GCE Offers Litigation, E-Discovery Support Cloud

E-discovery and the cloud seem made for each other: a business process of changeable intensity meets a computing and storage resource designed to scale up and down. Global Computer Enterprises Inc. (GCE) provides additional evidence of this pattern. The Reston, Va.-based company is in the early stages of selling a cloud-based litigation support offering. GCE grew up in the government systems integration market, but now focuses on cloud services. But the integration background does come in handy at times.

GCE Litigation Support Cloud provides legal and case management personnel with  electronic information processing, an e-discovery evidence review platform, and scalable storage. For the review portion, GCE offers iCONECT Development LLC’s document review product.

GCE can also provide financial management tools to its legal customers. Those services stem from GCE’s financial management cloud, the company’s initial cloud service. Federal agencies such as the Department of Labor use that cloud offering.

Another part of the package: GCE’s cloud infrastructure makes use of the Hadoop distributed computing and storage framework. The company has deployed Hadoop with the technology’s HBase big data-oriented database. Vertica, an analytic database, is another element of CCE’s big data tool set.

Markets

Mare Lucas, vice president of business development at GCE, said the company plans to market its litigation support cloud to current customers of its financial management cloud and, in general, to government agencies engaged in regulatory and litigation activities.

Lucas said the litigation support-in-the-cloud approach resonates with law firms as well, noting that the company was at the recent LegalTech trade show.

Customers can tap GCE’s integration services as well as its cloud.  Lucas said the company can integrate with a customer’s current tools such as billing systems or financial systems. The company’s integrator origins makes bridging systems a natural extension of its services, she noted.

Others in the Cloud

GCE, of course, isn’t alone in the litigation support and e-discovery cloud business. Last month, Talkin’Cloud covered CaseCentral, which focuses on cloud-based e-discovery for corporations and law firms. Overall, the legal community seems inclined to investigate cloud offerings and managed services.