E-Discovery Shapes Up for Fresh Challenges

With vendors gearing up for the fall product onslaught, laptops, advanced search technologies, and archiving partnerships are all looming large on the e-discovery agenda.

First up is Kazeon Systems, which announced its laptop and desktop e-discovery plans at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)s annual conference in Grapevine, Texas, this week.

Laptops have already been highlighted as one of the major challenges in e-discovery , particularly implementing a laptop "legal hold" where data cannot be changed or deleted.

“It’s pretty complex to do any analysis and e-discovery on laptops,” says Sudhakar Muddu, Kazeon’s CEO. “Because most large enterprises have hundreds of thousands of desktops, it’s virtually impossible to install an agent.”

For this reason, Kazeon has built a set of "spiders" and "crawlers," which can perform "agentless" e-discovery into the latest version its IS1200-ECS appliance.“We have developed networking "spiders" and "crawlers" and we go into the OS of the laptop and access the filers,” says Muddu. “We can discover the file systems and the documents on each of them.”

Kazeon’s virtual creepy crawlies communicate with the OS, the file system access protocols, the TCP/IP protocols, and the email repositories to lock down sensitive documents.

"We send a command out to change the metadata permissions, security permissions, and ownership permissions,” says Muddu, adding that eight early adopters are currently testing the technology.

Kazeon’s rival Autonomy Zantaz already offers desktop and laptop legal hold, although this requires a piece of client software running on the devices.

The Kazeon CEO nonetheless admits that, with a $30,000 list price for IS1200-ECS version 3.1, the solution is not suited to all users’ needs.”If you just want two or three laptops [covered], somebody could just get an agent [installed on the devices,]” he says. “Our soft spot is in the tens or hundreds or thousands of laptops.”

Another vendor ramping up its e-discovery efforts in Texas this week is Clearwell Systems, which is keen to differentiate legal documents from other types of search technology.

“There’s a divergence of search occurring, particularly when you think about Web search, enterprise search, and e-discovery search,” says Kamal Shah, Clearwell’s vice president of marketing. “Saying that one category can be applied to all kinds of search is like saying that someone can win the 100 meter dash and the marathon in the Olympics.”

The exec explains that enterprise search and Web search typically involve personal documents, whereas e-discovery, by definition, is linked to some form of litigation. Crucially, firms must prove that they can "defend" their e-discovery search criteria in court, or risk sanctions, something that does not apply to other forms of search technology.

With the version 4.0 of its e-discovery solution, the vendor has introduced a technique called "transparent search," which it claims will make life easier for corporate attorneys.Transparent search encompasses features such as "search preview," which lets users exclude false positives and irrelevant documents. Search "filters," which sample filtered documents, have also been built into the vendor’s solution, and Clearwell is also touting the ability to run large numbers of queries simultaneously.

“Now, you can run your searched in minutes rather than days,” says Shah. “Transparent search enables attorneys to defend their search in court in the same way that Sarbanes Oxley enables CFOs to defend their financial statements in court.”

Unlike rival Autonomy Zantaz, which takes a software-based approach to e-discovery, there is a hardware component to Clearwell’s solution. Version 4.0 of the vendor’s technology, for example, consists of a two rack-unit high appliance running Clearwell software, which connects to email servers, file servers, and archive systems.

By opting for hardware as opposed to a software-based approach, Shah claims that deploying the technology is much easier for users. “We can be up and running in your environment in 25 minutes,” he says.

Users looking to run Clearwell’s latest e-discovery offering will nonetheless have to dig deep in their corporate coffers. Pricing for version 4.0 of the vendor’s system starts at $65,000 for 100 Gbytes of data, although Shah claims that manually preparing the data for e-discovery can cost around $1,800 per Gbyte.Another vendor banging the e-discovery drum in the lone star state is CommVault, which today threw its weight behind the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), an organization for developing e-discovery guidelines and standards.

In addition to Kazeon, Clearwell, and CommVault, FTI Consulting will also be making an e-discovery announcement this week based on technology from its recent Attenex acquisition.

FTI will open up APIs in version 5.0 of Attenex’s e-discovery software tomorrow, enabling users to integrate the technology with technologies such as Symantec Enterprise Vault and Kazeon’s Information Server.

Other vendors demo'ing in Sin City this week include StoredIQ, which unveiled the latest version of its eDiscovery appliance on Monday, and Guidance Software, which recently overhauled the pricing for its EnCase product.

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