E-Discovery: From Incident-Driven To Strategic Installation
E-Discovery is one of the latest buzzwords in the document management industry. According to Dr. Johannes Scholtes, president and CEO of ZyLab, it’s really just a new name for a type of implementation his company has been doing for several years. What Scholtes is seeing is an evolution of e-discovery from an incident-driven market to one more tightly integrated with knowledge management.
“What’s known today as e-discovery used to be called investigation,” said Scholtes. “We’ve been doing it for years. In fact, O.J. Simpson’s defense team used our technology back in the mid-1990s; so did the FBI for the Enron case. The FBI was actually one of our first customers; going back to 1983. The FBI helped fund development of our search tools when PCs were being introduced.
“Historically, we’ve always had two major customer sets—law enforcement and law firms. Now, we’re starting to see commercial organizations do their own investigations. This has been great for expanding our market, because there are only a limited number of law enforcement agencies. Also, we’ve found that, because lawyers typically charge by the hour, they aren’t necessarily motivated to install technology that will make the investigation process more efficient.”
Cutting discovery costs in half
According to figures Scholtes has compiled, the document production and collection portion of an investigation accounts for 30% of the cost. “The remaining 70% is related to the review of documents, which has to be performed by attorneys,” said Scholtes. “Our software can reduce the production and collection costs by 90% through automated searches for key words and other identifiers to determine which documents are relevant and also converting paper and e-mail to TIFFs that can be uploaded into case management systems. This conversion step alone can cost several hundred dollars per GB if you use a service bureau.
“In addition, because our search is so advanced, we can typically reduce the number of documents that need to be reviewed. This can reduce the cost of a review by up to 50%. We advertise that we can reduce the overall cost of an investigation by more than 50%.”
Evolving from tactical to strategic
As companies bring their investigations in-house, Scholtes said it leads to their leveraging content management for other purposes. “Initially, people bought our software for incident handling,” he said. “They had a trial they had to prepare for, so they’d install our software to help them with the discovery. Often, their decision to buy would come after they’d already been hit a few times with document prep costs and decided it would be less expensive to move some of this work in-house. It doesn’t take too many cases to pay for a $50,000-$100,000 e-discovery system.
“The next step, for companies in high-risk industries or that find themselves being sued a lot, is to start running our investigative tools as a preventative measure. In other words, these customers monitor their data to stop incidents before they occur.
“Of course, I’ve given you two fear-driven reasons for buying. The fact is, once you’ve captured all this information, you can start applying knowledge management to it for more positive purposes. For example, a customer may install a system in HR to guard against sexual discrimination suits. They can leverage that same knowledge base for something like searching the resumes of their current employees to fill openings. We have a legal services customer that has more 60,000 contracts online that it can leverage when it needs to come up with content for new contracts.”
We noted that, while most ECM vendors are currently looking to build out their e-discovery capabilities, ZyLab seems to be going the other way. “Anything to do with searching and locating information is our focus,” said Scholtes. “We started with imaged paper records, which are still important, but we now also search tremendous amounts of e-mail.”
For more information: http://www.zylab.com |
