Time for a round-up of the latest ediscovery and litigation support industry people and product news, this week featuring: DTI + Exact Data + Exterro and Ringtail + EY goes to Manchester + Kroll OnTrack and Microsoft SharePoint + RAVN Systems are now on the CloudStore…
• US news: DTI has appointed of industry expert Mario Skaf as its director of technology. Having held various positions in the Bay Area litigation support industry since 2005, Skaf brings almost 10 years of local experience to DTI and its clients.
• US news: Xact Data Discovery (XDD) has acquired an equity stake in C:DOX, a Cleveland, Ohio-based provider of litigation document services. The partnership provides XDD with a presence in the Cleveland legal market while offering C:DOX clients an expanded array of ediscovery and managed review services. Founded in 2005 by Marty Bohn and Bob DeStefanis, both veterans of the document management and litigation support services industries, C:DOX serves the Cleveland and Akron legal markets with a unique blend of expertise and unparalleled service. C:DOX offers litigation support services from document scanning and photocopying to trial exhibits, archive scanning solutions and facilities management services. C:DOX is well known in its market for Whole Inch Pricing (WIP), an exact all-inclusive pricing model. The agreement allows C:DOX to offer XDD’s entire suite of electronic discovery services, including both domestic and offshore review, under the banner “C:DOX eDiscovery, an XDD-powered Solution.”
• US News: Exterro Inc has unveiled its connector to FTI Technology’s award-winning Ringtail ediscovery software. Exterro’s new connector eliminates the need to manually create export files and metadata formats, allowing in-house legal teams to automatically upload large amounts of data for legal review into Ringtail after conducting preservation, legal hold and collection with the advanced Exterro Fusion ediscovery software suite. This new, two-way integration lets in-house teams seamlessly and cost-effectively transition from Exterro Fusion to Ringtail and maintain complete visibility across all ediscovery phases.
• UK News: EY (aka Ernst & Young) is to open its first dedicated forensic technology facility outside of London. The new Manchester based lab will see EY investing £650,000 and hiring an additional 50 forensic professionals over the next two years to complement the existing team.
The facility is scheduled to open in the autumn and will initially specialise in collecting, managing and analysing ediscovery data for legal disputes and regulatory investigations across the UK, as well as supporting the firm’s Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services team.
Aside from traditional data collection, predominately from laptops and computers, EY is seeing significant growth in demand for data collection from mobile phones, tablets and social media.
Paul Walker, Head of Forensic Technology & Discovery Services said “This new lab will enhance our ability to effectively plan for and develop new eDiscovery solutions in response to evolving technology, as well as support our London-based team in servicing a broader range of clients throughout the UK.
The investment will boost the size of the team to 150 people – the largest in the UK – a sign of our market-leading capability in forensic technology. It represents a significant investment that reaffirms our intention to continue expanding our FTDS practice – which is a high growth area for the firm – and EY’s continued commitment to Manchester as a business destination.”
• UK & US News: Kroll Ontrack has announced the availability of Ontrack PowerControls version 7.2. Adding support for StorSimple SharePoint Database Optimiser, in addition to Metalogix StoragePoint and FileStream, Ontrack PowerControls is a comprehensive tool for accessing, searching and restoring externalised Microsoft SharePoint 2013 data. It also addresses the complex challenge of reassembling shredded files directly from a SharePoint 2013 backup without needing to restore the entire database. The StorSimple solution uses SharePoint APIs to offload large BLOBs from SharePoint databases. This helps maintain performance levels for SharePoint servers and facilitates SharePoint disaster recovery by reducing the size of the databases that must be restored. Leveraging Ontrack PowerControls 7.2 empowers IT administrators to granularly rebuild these externalised databases and shredded SharePoint files during the restore process.
“Native SharePoint SQL storage is very expensive and huge database volumes can impact performance, so organisations leverage remote BLOB solutions like StorSimple to externalise BLOB data to reduce storage costs and increase performance,” said Paul Le Messurier, programme and operations manager at Kroll Ontrack. “Ontrack PowerControls 7.2 allows IT administrators to restore individual items without conducting a full database restore.” Results from a recent Ontrack PowerControls customer survey revealed that 34% of respondents frequently receive requests for restoring SharePoint items, lists, libraries and folders. www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery
• UK news: RAVN Systems just announced that its eDiscovery support services have been ratified for inclusion on the Crown Commercial Service approved supplier list on CloudStore. CloudStore, also known as the G Cloud, is an easy-to-use online marketplace where cloud-computing suppliers can offer their services to the public sector. Public bodies are also able to review and purchase these services through CloudStore.
The revolutionary CloudStore framework reduces costs and improves efficiencies as it allows users to draw down and pay for RAVN’s services as they are required, rather than requiring expensive and time consuming full tender or competition procurement processes. RAVN joins the £60m framework by providing services to support eDiscovery, information management systems and enterprise content management systems. For more information on RAVN’s services on CloudStore please visit http://govstore.service.gov.uk/cloudstore/5-g5-2011-002
