eDiscovery Daily Blog

• February 11, 2013

This is the first of the 2013 LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and generally asked each of them the following questions:

1. What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?
2. If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?
3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Brad Jenkins of CloudNine Discovery.  Brad has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, as well as 14 years leading customer focused companies in the litigation support arena. Brad also writes the Litigation Support Industry Blog, which covers news about litigation support and e-discovery companies’ funding activities, acquisitions & mergers and notable business successes. He has authored many articles on document management and litigation support issues, and has appeared as a speaker before national audiences on document management practices and solutions.  He’s also my boss!   🙂

What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?

Well, clearly the technology assisted review/predictive coding wave is the most popular topic here at the show.  I think I counted at least six sessions discussing the topic and numerous vendors touting their tools.  And, this blog covered it and the cases using quite a bit last year.  I’m sure you’ll hear that from a lot of the folks you’re interviewing.

Another trend that I’m seeing is integration of applications to make the discovery process more seamless, especially the integration of cloud-based collection and review applications.  We have an alliance with BIA and their TotalDiscovery legal hold and collection tool, which can export data into our review application, OnDemand®, which our clients are using quite successfully to collect data and move it along the process.  I think the “best of breed” approach between an application that’s focused on the left side of the EDRM model and one that’s focused on the right side is an approach that makes sense for a lot of organizations.

If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?

I’m not sure that I see just one thing as the “next big thing”.  I certainly see the continued focus on integration of applications as one big thing.  Another big thing that I see is a broadening acceptance of technology assisted review from more than just predictive coding.  For example, clustering similar documents together can make review more efficient and more accurate and we provide that in OnDemand through our partnership with Hot Neuron’s Clustify™.

Perhaps the biggest thing that I see is education and adoption of the technology.  Many lawyers still don’t actively use the technology and don’t find the applications intuitive.  We’ve worked hard to make OnDemand easy to use, requiring minimal or no training.  A lot of vendors tout their products as easy to use, but we’re backing our claim with our free no risk trial of OnDemand that includes free data assessment, free native processing, free data load and free first month hosting for the first data set on any new OnDemand project.  We feel that we have a team of “Aces” and a hand full of aces is almost impossible to beat.  So, the free no risk trial reflects our confidence that clients that try OnDemand will embrace its ease-of-use and self-service features and continue to use it and us for their discovery needs.

What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

In addition to our integration success with BIA, our partnership with Clustify and our free no risk trial, we’re also previewing the initial release of the mobile version of OnDemand.  The first mobile version will be designed for project administrators to add users and maintain user rights, as well as obtain key statistics about their projects.  It’s our first step toward our 2013 goal of making OnDemand completely platform independent and we are targeting a third quarter release of a new redesigned version of OnDemand that will support that goal.

Thanks, Brad, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.