Exterro

No one wants to throw money out the window; unfortunately in the world of eDiscovery, many organizations are spending far more than what’s required. Beyond implementing proactive data management policies, corporations should also be looking to specific eDiscovery rules under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and the United States Code (U.S.C.) for cost reduction opportunities.

Clients can now locate, collect, process, analyse, review and produce documents efficiently, while reducing the costs and minimising errors or delays, claims the company

LegalTech West Coast continues today at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The exhibit hall stays open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., so take the opportunity to see some working legal technology and discuss product road maps leading to LegalTech New York 2013.

Electronic discovery is expensive. Identifying, collecting, processing, analysing, and finally producing electronically stored information (ESI) to opposing counsel is time consuming and resource intensive. Besides the costs of producing data, expenses are multiplied by the current adversarial nature of litigation. “In some cases, discovery becomes a tool with which to bludgeon the other side into submission,” wrote Judge Joe Brown in a recent ruling. “Rather than monitoring and moderating the process,” parties are in many cases simply “throwing gasoline on the fire.”

Guest Blog by Michael Hamilton, J.D., Exterro, Inc. // Being an attorney is like being a juggler. Within the litigation process there are many balls (tasks) to juggle: reviewing a claim, researching legal precedence, interviewing witnesses, submitting interrogatories, prepping experts, reviewing documents and more.

Jennifer Hamilton, global e-discovery counsel at Deere & Co., talks to LTN‘s Editor in Chief Monica Bay about developing a checklist with a 430-point criteria to vet vendors for a legal hold tool, which led to its receipt of the LTN Most Innovative Technology in a Corporate Law Department award.

In e-discovery, collaboration between multiple teams for tracking, monitoring and ensuring a defensible and comprehensive e-discovery process is essential. Project managers play the vital role of coordinating and managing this process so that matters stay on track and important information does not fall through the cracks.

As e-discovery costs have increased, along with the available data that may be responsive to litigation or investigation, corporations and their legal departments have demanded more control of the e-discovery process from early case assessment to collection and production. To satisfy this need, Exterro extended its Fusion platform to offer corporate legal departments and their service providers a Zeta product, which gives the company credibility in claiming Fusion is an end-to-end e-discovery platform.

Siemens Corporation, the U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG, is tapping Exterro and Recommind to gear up the company’s in-house electronic discovery. The American division of the German multinational provider of electronics and electrical engineering to health care, energy, public and private industry, and cities announced its integration of Exterro’s Fusion platform…

“In Right-Thinking E-Discovery Project Management,” I asserted that lawyers are not project managers. In fact, lawyers would find project management alien to their legal education and experience, which begs the question: What does an e-discovery project look like from the practical, logistical point of view?

Managed services providers (MSPs) are adding new services at a rapid rate in an effort to increase revenues, broaden their portfolios and differentiate their companies in a competitive marketplace. Four types of new service opportunities stand out in the crowd as unique offerings to keep an eye on.

» Exterro unveils Fusion’s workflow and EU compliance tools. Booth 331.

LegalTech New York 2012′s technology tidal wave has arrived, and it’s flooding our ears, emails, and eyeballs with news of companies offering products or services in legal research, information management, e-discovery products, and more.

Under the direction of Global E-Discovery Counsel Jennifer Hamilton, John Deere & Co. established an automated legal hold system.Hamilton developed an extensive 430-point rating system to assess various vendor offerings, because the system needed to work in the company’s current technology environment, integrate with existing technology, and be highly configurable. John Deere was looking for a tool that could deliver a common, repeatable process for issuing and tracking legal holds across different departments and ultimately selected Exterro’s Fusion Legal Hold.

Portland, Ore.-based Exterro, founded in 2004, is a maker of e-discovery workflow management technology and the Fusion software suite. Bobby Balachandran, company president and CEO, wrote via e-mail that the origin of Exterro’s name comes from the word “terra,” Greek for earth or globe. “Moreover, ‘tera’ is a prefix that denotes one trillion and I liked that connotation for a company like ours with so much data.”

It’s obvious that the International Legal Technology Association is having its annual meeting (this time in Nashville — yee haw): E-Discovery vendors are coming out of the woodwork to make product announcements.

Fusion LawFirm^TM Enables Law Firms to Deliver Greater Value, Advanced Project Management and Increased Price Predictability Across the Entire EDRM Spectrum

Fusion LawFirm™ enables law firms to deliver greater value, advanced project management and increased price predictability

Early case assessment (ECA), predictive coding, and search/data review applications will dominate the e-discovery product announcements at this week’s International Legal Technology Association trade show in Nashville, Tenn.

The Gartner report evaluated “a vendor’s ability to understand buyers’ wants and needs and to translate that understanding into products and services…. another key investment strategy for products is to consistently work on the simplification and ease of use of the toolset.”

From the ground up, the Exterro Fusion platform includes a workflow engine, collaboration framework, and a vault for electronically stored information, as well as software modules for data mapping, legal hold, and workflow management. Zeta adds the ability to analyze data that may be relevant to litigation or investigation, more commonly known as early case assessment.

Need an e-Discovery solution that reflects perspectives of both the IT and legal departments? The search may be over. Today, Exterro released a new data management layer for its integrated solution suite.

Workflow-Driven Early Case Assessment, Collection, Analysis and Review Drive Winning Case Strategies

Exterro®, the legal industry’s most trusted provider of software solutions, today announces the release of Fusion Zeta™, the new data management layer of its integrated solution suite.

Exterro, the legal industry’s most trusted provider of software solutions, today announces the release of Fusion Zeta™, the new data management layer of its integrated solution suite.

Business process management solutions are effective in managing the chaos of complex e-discovery.  Lawyers recognize the power of applying project management principles to the task at hand, using integrated project management applications and practices to help drive efficiencies, manage resources, and delegate tasks effectively.  After all, e-discovery is a business process, and as such, it can be improved.

During litigation, nothing is sacred, and no stone will remained unturned in the hunt for responsive data — and that includes social media data. With social media here to stay — and growing in popularity every day — the question needs to change from “How do we avoid these sites?” to “How can we manage our risk?”

The primary drive toward a more efficient electronic discovery process boils down to a concern for the bottom line: Costs skyrocket as e-discovery drags on, or if early stages of the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM) are mishandled. An IT IT professional’s time is stretched thin and they may not be available to assist attorneys with tricky data transfers between tools. But this article will show you how, by choosing e-discovery project management tools that play well together, you can drive down costs and risks throughout the e-discovery process.

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) gets a new look just in time for Valentine’s Day. Originally an E-Discovery Beat blog post, this story was picked up by the Legal Service Providers Daily.

Exterro maintains its lead at LegalTech New York, touting several client wins and new integrations. Read this roundup of industry news and views from Katey Wood, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst.

Fusion 4, a software suite of tools designed to manage workflow, capture data and report on results for compliance and e-discovery tasks, including legal holds, contains more than 100 innovations. New features include a Fusion Integration Hub that provides a central point to manage and report on all EDRM projects, search enhancements that incorporate fielded and historical search criteria, tools to manage and analyze custodian interviews, the ability to link matters across projects, and build menu-driven reports that can be exported in Excel format.

Exterro and Digital Reef have announced the integration of Digital Reef eDiscovery and Exterro Fusion. The companies say the combination substantially reduces the cost of legal holds, data preservation, processing and early case assessments (ECA).

E-Discovery Beat, Exterro’s one-stop resource for news and information about e-discovery, was added to the ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory today.

Exterro, Inc., the leading provider of legal governance, risk and compliance management software solutions, and Digital Reef, a leading software provider of scalable and open software for eDiscovery and file governance, today announced the seamless integration of Exterro Fusion and Digital Reef eDiscovery.

“We believe we can build a stand-alone company to go public,” said Bobby Balachandran, CEO of the legal compliance software company. “We believe we can grow to a $100 million company in the span of three years.”

The sixth and final post in this series will look at some of findings of ILTA’s 2010 Survey on Legal Project Management.

A detailed data map can be a key tool for meeting requirements of the amended federal rules concerning electronic discovery. An automated system is particularly useful since it is always current.

E-discovery project management allows e-discovery practitioners to develop meaningful metrics and improve the e-discovery process.

In this article, Peter Caradonna, seasoned e-discovery consultant for Fortune 500 companies and owner of Breakwater E-Discovery Consultants, shares a few tips and tricks for getting legal and IT to work together.

Implementing a legal hold solution is a positive step, assuming the organization has some grasp of the process and the policies that will be enforced.

One of the biggest decisions legal teams have to make is how and where to run legal applications and solutions. Fortunately, there are multiple choices that lower costs and increase business agility, including traditional onsite deployment, server virtualization, internal clouds, external private clouds and public clouds.

Even small gaps in e-discovery can result in operational inefficiency, fines, sanctions and reputational damage. By taking the time to assess e-discovery process gaps and build compliance and repeatability into their processes, enterprises can proactively — and effectively — address e-discovery requirements, even when requirements keep changing.

The Amended Opinion and Order filed January 15, 2010

The question is no longer “Is legal hold necessary?” but “How can we ensure compliance, and effectively implement defensible, repeatable legal processes while keeping costs and risks down, to build a totally defensible e-discovery process?”

In today’s highly litigious world, creating a data map is one of the primary steps in responding to litigation requests. It is vital that organizations get a solid foundation by focusing time, energy and resources in doing it right – and creating it long before it’s needed.

Learn how Haynes and Boone, LLP, an international law firm, was able to reduce errors, force compliance, increase efficiency and consistency and reduce its legal services operational budget.

Exterro made its name in on-premises legal-hold workflow for large enterprises, providing notification and tracking to alert data custodians about…

Exterro has announced a strategic partnership with the eDiscovery Solutions Group  (eDSG), an international consortium of GRC and eDiscovery consultants, system integrators, litigation service providers, and software vendors.

Legal hold software helps preserve data and reduce legal hassles. Here’s what to look for in a system.

Evaluating Legal Hold options? Experts note these dos and don’ts.

Leading Legal GRC Solution Provider Recognized for Its Expertise in Data Mapping, Legal Hold, and E-Discovery

Portland Business Journal honors Balachandran for his leadership in legal governance, risk and compliance management solutions for e-discovery

Seven predictions for the future of electronic discovery.

Exterro Inc. launched Fusion Cloud Legal Hold, a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) license for its automated e-discovery legal hold solution.

“These tools will help a lot in terms of bringing attorneys into the role of legal knowledge workers,” Easton says. “In addition, they will facilitate process improvement.”

“This is just the tip of our growth. With our core platform we can rapidly add new products, which can help us get our average sale to the $2 million to $3 million range and shooting for an IPO at the end of 2012 or early 2013,” Balachandran said.

More and more companies are moving from relying on e-discovery service providers for a case-by-case fire drill toward adapting their litigation response into a repeatable internal business process. The need for project management is acute.

When implemented correctly, the best e-discovery systems can save a pile of cash and time, and can become real productivity boosters.

Buying a Lathe Does Not Make You a Carpenter: Setting Realistic Expectations for Legal Project Management Software

Learn how Family Dollar Stores, Inc. reduced their outside counsel expenditures, cut spoliation risks and implemented a transparent, fully automated, defensible legal hold process.

A data map can make e-discovery and regulatory compliance a lot simpler, but the difficulties of getting there are well-known. Bruce Phillips offers tips from Fidelity National Financial’s data mapping project.

Records management has always been painful but now it’s nearly impossible given the unending growth in ESI.

In the wake of recent court rulings, many businesses are having to rethink their litigation hold strategies or face potentially dire consequences.

It can be a storage nightmare: Given expanding regulatory requirements and the key role that electronic records now play in lawsuits, some enterprises are saving every bit of data they have, just to be safe.

Exterro announced the release of its Fusion Genome, a data mapping solution that helps legal and IT teams identify, manage and analyze data sources and electronic stored information (ESI) across an entire organization.

Increases in data breaches and the development of electronic discovery (e-discovery) are prompting firms to closely re-examine their records retention and management policies.

Association of Litigation Support Professionals (ALSP) gives industry accolades

The International Legal Technology Association’s annual meeting was held last week in Grapevine, Texas, just outside of Dallas. The theme this year was “Global Perspective, Peer Advantage.”

Two Portland companies in the electronic legal discovery industry are teaming up to boost business through mutual customer referrals.

Information life cycle management (ILM) is a critical component of nearly every business. The efficiency with which information assets are managed—from creation to review, distribution and storage—significantly determines success.

While on the surface the goal seems simple — preserve, protect and collect relevant data and notify all stakeholders and custodians either during pending litigation or investigation — in reality there are many opportunities for foul-ups.

Precise navigation along the journey of electronic discovery requires more than a simple roadmap of obligations.  Protocols must be integrated into business processes, and any imprecision or misdirection is unacceptable in this era of heightened accountability.

The critical elements of a successful legal hold strategy are broad-based management, transparent technological infrastructure and cross-departmental collaboration. With respect to management, there needs to be a predetermined understanding of how to deal with custodians with potentially relevant information.

Read Sean Doherty’s wrap-up of LegalTech New York 2008

It’s no surprise that e-discovery continued to be front and center at LegalTech New York again this year.