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 3 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 driving the need for in house eDiscovery platforms?
Bill Lyons: eDiscovery review costs are driving legal budgets higher. Traditional vendors, like Kroll Ontrack, have made significant revenue gains on very large margins by going over the same custodian data multiple times. Businesses realize the same custodians are involved in multiple cases. It is relatively simple to identify the cost savings if the data was managed once, in-house, with a self-service eDiscovery system.
For example, we have partnered with RenewData to recover customer data from tapes to an online disk based eDiscovery system. We partner with RenewData to build historical archives of tape data for our clients. This enables them to find and manage custodian data using workflow and retention management solutions, in a self-service manner.
Joshua Konkle: In your experience, what are the pitfalls that enterprises have yet to encounter bringing eDiscovery inside their firewall?
Bill Lyons: Our experience shows organizations bringing or wanting to bring parts of the eDiscovery process (certainly the early case assessment work) in house. The problems we see organizations encountering are logistical and expert resource issues.
Our anecdotal research shows IT in many organizations is not well prepared to handle this new business technology process. If they attempt to build an eDiscovery system vs implementing simple tools, IT will be stretched too thin. Further, our clients determine early on that making IT responsible for a lot of eDiscovery tasks is sub-optimal. As I stated earlier, General Counsel (GC) want true self-service tools to address false positives, chain of custody and above all else – false negatives. By false negatives, I mean finding something that shows they were in the right, but in fact were in the wrong.
For example, we recently had a medium sized manufacturing firm, about 5000 employees, come to us to help address records compliance and archiving. The company’s GC wanted more than early case assessment, but their IT group wasn’t equipped to handle the demands of legal holds and case management. Through requests like that, we continue to validate the current need for Software as a Service (SaaS) record compliance and for years to come.
In companies where eDiscovery is a challenge, the first answer is to start looking at the data earlier in the litigation process. This is being called Early Case Assessment (ECA), Our clients realize that ECA is a great way to reduce eDiscovery costs. We have delivered ECA, but we can also share the burden of proof. To do both, with limited resources and reduced logistical risk we recommend they use a SaaS solution. For example, Morgan Stanley’s uses SaaS record compliance. Using our SaaS or on-premise systems ensures companies can manage their legal risk versus reacting to it.
Joshua Konkle: What is your companies’ vision for dealing with escalating costs in review datasets for large cases?
Bill Lyons: As CEO I’m happy to say my sales, engineering and operations teams are executing against our shared vision. AXS-One latest functionality includes a very sought after Case Manager module. It is providing our customers with a true self-service discovery and review capability. If I may indulge a bit on my team’s hard work; the Case Manager enables our customers to:
- Conduct initial searches themselves
- Review and modify the results of the searches
- Add dispositions to the searched results
- Package the search for additional review by outside counsel/other 3rd party
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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