Andy Jenks's Blog

Andy Jenks is Vice President, eDiscovery Marketing for Autonomy iManage. He was co-founder of Discovery Mining prior to Interwoven acquiring the company, and has deep knowledge in building and selling technology solutions. Andy’s passion and understanding of technology, and his enthusiasm for the evolving eDiscovery market, places him in a unique position to communicate product and market direction. His blog offers both broad stroke and detailed viewpoints and insights. Andy has a BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Utah.

The Road Ahead

July 24, 2008 @ 7:35 am by Andy Jenks

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 ofthe 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.

No Comments | Category: eDiscovery

Thanks

July 23, 2008 @ 11:29 am by Andy Jenks

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.

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We knew this already, thanks Google

July 17, 2008 @ 11:31 am by Andy Jenks

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.

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Is the Price Right?

July 8, 2008 @ 11:35 am by Andy Jenks

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^TM 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.

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Search is not the magic bullet

June 9, 2008 @ 11:39 am by Andy Jenks

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.

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Nothing Safe in this Harbor

May 28, 2008 @ 11:44 am by Andy Jenks

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.

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eDiscovery Processing for the Price of a Latte

May 15, 2008 @ 11:47 am by Andy Jenks

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.

It’s going to happen; the cost to process data will drop. Some vendors are throwing it in for free, others charging rock bottom prices as the bait to get clients in the door. Whatever the real price, there is a cost to processing data. CPU cycles, power, and real estate add to the total cost of “processing data”. Start adding the ‘special sauce’ and you can begin to see how the costs can rise. Processing data is a commodity, just like tiff creation. You need to follow the standards and there are big implications should you not. But let’s face it, processing is the step we all use to PREPARE data for loading into a review tool. All of the analysis, inventory, and de-duplication should be done by a responsible vendor and the value added should be the quickness of both processing and getting it all into a review platform. Each bullet point mentioned in the Clearwell post outlining the basic goals of robust processing should be happening already by every vendor who is working with AmLaw 100 firms or Fortune 500 corporations.

Let’s say you can process for $4.30. Where does that leave you? Do you have images or a loadfile for a review tool? How long did it take to process…hours, days, weeks? Kazeon was touting their Information Server and the efficiencies it delivers in only one aspect of E-Discovery. I say let the cost fall. Discovery Mining sells mostly around the value we bring to the table and never, other than speed, do we sell on the fact that we can process data.

So what is the rock bottom price when factoring in all the fixed costs of processing electronic data? One of the companies I most admire, Amazon, has a great model. Amazon, through their innovative Amazon Web Service, can get you an instance on the Elastic Compute Cloud. This is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Depending on the amount of time, you can probably process a Gigabyte of data for $1.00. That’s a double cheeseburger on the dollar menu.

So there is an example of a low-end price point due to efficiencies that Amazon has built into its service, and which, by the way, is not even being touched by Google. Does that help us figure out what the right price is for processing?

The market and the customers would be better off if vendors were competing based on the total project, or total cost of product ownership, or value of the platform solution. That is, using the value there to save clients hundreds of hours of review time, and therefore money. Who cares about some silly line item? It’s frustrating to know that no matter what price you put in the proposal, it will be criticized. As I have mentioned before, it’s time to start looking at the entirety of the case and all of the efficiencies vendors can bring to the table, not just one commoditized aspect of a very complex process.

No Comments | Category: Uncategorized | eDiscovery

Keyword is broken?

April 28, 2008 @ 11:49 am by Andy Jenks

This week the world of Web 2.0 converged on the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Most of the hype surrounding the new web is about social technologies and the way we interact with each other using technology. This got me thinking about how it applies to E-Discovery. The outward appearance may look different, but the underlying element of the new web frontier is still search. In E-Discovery we are well aware of the issues of general keyword search, like finding a needle in a haystack. However, I’d like to repost some thoughtful comments from Nova Spiviack, the Founder and CEO of Radar Networks, from his presentation at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam (Nova and Discovery Mining’s CEO Matthew Work used to work together in a previous life).

Here’s what Nova had to say about next generation searching on large datasets:

Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want-the “needle” you are looking for-may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.

Sound familiar? Nova’s assertion is that keyword search on big data sets is broken. How do you find what you’re looking for in all those haystacks? I think this is where the E-Discovery market is already out in front of commercial web. At Discovery Mining we’re constantly working on ways to promote the ‘needles in the haystacks’ of search results. Using LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) and other identifiers, we’ve been successful at moving relevant information to the forefront view for our clients. As data sets get larger even these technologies can’t keep up. However, you can put pieces together to review smarter and make the relevant information “pop out” at you.

What does this mean? Firstly, congratulations to us (E-Discovery market), for understanding that this type of technology is what is necessary to sort through the mountain of data typically involved in litigation. Secondly, we’re still nowhere near the “holy grail” of search. There needs to be an underlying platform to advance beyond what is out there now. As an industry we’ve only just started to see the monster cases that will be commonplace in a year or two, and the platforms are just now achieving acceptance. The tools are fine, for now, but we should be out there innovating beyond the keyword search.

Over at TechCrunch, Nova was interviewed about the Semantic Web and its implications. Radar Network’s product Twine is crazy but cool. I’m in the beta pool checking it out. The full article about the Semantic Web is here at TechCrunch.

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Do you have an Erdős number?

April 21, 2008 @ 12:07 pm by Andy Jenks

Analytics and social links are becoming very popular in e-discovery. Certain tools claim to be able to provide you with the number of links between two people in a document collection. Does this help? Can you find what you’re looking for faster? Maybe, but I don’t believe it is the magic bullet that will make other methods obsolete.

You may have heard of the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the real game started with a Hungarian Mathematician named Paul Erdős. Colleagues of Erdős referred to an Erdős Number to describe the “collaborative distance” between an author of a mathematical paper and Erdős himself. This study has lead to some very interesting models of graph theory, namely “social connectedness”. Within infinite communities, even the entire web, you will find that individuals are closely connected. The average Erdős number for any self respecting Mathematician is 4.65, which means that a majority of published Math authors are within 5 degrees of Erdős. I once had a Professor with an Erdős number of 2 and even Bill Gates has an Erdős number of 4.  What does this mean from an e-discovery perspective? Well simply that clustering around people is an interesting concept, however in homogeneous document collections you’ll most likely find that everyone is closely connected to everyone else regardless of significance.

Think about your company, or firm’s, email. I bet you have a very close degree of distance between you and somebody who may be in a different office altogether. While I believe that using social networking features in e-discovery is a step in the right direction, based on the connectedness of any organization, we may just be adding a neat “wiz-bang” graphical feature that does not really tell you something you don’t already know. I believe that there are applications of social networks in e-discovery, but telling me that Person X is connected to Person Y through Person Z doesn’t give me anything. I could have looked at the org chart and determined the same thing without spending a ton of time and money. I think this is going to be an important feature set in the future, but for now I think I’ll pass.

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Data Portability Continued…

April 14, 2008 @ 12:09 pm by Andy Jenks

In Sedona last week we were discussing QC and sampling mostly. However, a short sidebar happened surrounding the ability to get data from one system to another. As I mentioned in my previous post this is becoming more and more important to our clients, which means we need to be moving toward an accepted standard, whatever that may be. We not only need to transfer data between vendors, but also across upgrades.

This week at Discovery Mining we’ve heard from more than one client about the problems with data portability within internal software applications. Specifically upgrading from Concordance 7 to 8 (a.k.a. 2007). I’m not a Concordance expert, nor do I pretend to be, but this example screams for a universal standard. The specific issue our clients were experiencing was the inability to view some new databases that were created in the new version with the old version 7. Because databases converted to version 8 cannot be viewed by 7.3 backward, the client is left with a big headache, to say the least. The upgrade process is time consuming and expensive. I’m sure there’s a workaround, but for most cases workarounds are not adequate.

Having a data portability plan and standard will help with a situation like the one described above. I’m looking forward to continuing the efforts on this front, and trying to stay technology agnostic, but as Google just opened up their platform maybe litigation support can follow the leader. Google has opened up the entire platform and lets you mashup almost every service using a series of open web api’s. Yes, you need to know Python, but hey, it’s a start. In 30 minutes I was able to build a silly little test app here. My app doesn’t do much but as you can see it’s integrated into the login/users data of Google. Amazon is the leader in this area with their AWS, but this is not about web services.

As the larger data intensive companies know, being open to standards ultimately helps everyone. I think we should all consider the efforts of the EDRM XML group and petition The Sedona Conference to weigh in and influence the bench, thereby, helping and influencing the industry.

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Are We Promoting “Walled Gardens”?

March 31, 2008 @ 12:12 pm by Andy Jenks

On a flight back from L.A. last week I was reading the Economist, which I try to do regularly. In the March 22nd issue there was mention of social networks. The substance of two articles, “Everywhere and Nowhere” and “Break Down These Walls”, covered the rise of the ‘walled gardens’ we once had with AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. As the Internet matured and opened up, the question became why would anyone live in just AOL, a proprietary platform, when there was a whole WWW out there to explore? Over the years the world realized, mostly through the launch of Netscape, that open communication standards and data portability are long term winners.

So when I read Craig Ball’s article from Tuesday it got me thinking-are we propagating the mentality of web circa 1994? I would say Craig’s skepticism is expected. When I first learned about the EDRM XML project, I too had reservations. However, we do need something to help the data portability problem. But is this the right way to handle the portability issue? I have no idea and I don’t think this is actually the central issue. What is at stake is the ‘openness or lack of openness’ of our clients’ data to move from one system to another, and this is not a trivial issue. It can involve tremendous cost-not only price, but also time.

When a market matures standards tend to emerge. This pushes competition more towards increasing the value of their product offering, which is a good thing. This is exactly where the eDiscovery market is-ready for standards. We need to introduce a standard to the market; the first standard out may not be perfect, but it will push vendors to compete on value adding initiatives. We hear it all the time… “I’m having such a hard time with vendor x, but there’s nothing I can do. My data is being held hostage.” We do a big dis-service to our clients if we don’t offer a standard in terms of data portability.

As the social networks are proving, there is value in data portability. eDiscovery vendors need to conform to some basic standards so that we can then compete on our merits, and keep turning up the heat on innovation. Is XML the way? I’m not certain, but I’m willing to give it a try. After we investigate one area maybe we’ll uncover an even better approach-why not open up the web platforms to an API which allows anyone to write some code or move the data? Most of the work on the XML schema is working with text files. Any self respecting Perl programmer could quickly design and test to see how it works.

Implementing standards takes time and before one ’sticks’, there will be a few that fall down. I say let’s try. What do we have to lose? What we have to gain is increased innovation, and that’s good for everyone.

I’m sure we’ll be discussing this at Sedona, check me out on twitter later this week from the meeting.

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