynamic reports to legal teams, as well as workflow and early case assessment tools. It integrates with Epiq's proprietary review platform.
Equivio launched Themes, a new content analtyics application that maps thematic relationships across documents and document sets. Themes is designed for litigators, strategists, and investigators to quickly scan documents and find out what they need from the collection.
Ernst & Young LLP announced its predictive coding platform, which uses patented technologies and processes that the consulting group acquired from Cataphora Legal in May 2011. The new application works with kCura's Relativity, so users can turn to kCura for Boolean searching, batching, and imaging. Ernst & Young's predictive process parses each document into hundreds of topics and assigns a relevance score to each topic per unique document; topics are correlated with attorney sampling decisions using the company's voting schema.
Attorney Chi Eng, CEO of NeuLexa, launched the eponymous legal workflow software with project and document management tools at LegalTech. Eng said NeuLexa is designed by "lawyers for lawyers" who want to improve legal work product quality, bolster existing client relations, assemble geographically dispersed legal teams, and improve cost efficiency.
NeuLexa aims to accomplish its mission by offering an on-demand computing and storage environment via Amazon's cloud infrastructure, which will grow and contract according to your needs. The cloud-based software focuses its legal workflow around people, not data. The startup has an intuitive project and document management interface with internal social media features that leverage the skills and knowledge base of the participating members of legal teams. Project team and client collaboration is conducted within a highly secure Amazon compute environment that employs military-grade encryption of data, messages, and files in transit and at rest in storage. NeuLexa offers a free trial.
Covering LegalTech involves searching the exhibit hall and traveling from booth to booth, suite to suite, and sometimes hotel to hotel in search of new products and new features to existing products. This was the first year that a product came to me. Albert Barsocchini, of NightOwl Discovery, introduced me to a one-terabyte external USB drive that comprised the new nVelope Collection Kit 1.0 and asked me if I would like to kick the tires on the reusable $500 self-collection tool.
The nVelope product collects from a computer running Microsoft Windows XP or above with a USB interface. After I unsuccessfully tried booting my system from the USB drive, I booted the local Windows 7 operationg system and ran the NCKLauncher.exe file on the USB drive. The nVelope program opened to a graphical user interface to collect files from my computer. See Figure 3.
Figure 3 shows NightOwl's nVelope Collection Kit user interface. Click image to enlarge.
The nVelope UI gave me options to collect the entire drive, collect selected content on the drive, or engage a "smart collection," with which I could select a file type such as Outlook .pst files to collect. I will review nVelope tomorrow.
Themis Solutions Inc. announced its first "ground-up" redesign at LTNY since the product's first launch five years ago at LegalTech West Coast. The first phase of its redesign improves the user interface. Clio's forms have also been redesigned to make it easier to enter data and provide in-place validation. A new "quick-start" sidebar timer helps users to start, stop, and modify timers in a few mouse-clicks (see Figure 4, below). Additional phases of the redesign will continue to be rolled out over the next few months, the company said.
Figure 4 shows a Clio timer that remains sticky on every browser page. Click on the timer to start, stop, and even open a new timer, which starts and automatically stops concurrent timers.
NEW RESEARCH
Downer's Grove, Ill.-based Microsystems released a new white paper based on a recent survey conducted by ALM Intelligence (like Law Technology News, an ALM holding) and sponsored by Microsystems, designed to identify disconnects in the communication between law firms and their corporate clients. The paper, "Meeting Client Expectations? The Hidden Secret for Improved Satisfaction," describes the challenges that lawyers in law firms and corporate legal departments face and how they meet those challenges with technology.
The ALM survey revealed that law departments and their corporate counsel have a common goal to deliver quality legal products, but that the workflow process can impact a corporate legal department's overall experience and the work product that is delivered.
The survey identified five different areas where law firms can improve on corporate client relations to ensure they do not lose a client due to "sub-par document quality and delivery:
• Deliver high-quality documents on time.
• Improve the reuse of existing work product with a multitude of sources.
• Meet corporate counsel's expectations for document validation.
• Include clients in the drafting process.
• Minimize delivering redline reports via email.
According to the survey, legal departments and law firms generally agree that the overall document exchange and review processs could be better — only about one-quarter of a total of 118 respondents claimed document exchange was adequate. ALM Intelligence gathered data from an email invitation distributed and returned via email between July 9 and August 6, 2012.
Invitations were sent to general counsel, deputy general counsels, and corporate counsels in corporate legal departments for the legal department survey. A total of 118 responses were received from legal departments. Invitations for a separate, but similar survey was sent to attorneys (from Associate to Managing Partner) at U.S. law firms of varying sizes. 107 responses were received from law firms.
ENHANCEMENTS, UPGRADES
The AccessData Group had a number of significant enhancements to its forensic toolkit, FTK 4.2, its mobile phone collection and analyzer tool, Mobile Phone Examiner Plus 5.2.1, and AD Triage 2.1, AD's collection and early-case assessment tool.
FTK 4.2 now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 or 2012, but you will have to provide the license. The Internet Information Server log files can now be viewed in HTML format and be broken up into discreet time records for review. Like the log files, you can process selected Registry files (e.g., SAM and NTUSER.DAT), as individual time records "interspersed" with other data. The new FTK has additional support for compressed PDF files, Apple iWork 09, IBM SmartSuite 9.8, Adobe Creative Suite 5, and Microsoft OneNote 2007/2010, among other file types. The new version can also decrypt Bitlocker in Windows 7 and Vista and visualize web browser history. If that's not enough for a dot release, see the release notes.
AD MPE Plus 5.2.1 includes a SmartDevice app analysis for Android and iOS that automatically pares application data for mobile apps inlcuding Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, and Twitter. The new version supports iOS 6 and 6.0.1 physical images and has updated support for iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini. And in one click, the MPE Plus' iOS and Android images can be parsed for critical user data, deleted logs and SMS texts in the event a device malfunctions. For more information on the new MPE Plus, see the release notes.
The new version of AD Triage 2.1 can come up in kiosk mode to give users the option to select one of the product's predefined profiles to use for collection. The new version captures screens of individual windows whether they are open, minimized, or moved off screen. In addition, the program can interrogate USB devices to obtain information on the first time the OS has seen the peripheral device, the date the device was last mounted, and the user that mounted it, as well as the local device's drive letters and volumes associated with the device. View AD Triage 2.1 release notes.
Catalyst Repository Systems released OnRamp 2013, which was formerly used for customer relations, but now used by Catalyst Insight e-discovery platform. OnRamp's new role is a behind-the-firewall enterprise data integration tool, which helps corporations load data into Catalyst's secure enterprise and cloud repository. OnRamp creates a compressed RAR file of approximately 4 GB or 10,000 documents to upload the file or files to the cloud using Secure Copy Protocol. Although free, the program requirements include a licensed copy of WinRAR 4 ($29.00).
OnRamp 2013 helps corporations and licensees to automatically collect and load structured and unstructured data quickly. The program provides more administrative control to users and works with an XML-database, called MarkLogic. More information.
Portland-based Exterro Inc., an e-discovery and information governance software provider, unveiled a number of advancements to the company's Fusion platform that focus on data management, including automatic document categorization, a wiki/web collector, direct ingestion of forensic files into the ESI vault, as well as data analytics.
Gallivan Gallivan & O'Melia enhanced redaction and privilege management in Digital WarRoom 8.4. See Press release.
Hewlett-Packard Corp. strengthened its e-discovery offerings with new information governance capabilities. Although predictive coding news and information still permeated the exhibit halls, information governance is becoming the talk of the town for many e-discovery providers, offering their technology, like HP, to help organizations automate and simplify the processing of large, diverse data sets.
HP has been an early adopter of applying e-discovery tools to its information governance software. Autonomy's eDiscovery platform is part of its Legal and Compliance Performance Suite. This combination is designed to detect new signals of risk in data and aims to give organizations a leg up in early case assessment of a litigation claim as well as comply with local, federal, and international legal obligations. HP's updates at LegalTech included the extension of its meaning-based coding technology, which uses Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) to automate content analysis, to Autonomy's Early Case Assessment (ECA) module. IDOL categorizes content by concepts, ideas, and patterns of information across single and multiple documents. With the integration of HP's Application Information Optimizer, HP can automate the migration or retirement of data in its Autonomy eDiscovery process as well as ingest and review structured data.
HP's Autonomy also added native discovery functionality to its archiving software. Autonomy released a fully integrated native discovery module that is designed to work with Autonomy Consolidated Archve, an information and governance software offering. ACA indexes and forms an understanding of the content available from various information repositories. In effect, organizations can apply early-case e-discovey across archived material.
Denver-based LawToolBox.com Inc. has added new customization capabilities to its eponymous software-as-a-service offering. The deadlines calculates and tracks deadlines for court cases based on civil procedure rules and automatically synchronizes those deadlines to Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Lexis/Nexis Time Matters, among others. LawToolBox.com now lets you create deadline calendars for related events and practices unique to a specific case.
Nextpoint Inc. continues to enhance Discovery Cloud, Trial Cloud, and Cloud Preservation, which I will review this month. A major new feature in Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud includes the ability to import web mail such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. A custom date-picking widget is now available in Trial Cloud and Cloud Preservation that lets you use custom date stamps when importing documents. Prior to LegalTech, the social media and web-based collection and processing tool unveiled a product to protect privilege.
Viewpointe, a provider of cloud-based information governance software and services, announced a significant release of its information governance platform, OnPointe. The enhancements aim to unify and simplfy early case assessment, review assignments, and legal hold notifications.
NEW PARTNERSHIPS
Catalyst Repository Systems has partnered with Proofpoint, Inc., a security-as-a-service provider that will supply data protection software to Catalyst's cloud-based e-discovery service.
Exterro and TyMetrix, a legal business software provider, announced on January 23 that it will integrate its system with Exterro's Fusion. TyMetrix will add Fusion's legal hold and e-discovery management capabilities to its TyMetrix 360 e-billing and management software.
The Exterro-TyMetrix partnership will allow TyMetrix clients to tag matters requiring legal holds in TyMetrix 360 and transmit relevant matter details to Fusion Legal Hold. Fusion will then update TyMetrix with e-discovery status updates, such as the number of custodians and collection details and associated costs to provide some transparency to the e-discovery process.
Mitratech announced that TeamConnect Deadlines will be available in an upcoming release. Since partnering with Aderant in 2012, Mitratech has been implementing CompuLaw's Deadlines.com engine into its TeamConnect matter management application. With the forthcoming TeamConnect Deadlines, customers will have access to CompuLaw's date calculation engine utilizing a database of court rules.
Thomson Reuters and CQ Roll Call have joined forces to provide WestlawNext customers with exclusive coverage of securities, banking, and energy policy developments in the federal regulatory agencies and Congress. The product, "Washington Briefings," will cover three legal practice areas: securities, banking, and energy. CQ Roll Call Washington Securities Briefing, Washington Banking Briefing, and Washington Energy Briefing will appear in Practitioner Insights — new practice area-specific pages on WestlawNext — later in the first quarter.
Attorney Sean Doherty is LTN's technology editor.
