eDiscovery Daily Blog

• April 9, 2018

This is the tenth of the 2018 Legaltech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscovery Daily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year (and some afterward) to get their observations regarding trends at the show and generally within the eDiscovery industry.

Today’s thought leader is Brad Jenkins.  Brad is CEO of CloudNine™.  Brad has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, as well as 18 years leading customer focused companies in the litigation technology arena. Brad consults clients on implementing best practices in litigation document management and the impact of technology on managing discovery. Brad is very involved in eDiscovery educational efforts and currently serves as the President of the Houston ACEDS Chapter.  He’s also my boss!  :o)

What were your impressions of LTNY this year?

Personally, I was in meetings with clients, partners and analysts during most of the conference, so I don’t have a lot of observations to share.  It seemed as though a lot of people with whom I was meeting didn’t spend a lot of time at the conference either.  That seems to have become a trend – a lot of people come to New York for LTNY each year (from a lot of corporations, law firms and providers), but it seems that more and more of them are using that opportunity to set up meetings because LTNY provides that opportunity to meet in person.  More attendees seem to actually be spending their time at meetings at hotels near the Hilton instead of actually at the show in the Hilton.

From a CloudNine perspective, we had a booth in the exhibit hall and, from what I understand (and also observed when I stopped by the booth), traffic was generally good.  Though I’ve heard from others overall that traffic in the exhibit hall was down again this year and there were less providers again this year.  CloudNine also co-hosted the “Drinks with Doug and Mary” happy hour at Ruth’s Chris Steak house on Wednesday, along with ACEDS and our partner Compliance Discovery.  That was a huge success, as we had an overflow of people register for the event and a full house during the happy hour.  One of the best things about Legaltech is the opportunity to network with others in the industry and it’s still one of the best conferences for that.

If you were “king of LTNY” for a year, what changes would you make?

I would consider moving the conference to a larger venue – one that provided a large number of meeting rooms for the meetings that currently take place near the show at nearby hotels, so those meetings could actually be held right there at the show.  Assuming they charged a reasonable rate for the meeting rooms, Legaltech could then keep more of the attendees plugged into the show itself and those people could attend sessions and check out the providers in the exhibit hall much more easily.

CloudNine just recently acquired the eDiscovery product lines (Concordance, LAW PreDiscovery and Early Data Analyzer) from LexisNexis.  Why did CloudNine decide to acquire these products and what does CloudNine intend to do with them?

For CloudNine, the opportunity through this acquisition to offer a hybrid of both on-premise and off-premise solutions simply made sense to us as a way to support customer needs regardless of their eDiscovery task, security, and cost requirements.  This purchase enables us to immediately begin serving the on-premise segment with a portfolio of proven and performing products and it provides us the technology that will enable us to deliver fully integrated and automated solutions that can address off-premise requirements, on-premise requirements and combined on/off-premise (hybrid) requirements through a single provider.

CloudNine has been a user of the purchased product line offerings for more than a decade, so we understand what they can do today and the potential of what they can do in the future.  As an example, our production team uses LAW daily to support our clients’ processing and production needs.  Just as the daily use of our CloudNine SaaS platform enables us to uniquely understand how our customers use the product – because we are using it to accomplish the same tasks they are – our regular use of the acquired products provides that same level of unique understanding of how they are used as well.

As for our plans for the products, CloudNine plans to invest significant resources in the support, development, enhancement, and availability of these products.  They will be offered as solutions available as part of the CloudNine portfolio of offerings.  Our acquisition of these products includes the current development and support teams, so the customers using these products will be working with the same people that have been supporting their use of the products today, helping to ensure a smooth transition at the outset.  Our short-term plans include technology integration of our existing cloud offerings and our new on-premise offerings to support client needs by developing connectors using our Outpost technology to automate and accelerate data transfer.  CloudNine partners will also benefit from the purchase as it will give them additional access to proven eDiscovery offerings that will see that significant investment in development and support that I mentioned.

Our ability to acquire and invest in these products is facilitated by our new capital partners, Peak Rock Capital.  Peak Rock’s principals have extensive experience working with businesses in the technology and software industries and they have considerable experience with these types of transactions, so they will be integral to our plans to support and enhance the products.

We know that customers of these products likely have questions (as do others), so we prepared an FAQ document to help address as many of those common questions as possible.  We have already begun to reach out to existing customers for their feedback on the products and encourage them to reach out to us, as well, to enable us to understand what features and capabilities they would like to see added.  If you’re a recent or current customer of these products, we want to hear from you!

What would you like our readers to know about things you’re working on?

Isn’t that enough? {laughs}  Actually, one personal item to note is my involvement in starting a new chapter of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) in Houston.  I’m the current President of the Houston chapter and our chapter has been in existence for several months now.  The Houston ACEDS chapter just conducted a panel discussion earlier this month on Technology Assisted Review that was very well received and we look forward to future ACEDS events in Houston.

As for CloudNine, we’re obviously very excited about not only our recent acquisition, but about accomplishments at the company as a whole.  Earlier this year, we announced a new preservation and collection capability for CloudNine and, in just the past few days, CloudNine was highlighted in G2 Crowd’s Spring 2018 Grid Report for eDiscovery as one of the best eDiscovery software solutions based on customer satisfaction.  We’re very proud of the highly positive feedback we get from customers for our CloudNine platform and look forward extending that to our new product offerings.  We also continue to emphasize eDiscovery education through this blog and through our monthly webcasts on hot topics related to eDiscovery, information governance and cybersecurity.  All of these initiatives continue to further our mission of simplifying the discovery process for our customers and for others in the legal industry.  The more things change, the more our mission of simplifying discovery remains the same.

Thanks, Brad, for participating in the interview!

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

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation.  Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

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