DiscoveryMining

By now the news has hit the wires and we are excited to announce that
Interwoven, a global leader in content management solutions, has
announced its intent to acquire Discovery Mining. I am a big ‘Lord of
the Rings’ fan. My dad read all the books to me as a kid. This news
makes me think of our favorite hobbit Bilbo Baggins. At the end of the
book Bilbo talks about the road ahead, and how finding the ring is just
the beginning. The Hobbit and Bilbo’s road ahead is why we have three of
the greatest pieces of the fantasy genre ever written.

Interwoven and Discovery Mining each bring complimentary strengths and a
shared vision for a clear, defined, ‘Road Ahead’ to the legal industry.
Discovery Mining will still continue to provide the best review product
with the best service, as evidenced in the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann
Electronic Data Discovery report. Interwoven’s solution for organizing,
finding, and governing matter content is recognized as ‘best in class’,
and their customer satisfaction rate is significantly higher than the
industry norm.

As Discovery Mining joins Interwoven we now have a greater pool of
resources to draw from.The combination is a formidable one, with global
reach in over 50 countries with nearly 4,400 customers of which over
1,700 are professional services firms. This global vision and strategic
combination of two of the top providers in their respective categories
will give legal professionals the confidence, resources, and technology
to make their jobs easier.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been able to get to know the team at
Interwoven. The combination of our two companies is going to change the
dynamics of this market. Now law firms can use Interwoven solutions to
manage the entire spectrum of content associated with a matter—with
speed and with confidence.

Reflecting on the six year roller coaster, from founding Discovery
Mining to this announcement, I have realized that this is only the end
of book one. With the exciting road ahead there are still many chapters
to be written.

I think I can speak for all of Discovery Mining and say that we’re
excited to join the Interwoven team and we continue to look forward to
providing the best software and service in the electronic discovery market.

At Discovery Mining, we pride ourselves on our platform and our customer service. In the 6th annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report, Discovery Mining has been ranked as a top provider, as well as a top 5 provider in the two areas most important to us, Review and Law Firm Rankings.

Top 5 Provider of Review
Considering this is our flagship offering, being ranked amongst the top 5 review platforms validates why we are here. Our proprietary software is designed specifically to address the most critical factors affecting litigation today, and we are proud to have it be recognized in the top 5.

Top 5 Electronic Discovery Service Providers - Law Firm Rankings
This is probably the rank we are most proud of. We have an amazing staff who work hard to continually keep our clients needs top of mind. We consider the Firms we work with to be partners, not just clients.

Thanks again to the community for thinking of Discovery Mining for your next case.

In this weeks’ Newsfactor, three companies were interviewed about ‘e-discovery’. The article focuses on compliance and archiving, but it also covers FRCP and how broad and deep your e-discovery plans should be. It highlights a few important factors, which could provide a better guideline to clients as to what questions to ask of prospective vendors. Although the article avoids any talk of market direction, I found it interesting that they decided to add Google to the mix.

When asked about their e-discovery approach, Google was very direct with their answer “we are working with partners in the e-discovery ecosystem to ensure that our data can be imported into other technologies”. It’s a good answer, but also highlights how tough the e-discovery process really is. It is not difficult to build search, or buy technology to process data and make images. The challenge is managing all of it from one single repository with real time updates, search, and production.

This is why Discovery Mining uses the SaaS model. It is simply the only way to crunch and search terabytes in a cost efficient and timely way. Not only does the “cloud” afford you on-demand software, it also comes with great service.

I’ve said this many times before, but the article sums it up nicely; E-Discovery is both a business problem and a technology problem. Giving clients access to the best technology in a SaaS model allows them to solve both the business issues and technology issues at the lowest price point.

Come on down!

At Discovery Mining we receive a lot of feedback about pricing from customers and potential customers. Even in our London office, they require parity with US pricing, but we are always competitive. There has recently been talk about the cost of filtering data and paying for “data you don’t need”. I did a post in May about the cost of processing and my philosophy about the “true” cost of processing data. As we know, there is a cost to doing business. However, one should ask, “Where do you recoup that baseline price so that you’re not out of business in a few months?” Google™ gives away so much free stuff that they are now going to charge their employees above market rate for childcare.

As I’ve said over and over, Discovery Mining focuses its pricing on the value it ADDS to the process. Our free TIFF imaging is a good example of that. The market, at least at LegalTech West Coast, seems to be saying “processing data we don’t need isn’t a value add”. While I do agree with this in principle, it takes a tremendous amount of CPU cycles to pre-process data. Typically, our pricing involves a small fee to process (cull, de-dupe, text extraction, search, upload data preparation) and another fee to upload data to our system. Getting back to our philosophy, we charge where the value lies and we think we’ve got a great answer.

In anticipation of a MAJOR feature release we are working on, we’ve decided to be preemptive and offer the related new pricing to the market now. While there is a marginal value to pre-processing data, our value-add is getting data online fast and making review easier. With this in mind we’ve decided to drop the price for pre-processing data and only charge upload, sub $1000, for data that makes it through the criteria. Now at Discovery Mining we have only three basic charges: Uploading, Monthly Hosting, and Loadfile Creation fees.

The nice thing about designing our own software is the flexibility in feature releases and the ability to tie our business costs to price points. This allows us to meet market demand while still keeping the lights on. Enjoy our new pricing and stay tuned for new features which will demonstrate why and how we’re staying with our core pricing philosophy.

Project Management. This is one aspect of an eDiscovery project that is critical to your case’s success. Your Project Manager needs to understand requirements, define the project scope, and actively assess risk, as well as identify and communicate change requests that either affect your overall review strategy and/or your project budget.

The importance of a competent eDiscovery Project Manager isn’t the topic at hand however. We already know the critical nature of this role when engaging a project that essentially turns unstructured datasets into structured datasets. Rather, I would like to raise the question “How do we account for this type of service from a cost and budgeting perspective?” Do clients prefer to have this service built into the costs of processing and hosting their eDiscovery project or is it preferable to separate the cost as a line item all together?

Here at Discovery Mining we provide Project Management services as courtesy to all projects, whether it is a 2 GB case or a 20 TB case. Your Project Manager is responsible for the coordination of the forensics and collections, data processing, reporting, training, supporting and ultimately, the production process. From end to end, the Project Manager is your advocate for the Discovery Mining system and with a partnership approach in mind, they will guide you on how to best use Discovery Mining in order to reach your goals. This is all built in. If you request something that is outside the normal scope of support, are we going to charge you? Sure, but we always let you know up front in case you want to change your mind.

Other firms in our space account for these services differently. The services outlined above are all billed by the hour. Do you have a question about a processing report and need to pick up the phone to speak with your Project Manager? You can expect another one-hour “Project Management – consulting” line item on your invoice. Receive your invoice at month-end and need more details on what this one-hour fee was for? Pick up the phone and call your Project… actually, that may not be the best idea as that may result in another hour billed.

Some may argue that splitting the processing and support charges provides transparency during the budget planning and vendor selection phases. I think it does quite the opposite; as accurate project scope is often unclear at the onset. Is it reasonable to expect one to be able to make accurate budget assessments of how many Project Management hours will be billed based on GB count and the expected duration of the review period?

I believe our approach of providing Project Management as a courtesy service is not only key to the success of your discovery project, it is also key to keeping your costs from skyrocketing due to unforeseen billable hours of Project Management services. If your costs do skyrocket, it is more likely due to the handful of custodians at your client’s Timbuktu satellite office that happened to have been forgotten.

One of the first things we did on founding Discovery Mining was join the Yahoo Litsupport group. This was, and still is, though to a lesser degree, a very useful insight into the issues facing litigation professionals. One of the topics that always intrigued us was how much people seemed to like TIFF images; as pioneers of native file review, it was a mystery to us why someone would wish to see a “picture” of a file rather than the real thing.

Another favorite topic was vendor-bashing. Many of those posting to the group would go to great lengths to make sure that they prevented vendors from expressing opinions, even if those opinions were based on experience and likely to be useful. No doubt some had been “burned” by unscrupulous providers, shamelessly claiming to resolve every complicated issue at a fraction of the price of their competitors by “first thing tomorrow morning” but it seemed the resentment was often much deeper than that.

It’s a pity that we all get lumped into the same category; at Discovery Mining, we pride ourselves on the quality of our customer service. A team of professional project managers and customer service representatives, headed by our VP of Client Services, provide on demand support at no charge to our customers. Internally we take this role so seriously, we have dubbed our VP as VP of Customer Happiness!

So I certainly will avoid any generalized client-bashing, but I would like to offer up some thoughts for improving cooperation and trust.

Law firms tend to be slow and disorganized when it comes to paying vendor bills. Often an invoice will sit on a partner’s desk for any time up to several weeks before it is re-billed to the client, and our invoice may not be paid until the law firm’s bill is paid. Many of our bills never seem to find their way to an accounts payable department, so tracking their payment status can seem like a job for a private investigator. And how many times do we hear “I never received your invoice, please send a copy”? Aren’t we all such Discovery experts that we can tell exactly when our email with the attachment was delivered?

The result of all this is that it represents a great victory for us when we keep our accounts receivable under 90 days. Unfortunately, however, that is a lot of working capital to finance, and distracts from our main focus of providing timely cost effective discovery services!

Prompt payment allows better cash management, which in turn allows prices to fall. I know I am speaking for the whole vendor community when I wish for the reduction of payment friction, and the benefits we all reap when any type of vendor/firm friction is reduced.

I just read Craig Ball’s post about using keywords to search for privilege, then producing the resultant set. He lays out a nice argument for eDiscovery keyword search, which he calls the “blunt instrument”. Search is a great tool for many purposes, but I prefer to frame it in terms of Analytics versus Review.

I take Review to mean exactly that, reading documents. Users look at the documents, review them (read them) and then make a decision based on strategy or obligation. Analytics is also the reference point I would use for conceptual or topical searches. Both functionalities analyze the data and allow you to logically group the documents into ‘like’ buckets. Discovery Mining offers the latest in all of these technologies, semantic and keyword, plus the analytics for grouping documents, yet I would not call this Review.

It is tough for me to admit, because I am a search engineer at heart, but nothing beats a good set of eyes on a page. There are studies which make the case that computers are just as effective at making a determination of relevance as humans. But with everything that is at stake, I understand why Attorneys would want to ‘eyeball’ documents before they go out. At Discovery Mining, our clustering and semantic analysis combined with keyword search is a powerful method to trim a collection, but this is only part of the eDiscovery process.

We continue to design with our intention toward streamlining the review of massive volumes of data because increasing data volume truly is the core issue for eDiscovery and why you need analytics in the first place.

Discovery Mining has been operating in the EU for just about 2 years. This experience has given us a clear understanding of Directive 95/46 EC. This rule, adopted in October of 1995, lays out with great specificity the ways in which corporations handle the right to privacy for their employees. Many vendors in the E-Discovery market claim that being Safe Harbor certified will keep them in order with Directive 95. However, this article recently posted at Law.com provides the bigger picture and makes me glad we have a full processing and hosting center in the EU.

I’m not aware of any precedent set for bringing data to the US under the guise of E-Discovery and having the Safe Harbor certification ‘tested’, but I sure wouldn’t want to be the first. As the article goes on to say:

The Safe Harbor is not a practical solution for the discovery process because it only permits the export of the data, not any further processing. The prohibition on further processing would make the data unusable for discovery, since any document production and review activities that take place in the United States are likely to fall within the scope of the “processing.”

Just to point out another catch when following the directive… if you are issued a subpoena, you’re stuck violating either EU or US law. As the article goes onto say, there are other ways to get around this, but they are typically time consuming and costly. If you violate the Directive, there are real penalties to pay. The French data protection authority levied a €30,000 fine against Tyco Healthcare France. So what’s an International Firm or Multi-National Corporation to do when trying to comply with a discovery request?

The answer is to find someone who can fulfill your request on both sides of the Atlantic. If you want to guarantee that you are following the US best practices and complying with EU privacy rules, you’ll need someone who has operated on both continents with full facilities for some time. Discovery Mining has been involved in many cases where the US based company needs to fulfill a discovery request, but has data in the EU as well as the US. It allows the corporation to contract with one company and know they are following Directive 95/46 EC. If you have international clients that do business in Europe and Canada, don’t rely on a vendor being Safe Harbor certified. You may find yourself stranded on a legal island.

Maybe it’s the heat wave that is moving across the usually moderate San Francisco Bay Area that has got me in a certain mood today, but when I read the recent post on the Clearwell blog attacking Kazeon, it struck me as misplaced. The post refers to the boilerplate on a recent press release put out by Kazeon, in which Kazeon claims they can deliver in-house processing of ESI in preparation for eDiscovery for as low as $4.30 per Gigabyte. The post questions what you can get for only four dollars and some change then compares it to seeing a 20 cent per gallon gas sign saying …“it may be cheap, but it’s probably not gas you’re getting.”

I don’t see anywhere in the Kazeon press release where they claim a client will get every service listed for the $4.30 price point, yet this conversation got me thinking about setting prices and how we can look at a case in its entirety rather than only one aspect of a very complicated process.

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Yesterday was Discovery Mining’s 6 year anniversary. This is a big milestone for any company. Over the last 6 years we’ve seen the E-Discovery industry grow quickly, become a “hot” market, and show signs of maturing. When we started Discovery Mining, we had no idea the ride we were in for. Even today, the evolution and sophistication of our client is moving at such a rate it feels like we’re sprinting a marathon.

We could not have done it without the great people that make Discovery Mining what it is. This is a tough market, but the faces above are just a few of the people who try to make a difference for our clients everyday.

Pictured above is the staff from the Discovery Mining San Francisco Headquarters. Not yet added are our teams from the Discovery Mining New York, London, Chicago and Washington DC offices.