Symantec spends $390M for Clearwell, discovery - Storage Soup

I realize that not a lot of people who read this blog know what eDiscovery is, but I thought some of you might find it interesting why all the big data companies are buying software that does something called “eDiscovery”.

Those of you who work in large corporations will hear this term more and more.

“eDiscovery” uses technologies that are constantly crawling all the computers on your company network and indexing all the documents, emails, databases, everything.

Think of it as Google for your company.

This gives those who manage your company the ability to search for anything.

• Who worked on that project three years ago?
• Did that person work for a particular supervisor during a certain time frame?
• What were the details of the contract negotiations and final agreement?

The ability to index all this stuff is a result of lawsuits (believe it or not). During these court procedures the person or persons suing your company has the ability to do what is called “discovery”.

So let’s say it is a '”wrongful termination” suite.

The lawyers representing the person suing has the right to ask for their employment agreement, all the employee reviews, emails between the person, their supervisor(s) and co-workers.

The ability to use the technologies used to pull all that information together quickly is called “eDiscovery”.

So all these large data companies are buying the technologies so they can sell the services of not only the software to do the searching, but the data storage stuff to. Or to reverse that, companies who use their data storage services will want to buy the eDiscovery software as an add-on product.

I’ve seen this consolidation first had.

Two years ago the number of eDiscovery vendors at the New York LegalTech were too numerous to count. Last year the consolidation of this space alone was a part of the reason the amount of space for all the vendor booths went from three floors to two.

Anyway, a link about one of the big software companies buying an eDiscovery company is below.

Symantec spends $390M for Clearwell, discovery - Storage Soup

Legal Directions

Just an introduction to a bit of programming some might find interesting, at least those of you in the legal industry.

A while back the owners of my company were approached and were offered a ‘service’ to have live news headlines appear on the LAWTRAC.com website and inside the LAWTRAC application.

I thought the cost was something that was really out of this world, so I threw this together over a weekend to show them that the technologies that were being offered for something that was over $200 a month could be done for free.

This site brings in news targeting the legal industry from many sources around the internet and taps into government news and regulations information releases.

Check it out… perhaps you can suggest an improvement or two.

Legal Directions

Progress

Easy Contract Management. It has the power of the contract management module in the LAWTRAC application used by major corporations to record their contracts and send out reminders to key individuals when the contract needs attention.

If you have any ideas on what features you think should be included please feel free to drop me a note.

Easy Contract Management

I'm putting the final touches on a new web application - EasyContractManagement.com.

The URL isn't active yet, but when it is your small company will be able to leverage the same tools that the large corporations use to manage their contracts.

Companys like FedEx, United Technologies, major defense manufacturers, even Oprah.

What does your small company look for in contract management? Web access for everyone to remind themselves of the contract details? Email notifications when the contract needs to be reviewed or is about to expire?

Do you need to retain licensing agreements or non disclosure contracts?

Let me know what tools you need and I'll do my best to incorporate them intapplicationpplicaiton.

Is this really a problem?

Yes, I'm confused.

Why the New Guy Can't Code

Jon Evans wrote on May 7th an interesting piece for TechCrunch essentially talking about hireing practices by large companies.

I must say that I appreciate his observations and his advise to only hire coders who can point to their past accomplishments as proof that they can in-fact write code.

Give his article a read.

I also like his observation about women who write code... I too have never meet a female programmer who wasn't a very productive employee.

Game Time

For those of you who watch the Yankees game tonight, keep your eyes open for the good-looking one catching all the home-run balls.