In A Legal Fix? Call Legato

It seems clear that New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has done more to spur development in the financial-services technology sphere than anyone on Wall Street. In fact, Legato Software is building a line of business around the capability of responding to one of Spitzer's subpoenas - specifically, responding to large-but-specific requests from investigators for company e-mails.

Chris Gray, vice president of compliance solutions for Legato, a division of EMC Corp., says that not having the proper technology in place means not being able to respond cost-effectively to an official request for information. To help firms prepare for such an unenviable eventuality, Legato is hard at work developing "advanced-litigation or investigation-support" technologies.

"The current models of investigative support are too costly," Gray says. "The reason for that is the support is broken into two activities - one hits IT and the other hits legal staff. We are working on the first integrated model where legal staff can work directly against native message stores," he asserts. According to Gray, Legato provides a lower-cost and faster alternative by allowing legal departments to directly and automatically work with a body of archived e-mail. He says that part of the solution is available now, with other parts slated for completion later this year. Gray adds that Legato is working on the type of "five-nine availability" (99.999 percent reliable) that financial-services firms require from their software and infrastructure equipment.