eDiscovery Daily Blog

• February 14, 2013

This is the second 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 Ray Zwiefelhofer of World Software (Worldox).  Ray has over twenty years of experience within the technology and legal services market, offering professional, consulting, technology management and product solutions with an emphasis on working with AMLAW 250 & Fortune 500 organizations.  He has founded and served in President/CEO/CIO positions at software startups and as a CTO at a Fortune 500 company.  Prior to joining World Software, Ray was the Founder/CEO of nQueue a global cost recovery company where he patented and spearheaded the change from a hardware-based to software-based cost recovery model. Ray has also worked previously at include the Thomas Kinkade Network, Bowne, Imagineer, Equitrac and Diebold.

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

We felt the show has been terrific.  The traffic has appeared to be of higher quality than normal with many clients wanting a private demo and follow-up. Very typically, a post-review from prior shows included comments of the masses that just swung by to grab a pen or giveaway.  This year’s LegalTech attendees appear to be a more serious decision making audience.  The trends we saw continually popping up during the show included information governance, the cloud and big data.

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 think the first “next big thing” will be the continued race for mobility and platform flexibility such as cloud computing. Even the largest vendors at the show announced their focus on more cloud computing initiatives. I believe over the coming years, if this trend continues at the pace it has been keeping, there will be less talk about the cloud because prospects will just assume a vendor’s company has a cloud product.  It will be standard, like back when software was ‘network capable.’  Having spent 25 years in this market, I never thought we would see this heavy motivation to move to ‘hosted computing’, but hey, it’s here, so we must embrace it or get left behind!

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

At World Software, we continue to fulfill our vision of anywhere anytime document access, on the platform of our clients’ choice.  I believe long-gone is the day when we as vendors can dictate what the client needs to run our products.  At LegalTech NY, we launched our new GX3 cloud product which completes our suite of offerings, delivering the same technology as our client-server based product (Worldox GX3 Professional,) and our ‘on-premise’ cloud solution (GX3 enterprise) which sits behind the firm’s firewall on their servers. GX3 Cloud is hosted in our data center and is offered for a low monthly fee.

Thanks, Ray, 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.