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.