President of Kroll on Track to battle President of Lexis Nexis Applied Discovery on top of Sears Tower to determine supreme control of Chicago

Chicago Lawyer Magazine conducted an e-discovery poll of Illinois attorneys and the results were rather interesting:

"Perhaps the biggest surprise occurred almost immediately in the question which asked “Are you familiar with the Federal Rules changes regarding electronic discovery?” 70% answered “Yes” which means that 30% were not familiar with the rule changes. The figure seems almost astonishing given the high degree of coverage and the flurry of CLE activity surrounding changes that went into effect in December of 2006."

"The question, “Have you ever hired an electronic discovery consultant or firm?” provided the biggest surprise of the survey for me. 69% of the respondents indicated that they had not hired an eDiscovery consultant or firm. Those who did hire such a company preferred Kroll (25%) Lexis-Nexis Applied Discovery (20%), Fios (18.5), FYI (18% ) and EED (15%) All other companies listed (KPMG, Encore, Stratify, Attenex and Navigant) came in at single digit percentages.

Upon examination, the breakdown is perhaps not so surprising. The respondents answering “yes” to the consultant question were the large firm attorneys with high value cases. The respondents answering “No” were predominately sole-practitioners and small firms. The fact that these are respondents performing a high percentage of their eDiscovery work in-house is a theory perhaps born out by the fact that the two most popular products listed as a response our question about products are Summation at 64% and Concordance at 47% . Both products are more easily used by smaller firms to perform their own eDiscovery processing, especially on email files. And in fact, after those two products, no other company had higher than a 10% response except for EnCase, which is typically used for forensic-level analysis of servers and workstations."

BTW, that picture below is from Cloud Gate Park in Chicago. Also don't forget to take first GabesGuide.com Unscientific-Scientific poll as well.

Is G-Discovery the new E-Discovery?

"There is no bigger idea in enterprise technology than the idea of “cloud computing“. What does it mean? Simply put, the idea is that enterprises will cease to buy hardware, software, and all the headaches that come with them. Instead, companies will rent whatever applications they need and access them over the internet. Software vendors will keep their applications on a pool of shared infrastructure (the “cloud”), which will automatically allocate resources between applications according to demand. Using a common analogy, we will move from today’s world where companies are buying and building their own electricity generators, to a world where there are power companies distributing electricity over a grid."

"E-discovery is no exception to this mega-trend, and I expect a portion of the e-discovery software business to move to the cloud. How quickly this happens depends on how easy it is for companies to adopt cloud-based e-discovery solutions, which is why Google’s recent moves into e-discovery are so significant.

Google is by far the largest cloud computing company in the world. Its cloud-based Google Apps suite of applications was only launched in 2007, but is already being used by several hundred thousand businesses and, Google tells me, 2,000 new businesses sign up every day. Today, the customers are mainly small to medium sized businesses (500-5,000 employees). But as its functionality improves, larger companies will increasingly start asking why they should pay for Microsoft Office when cheaper alternatives exist."