eDiscovery early case assessment and analytics Blog

earlyCASE is a SaaS web-based eDiscovery application which uses an on-demand deployment model (runs on your local PC), collects, preserves, analyzes and filters the ESI that your computer can access in-place without the data ever leaving your computer or network.

 

earlyCASE allows you to quickly and safely collect, organize, understand eDiscovery data, and apply filter / culling rules before it is processed for discovery.  It supports Unicode, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates, removes known system files and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions, easily and quickly cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the meet and confer, discovery processing  and document review.

earlyCASE is offered in three versions, a Basic (FREE) version, a Professional version which can be licensed per run, per matter or per month and an enterprise edition.  earlyCASE creates over 54+ high-quality eDiscovery reports, details the expanded sizes and counts of the data, estimates your processing and review budget and provides a long list of detailed as well as summary reports.

For more information, visit HUhttp://www.earlycase.comUH.

 

 

 

Analyze and extract files from EnCase images in the early case assessment process without having EnCase installed on your computer

 

ATLANTA, GA (December 04, 2008) – Atlanta-based earlyCASE, a leader in advanced early case assessment for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and eDiscovery, today released full native support for EnCase images and Encase Evidence Files (E01)  in its eDiscovery early case assessment software available as Software-as-a-Service  “SaaS�  from HUwww.earlycase.comUH.  earlyCASE is a SaaS web-based eDiscovery application which uses an on-demand deployment model (runs on your local PC) and analyzes the ESI that your computer can access in-place without the data ever leaving your computer or network.

 

earlyCASE allows you to quickly see and understand all of your data (including EnCase Images) before it is processed for discovery.  It supports multiple languages, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates, email conversation threads and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions and easily cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the meet and confer, discovery processing  and document review.

 

In the past, looking at the contents and extracting files from an EnCase image required special software licenses and training.  With earlyCASE, handling EnCase images in the early case assessment process is as easy and seamless as zip files.   With the release today of the latest version of earlyCASE, you can extract files from EnCase images and analyze them along with the other ESI you have without any additional software or costs.

 

“We are excited to add native support for EnCase images to the list of content types that we can process in earlyCASE.  The low cost and flexibility that eDiscovery early case assessment as a software- as-a-service delivers is unparalled,� said Tom Strack, CEO of earlyCASE. “earlyCASE brings an immediate and real understanding to the eDiscovery process at the earliest moment, the lowest cost, and at an unprecedented speed, giving clients a more realistic view into what data they have at stake and the budgets associated with handling the ESI. With data storage continuing to increase in size, it is common to have terabytes of information to process and review. earlyCASE can rapidly analyze that data and decrease the data sets that need to be reviewed, reducing not only eDiscovery budgets, but managing their legal risk. earlyCASE can process the data in-place without it ever leaving where it is stored, using your own people and equipment and without any per gigabyte charges. “

 

earlyCASE is offered in three versions, a Basic (FREE) version,  a Professional version for a small flat rate charge, regardless of the amount of data you analyze, and an enterprise edition. The Basic version offers 28+ high-quality eDiscovery reports, one which estimates your processing and review budget while providing an immediate understanding of your data. With the Professional version, Lotus Notes & EnCase images are processed, a 26(f) report for meet and confer is available to help clients reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information—custodians, context, third parties, and more. earlyCASE provides you the tools and results to best understand, define and memorialize the ESI going into the meet and confer. Duplicate document detection, container processing (zip, rar, arc), Lotus Notes NSF’s and EnCase images are the primary reasons most people use the Professional version of earlyCASE.

 

Pricing: earlyCASE basic is available for FREE, earlyCASE Professional is priced at $198 per run (unlimited data), and earlyCASE Enterprise licenses start at $8,000.

 

earlyCASE and the earlyCASE logo are trademarks of Level 9 Corporation

EnCase is a registered trademark of Guidance Software Inc.

Lotus Notes, IBM, Lotus Domino, Lotus Domino Express are trademarks of IBM Corporation.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

 

 

 

For more information, visit HUhttp://www.earlycase.comUH.

 

Press Contact:

 

Tom Strack

CEO

earlyCASE

PO Box 2474

Kennesaw, GA 30152

P: 404-819-6571

E: HUTom.Strack@earlycase.comUH

Traditional advertising no longer is the means to reaching people who have eDiscovery Data in their hands and are evaluating vendors and solutions.   Look at the reduced sizes of magazines as LTN, etc.   Advertisers and Vendors have to get smarter and have a better game plan to reach a more educated and empowered buying community than we had 2 years ago.  Advertising at the point of need is 15 times more effective than print advertising in reaching them and 25 times more effective than direct mail or email campaigns.

 

earlyCASE is the leading early case assessment and analytics software for eDiscovery, has over 1,200 licensed seats already, and is on the computer screens of people making ESI Collection, eDiscovery processing and document review buying decisions every day.

 

The way our sponsor program works is that sponsors are charged a flat fee to display their 30 second ad (image or multimedia) which is shown while a user is analyzing eDiscovery data.   Even if the ad shows 20 times in that users run the sponsor still only pay a flat amount.   Sponsors only pay if and when your ad is shown, and earlyCASE is only are accepting a total of 10 sponsors so the content cycles about every 10 minutes.   The ads are randomized so they don’t show in the same order and there is a like amount of non advertising content shown to make it more interesting to users.

 

At the end of the month sponsors will receive a report which identifies the domain of the accounts you ad was shown to during their runs of earlyCASE and the # of runs you advertisement was displayed on.

 

earlyCASE is the best way to get in front of buyers who have real cases and data right now!  If you have not created and tried earlyCASE I would encourage you to create a FREE account and see why so many users are jumping on board.   Give me a call or send me an email if I can be of assistance.  

 

If you are not the right person in your organization to take advantage of this win-win opportunity, I would appreciate it if you would forward this information to the right people.

 

 

Best regards

Tom Strack

Email:   Tom.Strack@earlyCASE.com

Phone:   404-819-6571

 

For more information visit us at:  http://www.earlyCASE.com

I had occasion today to attend a “Free” seminar being hosted by Google.  Well, whoever coined the infamous “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”,  wasnt off by much.    The e-discovery angle (read Business Model) that Google has come up with is pretty compeling from the purely economic perspective.

It plays something like this….  You get rid of all your Email Servers in your Enterprise, or at least point your servers and mail exchange gateways at Google Mail Services (lovelingly known by Many as “Postini”).  Postini becomes your email archive, retention manager, litigation hold ability and now offers some really basic, fast and cheap full text indexing, searching and ability to export just what you believe is responsive.

The speakers they brought in to present the “Governance and eDiscovery in the Cloud” seminar did a good job of playing on the fears of the CIO’s / mail administrators in the room as to the brutal grilling they could expect in a 30(b)6 deposition or on the stand with there current policies and the way the effect litigation holds today.   

Like alot of 3 or 4 hour pitches they did a good job of making everyone take at least a half step back and wonder what role cloud computing could play in litigation holds.    Once implemented the fact that the repository is not under the control of the company being sued,  very strong policy and procedure, audit trails and reliability in the Google Archive Cloud make alot of sense initially.     This approach may well be the best of all worlds for a small to medium business.  Cost to implement is almost Zero, less staff, no hardware and a known cost per year per user… I am sure the bean counters will cheer.  The GC may also weigh in on the side of taking the litigation hold management out of IT’s hands.

So, where are the holes?   A couple have come to mind already - and if I were rested I could probably post a bunch more.   Here are some initial concerns:

How would you load years of OLD emails / edocs to get them into the Archive and under the new fancy records management / retention polices?    Who is going to validate the loading of historical emails, etc. so that you can destroy the old backup tapes?     What happens when your search identifies 1Million plus “Records” that need to now be exported from Google archive so you can send them to a discovery vendor or to a document review application?   I havent heard any validation that 100% of the metadata is proven to be intact when Google Exports it - Who wants to be the first to role the dice?    

On the surface their direction makes sense,  it will be interesting to sit on the sideline and see who feels up putting their neck on the line to trust google as their records manager.   Heck,  maybe Big Brother is Google and this is a plot to read all of our mail.    How scary is that?

What we do know is that today we have real cases and real discoverable ESI that does not give us time or the ability to absorb the risk of Googles long term vision.   When a case starts and the team starts collecting data, the last thing I would imagine that comes to mind is “Lets Upload this Terabyte to Google”.  

After the initial shock and the attorneys pressing the team the reality of “We have got to get a quick and accurate idea of what all this stuff is” sets in and this is where industry leading tools like earlyCASE (which is available as Software as a Service “SaaS”) www.earlycase.com lets you analyze the data without sending it anyahere.  Anytime and Anywhere they need this visibilty.   All this without having to take any risk.

You have to applaud Google for thinking outside the box,   the entire e-discovery industry could use more innovators and common sense approaches.   If you would like to discuss more about the cloud and ediscovery post a note here or email me at   tom.strack@earlycase.com

For more information about Google Retention / eDiscovery solution set check out:  http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/archive.html

One thing is for sure, cloud computing is the lowest cost storage and cpu cycles available today - finding ways to help your company using the SaaS / Cloud solutions that make sense for you is a good thing.

For many people early case assessment is a buzz term, for some vendors its a means to try and get clients to send them their data so they can have a look at it and tell them what they have (and how much they will charge them to process, and host it for review). Having come from the eDiscovery vendor side, the basic rule is ALLWAYS GET THE DATA. Once you have it in your hands its alot harder for them to not use you.

Have a look at the Ferris Reserch notes on earlyCASE ( www.earlyCASE.com ) at: http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/13/earlycase-releases-saas-based-early-case-assessment/

earlyCASE lets YOU analyze your eDiscovery data WITHOUT sending the data anywhere. You run it when and where you are. Even more importantly, is that earlyCASE is focused solely on early case assessment and not on getting your project. Because earlyCASE are experts in eDiscovery and early case assessment it gives you information and tools an eDiscovery vendor probably does not want you to have.

Between now and the end of the year, earlyCASE has a GREAT offer for new users - Let them demo the product to you and at least 1 of your co-workers - and everyone who is in on the DEMO gets FREE unlimited use of earlyCASE for 30 days. How Sweet is that!

Have a look, I am sure you will be impressed. http://www.earlycase.com

I think you will find the early case assessment checklist (parts 1 and 2) that John DeGroote authored pretty helpful.   They are high level, but layout a simple roadmap of items that need to be take into account.

Check his article out (click here)

To get your arms around the eDiscovery part of your case during early case assessment,  check out  www.earlycase.com

Interesting Article on Reducing the size of data ESI in the EDRM Model.  (Click Here for the Article)

 

I saw an interesting Post earlier today asking the Question - Is anyone finding a real world application of EDRM XML?    Well, I waited in the wings to see what was posted against this blog entry… and no posts.   This lack of energy made me curios as to where people are seeing the value added by the EDRM model. 

Absolutely Clarity,  but here is the angle you must hold EDRM at to see the real value it has brought to the market - both on the consumer side as we well as the provider side.   The business of creating a set of standards and moving a rapidly changing market and product offerings takes a while,  ultimatley when END USERS (the people with money and buying eDiscovery goods and services) will have to demand EDRM interchangble products & services before vendors who are better served by locking in clients with proprietary storage and interchange formats will lead with EDRM interchangeble offerings.

Why is interchageble formats and offerings good for the industry and the market in whole… This is where either people blood will boil or we hear the choir crank up.    Being able to use your vendor of choice for certain services and change on a dime to a best of breed or Niche provider because the ALL are compliant with how they store and interpret data.   Ultimately this will bring better point (niche) products as viable options for a specific requirement or step, because nothing is lost in changing horses.

As vendors strive to retain as much revenue as possible, knowing that a client can move there business very easily will drive better products and services across the board.  Will it drive eDiscovery prices down,  perhaps in the short term as vendors with lessor products and services lower their price as the only way they can retain or get business.  In the long run, market forces will reward better products with premium prices, and worse products with,   you guessed it… less money (or NO Business).

For instance,  If you collect/preserve data using a “Engine”, ”Spider”, Forensic tool that stores the data in a form that you have to use that vendors product to extract files, filter cull, or process the data for eDiscovery - you are absolutly stuck with that offering.  Even if it isnt the best product, or the best price, or you hate the way it works or what it produces.   Now,   lets put our Standards hat on - You use a tools that store the collected data in EDRM XML,  or uses the rising (open source) AFF (Advanced Forensic Format) that is an open architecture storage format that anyone can use, build application to read, etc.   Data in AFF, gives you lots of options - including using tools like EnCase or FTK to access.   Now ask yourself why in EnCase reading AFF, but does not give others access to the API to be able to read their formats.   Well,  a reasonable person would immediatly see the value to EnCase (and NOT the end user) of locking them into using EnCase products.

Examples like this are abundant across the board throughout the eDiscovery and Litigation Support industry.    This is where consumers voice has to ring loud and clear demanding interchangebility and standards based software and solutions…. Enter EDRM:    The EDRM model defines in very simple terms the building blocks and the methods of interchange between these elements.   How things work under the hood within a single step is where smart vendors will work there magic,  the connectors and interchanges are the common highway which smart vendors will adopt and seek out to make EDRM better for the common good.

Is EDRM self serving for vendors,  perhaps from a marketing perspective.  But when there are independent means of validating that a solution is in fact 100% compliant and interchangeable then the EDRM logo will mean more than you wrote a check or attended a meeting.   So does a vendors display of the EDRM logo mean much today,  well you will have to decide that.   Knowing alot of the players in the eDiscovery space and seeing them brandishing the EDRM logo, lets me know there is no real meaning today.  In the long run,  I certainly hope it evolves to something closer to where the ISO 9XXX programs took quality in this country.

Well back to where we started,  EDRM is the right start - But we need more, and that will not come until people demand it with their checkbook.   Well,  George Socha I hope i didnt offend your stoic reasonablness or the vision you have brought to a half full glass of cloudy eDiscovery water.    Stick with it,  the market will get there and when they do vendors will finally step up with real interchangebility between the EDRM blocks.

Where does EDRM fit into the eDiscovery early case assessment - quite simply as collected data, litigation holds, archives, repositories store there data in a standard form and offer EDRM XML interchangebility places data within easy and rapid reach to be analyzed.   Today, connectors, middleware and some odd gyrations are required.   Leading products like earlyCASE analyzes large amounts of data very quickly in giving a clear and meaningful visibility,  as EDRM becomes a reality earlyCASE will get even better, faster, and be able to get to more and more data at a low cost.    If you like the concept of EDRM get involved, speak up, make it part of your requirements.

For more information about early case assessment for eDisocvery visit:  http://www.earlyCASE.com

for more information on EDRM visit:   http://www.EDRM.net

to send George Socha a Note of thanks for being the EDRM conductor:  George@sochaconsulting.com