Synopsis Part 1: AXS-One agrees Spitzer and financials drove email archiving, what’s next for blogs and wikis?
Synopsis Part 2: AXS-One is educating legal on IT, but CIOs and IT must fend for themselves
Synopsis Part 3: Electronic Discovery behind the firewall and AXS-One vision, will it be 20/20?
Electronic
data discovery interview – William “Bill” Lyons, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AXS-One®, (Part 1 of 3)
Bill Lyons joins AXS-One after serving as chief executive in several high growth software companies for large enterprise markets. In his last assignment, he served as President and CEO of Caminus Corporation, a publicly traded software company, providing mid and back office software applications to the global energy industry before it was sold to SunGard Data Systems. Previously, Mr. Lyons served as Chief Executive Officer of numerous software companies in both the public and private marketplace including Ashton-Tate, ParcPlace Systems, Finjan Software and NeuVis. Prior to his software executive positions, Lyons spent 18 years at the IBM Company in various sales and marketing roles culminating as Vice President Software/ General Manager PC Merchandising.
By Joshua Konkle writing for dcig.com
www.dcig.com
Joshua Konkle: What is the mood of legal counsel out there?
Bill Lyons: They are buying solutions for their challenges in 2008. 2007 was a “tire kicking” year, where we experienced many General Counsels and IT departments evaluating products and asking questions. There was a lot of self-education, largely brought forward by the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP).
Prior to 2007 the drivers for archiving were two fold 1) operational efficiencies and 2) SEC 17a4. The latter required financial services companies to maintain a record of every email sent and received from the company. These two issues drove the systems to retain and manage data, largely email initial. The early success of products from KVS, Inc, now Symantec, are clear examples of people buying for specific applications.
2007 was a year of calm in the early email archiving business. Our business picked up as prospects started asking hard questions about record compliance searches that included with legal hold and chain of custody, as well as retention management. Our customers excel at resolve retention and disposition challenges by working through our “game plan workshop.” It is a proven strategy for driving cross-team discussions and achieving consensus.
Joshua Konkle: There appears to be some gap between what legal teams require to support eDiscovery and the capabilities available today in data management technology. What advice do you have as a vendor trying to assist their clients in addressing litigation readiness and review costs challenges?
Bill Lyons: Our advice is for prospects to ask very specific questions and spend time on a proof of concept to ensure the required functionality actually exists. The following is a short list:
• What are the ESI types handled by the platform?
• How does the product handle retention and disposition?
• How does preservation/legal hold work within the application?
• Are the correct level of search and case management available?
• How does the search, retrieval, preservation marking, etc perform?We recommend that these questions be answered by a legal technology team that includes the General Counsel (GC). In our experience, GC is looking for self-service capabilities. The self-service platform shoud enable them to search the archive directly, as well as complete the first round of document review, via a unified interface. This type of early search, aka early case assessment, is the number one way to reduce review costs and eDiscovery budgets. Finally, GCs must ensure that there is a chain of custody validation available for all data.
Joshua Konkle: How are you dealing with the forensic collection of Enterprise Blogs and Wikis?
Bill Lyons: To date, this has been a topic of discussion, versus a product pre-requisite. It is still not clear what specific data from Web 2.0 needs to be archived. Once this decision is made, AXS-One can, with its current product, handle these data types.
Not only are some customers looking at Web 2.0 objects but they are looking at it from a broader perspective of defining what “communication” means. Must they archive WebEx sessions? What about other collaboration data such as VoIP (CDR/IPDR), fax, etc.?
Read Part 2, AXS-One is educating legal on IT, but CIOs and IT must fend for themselves
If
you would like to communicate with him directly, he can be reached at info(at)axs-one.com or by calling AXS-One at 1 201 935-3400.
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