A year ago, I attended LegalTech New York for the first time. Last year, I went to LegalTech looking to survey the marketplace, understand what solutions vendors were offering, and determine if there was a company we could partner with to augment our eDiscovery offering. The size of the show, the number of vendors packed into a small place and the number and variety of different eDiscovery solutions was quite overwhelming.

Open Text was certainly well represented at LegalTech by our Legal Solutions group who had been attending for years, but if you were to ask around about Open Text and eDiscovery, it seemed like nobody had made the connection between Enterprise Content Management and eDiscovery. Like the title says, "What a difference a year makes!"

With increasing frequency in the past year, corporations and organizations are coming to the conclusion that one way to reduce the cost and risk associated to eDiscovery is to reduce the overall volume of content in their organizations. It's not surprising then that these same organizations are turning to the Content Experts for strategies and tools to help them classify content and therefore disposition content to reduce the impact of compounding growth of content year over year - however - those same customers are looking for end-to-end solutions for eDiscovery that work with their Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) systems. It makes sense, to cover the full spectrum of content that is discoverable, an eDiscovery solution must work with content that is contained in their ECRM system AND content that exists "in the wild" outside of their ECRM system.

It was also at LegalTech last year that I first met Craig Carpenter, Vice President of eDiscovery Solutions and General Counsel of Recommind. We had breakfast, and I shared Open Text's vision for an eDiscovery tool that could be used by companies to in-source many of the activities that usually required help from outside service providers. It turned out, this was great timing, because Recommind was working on a solution that would fit into this vision. We both agreed that tools were needed for "within the firewall" to improve the collection process and to significantly reduce the amount of content that is being sent outside of the firewall for review. The added bonus was that David Baskin also works for Recommind. David also heads up the EDRM XML project that has as its mandate to "provide a standard, generally accepted XML schema to facilitate the movement of electronically stored information (ESI) from one step of the electronic discovery process to the next". Because of this, our combined solution also exports fully processed ESI, meaning that organizations do not have to out-source processing. This results in considerable savings above and beyond the reduction of content sent for review.

So, here we are a year later, partners with Recommind, with our combined solution recently announced. Not only that, Craig and I will be co-presenting at a Super Session at LegalTech on Tues. Feb. 3. Together, we will cover many of the areas where organizations can reduce the risks and costs associated to eDiscovery. Additionally, we will discuss the impact that companies' desire to in-source might be having on Outside Counsel.

I'm definitely looking forward to LegalTech this year. I hope you get a chance to come by our Super Session or drop by our booth (# 2306). Enjoy New York.

The opening moment of the keynote at this week's LegalTech New York was a testament to collaboration and use of new media. Speaker Fred Borchardt, Partner with KPMG LLP was a last minute pinch hitter for the scheduled speaker Christopher J. Olsen of Lockheed Martin (retired Chief of Records, CIA) who had bowed out due to a medical issue. But thanks to creative use of rich media and audio, Fred was introduced virtually by Christopher, setting the tone for the day. An excitement about the use of social computing, web technology and a resurgence of knowledge management principles inspired by the Web 2.0 phenomenon was constant in many of the Day 1 sessions.

Fred Borchardt's presentation, titled Think Left: Think Left with Respect to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model reinforced the message that a proactive and informed approach to an organization's electronic records and information is critical to minimizing the costs, time and pain of an electronic discovery order. Borchardt still sees many organizations struggling. Records and information management often viewed only from a departmental or media based approach, too much information is kept on legal hold "just in case", inconsistent classification and identification practices result in intensive burden of discovery, and companies are failing to educate employees on retention and disposition obligations.

-photo from www.edrm.net

The "Left" is the first stage of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. Information management is the essential starting point for reducing the risk and cost of the discovery process. Organizations that have adopted an information governance strategy that supports requirements driven by both regulatory obligations as well as the needs of the business managers inherently will have an advantage because content has been created, shared and categorized according to its purpose in a business process.

The five core activities needed to support an enterprise records and information management strategy are: classification and identification, search, retention and disposition, preservation and discovery, and governance and monitoring. Borchardt calls out specific categories of content - not all of which are appropriately considered and understood when reviewing e-discovery risks. Structured content (such as that found in ERP systems like SAP and Oracle), semi-structured content (email, text messages), siloed unstructured content (such as that managed in an ECM Suite such as Open Text) and unmanaged, unstructured content (office documents on local disks, thumb drives, shared drives) all need to be considered and identified during the course of a discovery order. Looking at organizational content through the lens of a "heat map" can help Legal, IT and RM administrators understand the risks incurred and information produced by different types of business decisions and activities. Where's the risk?

Borchardt's call to action was to alter typical views of records management: think enterprise, not departmental; think strategic, not tactical; become proactive not reactive. Successful organizations today have common characteristics: sustained executive level support, frequent and consistent communication across the organization, collaboration among business units, legal, IT and compliance managers, and understanding the need for change management planning in order to change behaviours.

Day 2 is well on its way. If you are at the conference, come see us at Booth #2306. We have our Legal and E-Discovery gurus ready to chat about your current challenges. We're also hosting a Super Session in the Concourse D room from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. Follow us on Twitter or search for the Twitter hashtag #LTNY.

With LegalTech 2009 taking place this week in New York, now is a good time to take a look at some of the trends in ECM for law firms. What's most striking at the moment is that the recession hasn't avoided the legal industry this time around, as detailed in the Wall Street Journal's recent front page story Recession Batters Law Firms, Triggering Layoffs, Closings.

What this means for many firms is finding a way to lower overhead costs and help lawyers and staff members work more efficiently. In going around the globe talking to law firm IT managers, we have found that top firms are continuing to invest in IT projects, especially ones that are quick and easy to implement. Among the projects at the top of the list are:

• Eliminate duplicate systems. One large firm had a document management system in its UK headquarters from one vendor and different one in the U.S. By eliminating the duplicate system, it saves the cost of maintaining a separate server and software environment and improves collaboration. You can read more here.
• Extend Office and SharePoint.Microsoft Office and SharePoint are extremely popular across the legal industry. One way to leverage that investment further is to use software solutions built on the SharePoint platform.
• Automate email filing. Regulatory and firm policies require good record keeping practices around email, which has become the de facto way of communicating at law firms. One way to make it easy on lawyers is to automate email filing, as part of email lifecycle management. Such automated tools are integrated into Outlook and provide suggestions on filing locations, bulk filing and metadata markers to make it easy to find emails.
• Work with clients to lower eDiscovery costs. Many firms are finding that working with clients to take a proactive approach to eDiscovery benefits both the firm and its clients. High eDiscovery costs eat into client's resources so that they often have to scale back in other areas in a legal action including legal fees. It makes sense to work with clients to implement ECM-based eDiscovery solutions that can make it significantly easier, faster and far less costly to retrieve electronic information. Many firms are finding that working with clients to take a proactive approach to eDiscovery benefits both the firm and its clients.

If you're at LegalTech this year, be sure to swing by our booth, #2306. See you there.

This week at the 22nd Annual DIA Conference for Electronic Document Management, selected vendors presented their views on how the SAIC DIA EDM reference model could be accommodated within their software products, and how they plan to leverage this model within their technologies. The vendors illustrated how a standard taxonomy for submissions related documents, or artifacts, could enable strong collaboration between business partners.

In the session, we talked about how a flexible Enterprise Content Management platform needs to provide a framework that allows industry standard metadata taxonomies to be inherently accommodated within the system. By leveraging a standard implementation methodology, the EDM reference model is readily employed in Life Sciences deployments in an open and sustainable manner. Using standard system configuration capabilities the EDM reference model provides a consistent taxonomy for the creation of document types, folders, categories and attributes within an ECM system.

We also talked about how flexible ECM systems are able to extend the DIA EDM reference model employment to include corporate taxonomy requirements, and to adapt to changes in the EDM reference model.

The reference model shows great promise for business partners who want to share content and metadata. The ability to export content with a standard set of tags will enable better and more rapid collaboration.

As with most compliance solutions, companies will put whatever is needed in place to meet the requirements, and come back and re-evaluate their decisions later. On January 1, 2008 the FDA withdrew guidance for non-electronic common technical document (eCTD) submissions, and to prepare for that, along with various other regional requirements, pharmaceutical companies implemented multiple solutions to address their varying requirements.

A year ago organizations were talking to us about preparing electronic submissions, and seeking the assistance of the technology vendors to help them get organized for this upcoming event. Although some had already chosen a tool, some were still looking, and most were still trying to find out more about what was available, whether they had purchased a tool or not.

It is over a year later, and the mood is different. I talked to a number of companies at DIA this week that are looking to standardize on an eCTD submissions tool. The problem, they explained to me, is that they cannot get it all from a single tool. They know what the need to do, and now they want to do it.

But this market is maturing from a technology adoption perspective; it is no longer the early adopter market that it once was. It is mainstream -- the early majority, according to Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. This is the time when the superior products will rise to the top, and others will struggle and drop-out of the market.

Pharmaceutical companies can expect to get what they require, without have to use multiple technologies for varying requirements. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next year.

Resources:
Podcast - Electronic Submissions - Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Industry