Autonomy in legal – and there’s more

Just come off the phone from a telco with Autonomy + there is another wrap up release from the company. What the company is keen to stress is that whereas many vendors can still only offer point solutions (or at least combinations of best-of-breed software) Autonomy has always been a believer in end-to-end platforms. For example its new e-discovery appliance is the only product out there that can deliver an easy-to-use, plug-and-play solution that also handles ECA and legal hold.Other points to note include…• the new iManage ConflictsManager app is available both as part of the overall suite and as a stand-alone system – which will presumably take it into new territories previously the turf of BPM/workflow vendors such as Metastorm. • Autonomy is promoting its ‘chaining’ concept as the next big idea. By chaining it means the way technology must increasingly link processes & data within corporate legal departments with law firms’ processes and data, whereas previously (or at least before the recession) there was a disconnect.• Autonomy say its approach to ‘meaning-based’ computing mean its e-discovery products have a natural fit with the recent Jackson report’s recommendations on relevancy and proportionality in the UK litigation support/e-disclosure market.Here’s some of the release……The advantages of the Autonomy legal technology platform are driving the company’s continued market-share growth, with several recent customer wins including BAE, Bingham McCutcheon, CVR Energy, McAfee, Mayer Brown LLP and Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP. “Autonomy’s legal technology platform is ideally suited to meet the challenges and realities of the modern day practice of law,” said Mayer Brown partner Michael E. Lackey. “I believe that Autonomy’s ability to enable law firms to seamlessly collaborate with corporate clients may allow us to speed timeframes and reduce costs in e-discovery, allowing us to offer higher quality service and better outcomes for our clients.”Corporate legal departments and law firms face significant obstacles to achieving a fast and effective e-discovery process.  Corporations often depend on multiple, disconnected point solutions from different technology providers. Each step in the process requires a costly and time-consuming hand-off of information. Because these tools lack the ability to form a conceptual understanding of the data, they are unable to automate the process of quickly identifying and holding only relevant information for each case. As a result, in a process where speed and accuracy are of paramount importance to success, law firms are often left with their hands tied while they wait for access to their corporate clients’ data. Autonomy provides a unique ‘chaining’ capability that transforms a slow, reactive, manual and costly process to one that is fast, proactive, automated, and cost-efficient. With one platform that covers every step in the EDRM, Autonomy can transparently move the data through the entire e-discovery process, eliminating the need for inefficient hand-offs of information between technology and service providers…Autonomy’s legal solutions now consist of the following:• Autonomy iManage WorkSite• Autonomy iManage Universal Search• Autonomy Records Manager• Autonomy iManage ConflictsManager – a new solution that enables law firms to streamline the management of their conflicts of interest process, iManage ConflictsManager detects patterns and reduces the risk and time for new client vetting procedures.• Autonomy Digital Safe – a massively scalable, hosted archive service that enables customers to outsource the storage and management of email messages, rich-media files, audio files, instant messages, and web content. With over 13 petabytes under management, Digital Safe is the world’s largest private cloud.• Autonomy eDiscovery Appliance – another new solution and the industry’s only e-discovery appliance that combines early case assessment (ECA) and legal hold capabilities.• Autonomy Legal Hold – automates the legal hold process, data & custodian identification, notification management, preservation & collection, including industry-first hold-in-place capabilities.• Autonomy Investigator Early Case Assessment – enables early case assessment with the ability to analyze and categorize enterprise Electronically Stored Information (ESI) using the Autonomy IDOL platform. • Autonomy Introspect – a scalable review, analysis, and processing solution, Introspect marks, tags, annotates, redacts, and numbers all ESI.• Autonomy DSMail – another new product: a self-service archiving solution for email management, governance, and e-discovery.