E-Discovery Cloud Services Trend Continues

The e-discovery sector has been moving to managed services and cloud computing for a while now. An additional data point comes from CaseCentral, a company that focuses on cloud-based e-discovery for corporations and law firms.

Steve d’Alencon, chief marketing officer of CaseCentral, said the 18-year old company has gone through previous iterations of cloud software delivery including  the application service provider (ASP) approach. Today the company offers its Case Central eDiscovery Platform, which integrates early case assessment with review and production.

The company uses direct sales, but also works with channel partners. Those include legal process outsourcers that provide managed review and others services.  Partners in that category include Cobra Legal Solutions LLC, Compliance, and Peak Discovery. In addition, CaseCentral works with vendors such as Hitachi Data Systems and Symantec Corp.

Latest Move

CaseCentral recently announced CloudConnect software, which lets its customers upload data into the CaseCentral eDiscovery Platform. The company said the connector replaces the manual chore of copying electronic information to media and shipping it to a service provider who then loads the data into an e-discovery tool. With the connector, users select the files they wish to upload and the software handles to job of encrypting, transferring, processing, de-duplicating and loading the data, according to CaseCentral.

The connector performs the task in a matter of hours, while the manual process could take days or weeks, d’Alencon said.

CloudConnect follows an earlier CaseCentral connector that integrates Symantec’s Enterprise Vault with the CaseCentral eDiscovery Platform.

The connectors, essentially, put the data onramp in the cloud along with e-discovery software. Overall, it’s another attempt to simplify e-discovery as many legal departments seek to bring the process in-house. A number of service providers and, increasingly, their customers seem to think the cloud offers the best path for doing that. Eighty-one percent of the attorneys surveyed in a Kroll Ontrack-sponsored study said they plan to leverage the cloud for e-discovery or storage purposes over the next two years.

“The cloud as a delivery vehicle for e-discovery software is here to stay,” d’Alencon said.

It’s hard to argue otherwise, as the market fills with MSPs and software companies staking their e-discovery claims in the cloud.