As we all finish unpacking from LegalTech New York 2014, it's time to sum up the key news from the annual conference. It can be difficult for legal technology vendors to start each new year. Product development for legal technology happens year-round and at any point in time, a manufacturer will have a new product and service, or an update to an existing one. For example, prior to LTNY 2013, Cicayda launched its Firmata Legal Hold software that sits atop the e-discovery software as a service provider’s proprietary search NLP (natural language processing) analytics engine.
Since LTNY 2013, Cicayda released Staccato ECA, which culls and reduces data sets by de-NISTing and de-duplicating data, and Drone, a data production analyzer that provides an analysis of key people, organization, dates and other entity relationships in a document. Then prior to LTNY 2014, the Nashville-based company announced that it had raised $3.8 million in B-round capital investment. So if I was only interested in what was new at LTNY 2014, I would have been disappointed had I not “leaned in” to my conversation with Roe Frazier, CEO of Cicayda.
I had a similar “what’s new” conversation with Johannes Scholtes, chairman and chief strategy officer of ZyLAB Technologies. Last October, ZyLAB improved its multimedia search with the company’s eDiscovery Bundle 3.4. The latest bundle can search audio or video files with words or phrases without having to transcribe and listen to each file. Reviewers can now create queries that list results, which can be automatically redacted, e.g., personally identifiable information, or PII. And in addition to duplicate detection and handling, ZyLAB can locate near-duplicates using a numeric score for similarity and surface them for review and tagging.
Jay Lieb and Kit Mackie, founders of NexLP, continued to tell me stories of how the NexLP Story Engine works to unfold a story about big data. The NexLP Story Engine is designed to input big data, such as e-discovery data sets or the results of a corporate investigation, and output profiles of people, places and events that can help you plan a litigation or settle a claim. NexLP’s analysis and visualization of data from a Graph Database make it one of the most interesting companies to watch in the e-discovery and compliance space. NexLP’s Story Engine provides a stand-alone service and is part of the kCura Relativity ecosystem. (For more on “Letting Data Tell the Winning Litigation Story,” see the Second Annual Electronic Discovery Conference at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law.)
E-discovery vendors at LTNY 2014 did not introduce a watershed of new technology, such as when predictive coding and computer-assisted review technology surfaced in products by OrcaTec, Recommind, and others. There were, however, two major trends at LTNY this year that continued from 2013:
E-discovery technology continues to get easier, more graphical and increasingly mobile—with cloud-based options.
Predictive coding technology is creeping out of e-discovery and litigation support to facilitate, forecast and automate tasks in governance, risk management and compliance.
EASY, GRAPHICAL, MOBILE AND CLOUD
Legal professionals include lawyers and paralegals, but generally not computer engineers and scientists. Legal professionals want legal technology and computing to be easy so they can focus on the business and practice of law. Vendors are listening and making easy complex e-discovery tasks using advanced graphical user interfaces and visualization tools that summarize and display aggregate and complex data.
Advanced Discovery, an e-discovery software provider, enhanced views of e-discovery data analysis and document review for the popular review platform kCura Relativity at LTNY. AD also unveiled stand-alone Web views of e-discovery with its new Advanced Visibility version 2.1 release. The new release, based on HTML5, adds support for all Web browsers, an iPad version, an updated graphical dashboard and two new tools: Search Magnifier and Budget Builder.
AD’s Search Magnifier overlays and makes easy complex DT search strategies comprising multiple Boolean and proximity searches using keywords and phrases. The search tool allows you to add and remove entire search strategies to hone search results that can be viewed quickly with hit highlights. Search result statistics include word and document hit counts along with unique document hit counts.
AD’s Budget Builder is designed to build or modify an e-discovery budget at any task along the Electronic Discovery Reference Model from early case assessment to production. You can create a budget and view various scenarios prior to engaging e-discovery and adjust the budget as you compare your forecast to actual numbers as the project ensues—all in a rich graphical user interface.
FTI Technology, a business segment of FTI Consulting Inc., announced the launch of version 8.4 of Ringtail e-discovery software. The new version enhances the training features of the program’s predictive coding function, allowing users to get started sooner and knowing when to stop training.
Ringtail version 8.4 supports small sets to train a predictive coding model. Rather than manually review thousands of training documents, you can begin the training by coding 100 or more documents. Then Ringtail’s active learning feature uses the coded materials to determine the best documents to continue training the predictive coding model. Using the new model training dashboard, Ringtail users can realize the productivity gains of each additional training document to better determine when to stop training and apply the current model to predict a data set relevant to litigation or investigation. Ringtail 8.4 also enhanced the visualization tools it launched last year so you can better understand a predictive coding model.
Ringtail 8.4 includes a new French user interface for reviewers and administrators and an improved batch printing feature. The new version will be available to Ringtail on-demand, on-premise and software-as-a-service users in March 2014.
HP Autonomy announced at LTNY a new cloud-based e-discovery offering of HP Autonomy’s eDiscovery platform. HP eDiscovery OnDemand delivers from a private, secure cloud the entire Autonomy platform, including processing early case assessment, review and production. The new cloud offering combines the elements of a full-service outsourced offering and on-premise software, with a range of customer control, simplicity of a web-based design, and the cost savings of not operating software on-site.
iCONECT Development unveiled iView, the e-discovery software maker’s new visualization engine. iView works with Xera, a hosted e-discovery review platform, to provide users with graphing tools to make interactive pie, bar and line charts that represent user activity, document coding, metadata and interrelations among data points. From the charts, you can kick off search queries, review tasks, and drill down into data in one click.
Lateral Data, a Xerox company, showcased the new version of Viewpoint, an all-in-one e-discovery platform. The new version 5.6 has a new user interface and extensive early-case assessment features that allow you to analyze data early in the e-discovery process. Viewpoint’s Relationship Analyzer tool now has dynamic visualization tools designed to analyze more data, faster than before. It’s now quick and easy to view communications between domains and email addresses and identify spikes in communication between custodians, as well as identify communication patterns of interest. Version 5.6 boasts faster password decryption, a more efficient search interface and more robust reporting.
Recommind Inc. released Axcelerate 5 with a new HTML5 interface featuring intuitive controls for multiple computer and mobile platforms and advanced work-flow and visualization tools to increase project management control and review productivity. As seen at LTNY, Hypergraph, a visual representation of interrelationships among custodians and other entities, can identify data risks, surface hidden data, validate collection decisions and discover key documents quickly, and visually. The HTML5 viewer can redact documents on the fly without waiting for .tif conversion and use text analytics to automatically find personally identifiable information in a document set and redact it.
PREDICTIVE CODING EVERYWHERE
Predictive coding technology is starting to bleed through the traditional EDRM, finding application in governance, risk management and compliance tasks. Equivio announced at LTNY the launch of Zoom for Information Governance. Equivio’s predictive coding software aims to automate records retention and remediate risk in legacy data, which the software maker labels “dark data.”
Equivio, a provider of Zoom data analysis software for e-discovery, has recast its predictive coding technology as an information governance tool. Zoom for Information Goverance is learning software that can be trained to automatically classify documents into various categories for retention, remediation or removal.
Equivio Zoom for Information Governance training dashboard. Click image to enlarge.
In addition to the ability to train Zoom to identify documents to retain or defensibly delete, the program features include clustering, data profiling, pivot analysis and email threading. The Zoom architecture is designed to support integration with third-party, on-premise and cloud-based repositories. It is an add-on, not a replacement, for a company’s existing archiving and records management systems.
Mindseye Solutions, an e-discovery and work-flow technology provider, announced on Feb. 5 an update to its e-discovery platform, TunnelVision. The new TunnelVision version 4 includes new analytic capabilties and an updated user interface supported by HTML5. The Web-based Decision Engine is redesigned to provide visual navigation and data analysis and apply predictive analytic capabilities at the processing stage, allowing organizations to take control of data early in the discovery process and, in turn, control costs, said CEO Bob Krantz, in a press release. TunnelVision 4 is powered by Content Analyst and now includes conceptual search and document categorization, dynamic clustering, email threading, near-duplicate detection, and conceptual mapping.
UBIC, a provider of Asian-language e-discovery software, demonstrated at LTNY its new suite of data analytics tools for e-discovery and risk management that are now part of the Lit i View technology platform. The new tools, Behavior Informatics and Virtual Data Scientist, comprise UBIC’s “Future Discovery” software designed to manage risk and compliance in real time and anticipate and reveal dubious behavior before it becomes legally actionable. BI mines large data sets to provide insights to human interaction; VDS works with BI to analyze data and make inferences and deductions to discover trends and patterns in human communications.
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