In the course of reporting our October cover story, “Defending Big Data,” Law Technology News sent out a request for information to legal technology vendors that participated in LegalTech New York 2012. We acknowledged the emergence of Big Data and the tension that exists in mining, exploiting, and monetizing customer data versus the security and privacy of that data. We then asked the vendors “if they have launched or will be launching products and services addressing Big Data.” LTN received a number of responses that show that, for the most part, that legal technologies addressing Big Data are focused on the production of evidence in litigation and government investigations, and not the extraction of customer or consumer preference.
Paul Bond, partner at Reed Smith, said in the cover story that Big Data “is used to characterize the escalating accumulation of data, especially the data sets too large, too raw, or too unstructured for analysis by conventional techniques.” Bond’s reference to “conventional techniques” is to the use of relational databases which do a great job managing uniform data in data sets that we thought were large, until Big Data, he said.
