It is no secret that limiting the number of objects legal staff have to review dramatically lowers the cost of litigation. Therefore, you would think many of the long standing in-house eDiscovery solutions would have figured out how best to swiftly process or cull large chunks of unstructured electronically stored information (U-ESI) prior to review. Apparently not as well as they could.
Company and Approach
Clearwell has made in-roads into enterprise clients with its appliance approach, which promises quick and easy installation and up to an 80% to 90% reduction in data to be reviewed. Clearwell claims the impact translates to a 50% reduction in downstream processing costs and an equal impact on attorney workload. In addition, Clearwell’s solution enables earlier case assessment by legal staff, affording a pre-review stage before further culling and processing occurs. See EDRM Framework.
By integrating components of the Processing, Analysis, and Review (PAR) stages and providing a better-than-enterprise Transparent Search capability, which they say enables defensibility, Clearwell has made fans of legal and compliance departments as well as law firms, service providers, and several major technology partners including EMC, HP, and Symantec. Founded in December 2004, today Clearwell touts a 200-strong customer base and has a large number of publicly referenceable enterprise customers. The company experienced 284% revenue growth through 2008, which was accomplished with just over 70 employees (40 plus technical staff) and the help of $33 million in funding.
Functionality and Cost
Clearwell's E-Discovery Platform creates its own index, provides de-duplication and full Web-based capability. It mirrors the common workflow of eDiscovery by searching on custodian, date, or relevant keywords and automatically links together all related messages into chronological threads which capture the entire discussion. The solution’s analytics removes false positives and can perform a loose file metadata search. Appliances can be clustered (loosely coupled) to meet the performance and scalability requirements of larger installations.
Clearwell is best aimed at electronic data rather than hard copy scan or coded documents where processing and de-duplication of data is very fast (approx 11-14GB per hour according to one source). The product’s Intelligent Culling capabilities look across datasets to remove duplicates and non-relevant information. This means that only relevant data is passed to the lawyers for review, reducing the cost and time of review. The lawyers can then perform the analysis and view the email threads and relationships in a graphical manner.
Clearwell offers two pricing models today; the first is a perpetual license based on capacity, the second is pay-per-use license. A typical installation can run between $100k and $500k, but given the potential ROI, this may appear to be a bargain for some large enterprise users.
Concerns and Futures
While Clearwell focuses on processing, analysis, and review of emails and documents, other tools are needed for redaction, review of TIFs and production, thus the need to pass data on to solutions such as Concordance or Summation to do a full review. One user suggested that functions such as re-sorting document summaries, returning to the last document reviewed upon exiting and re-entering the database, creating customized fields, organizing entered data, and running reports are limited and much more time-consuming than with other solutions they had used.
This is not surprising as Clearwell has focused on processing, analysis and first-pass review, and is not a full linear review platform. Clearwell has told some of their users that the full review platform will likely be ready by the end of 2009. They may also be looking to expand capabilities into the Preservation and Collection phases of the eDiscovery lifecycle to broaden their capabilities and appeal.
Bottom line
For in-house legal departments or law firms that want to get an early view of data and for the litigation support teams that want to reduce the number of emails and documents they review into manageable chunks, Clearwell appears to be a very good choice. See eDiscovery Woes
Action Item: There are still no truly end-to-end best-of-breed eDiscovery solutions that provide all the functionality needed to fill out the entire ERDM framework. Enterprise users, legal teams and service providers will still need to deploy point solutions to limit the amount of unstructured data that is reviewed while continuing to search for ways to decrease the overall cost of eDiscovery activities.
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