Article by Tony Tangora
I recently sat down with Jo Sherman Founder & CEO of EDT and Frank Canterino Co-Founding Partner & CTO of Empire Discovery to discuss their new partnership.
Q: Jo how long has EDT software been around and what was the
driving force behind its creation?
Jo : I founded the company over 10 years ago, in response to an
opportunity I saw to improve the way litigators were using electronic
information. I wanted to make a real difference to the way litigation and
investigations are managed - to make the whole exercise more efficient and to
develop software that is really easy to use.
Q: Frank, with all the established technology in this market,
why did your firm embrace EDT?
Frank: The key appeal for me was the transparency it provides to
our client base. I have been searching for ways to reduce the costs of
Processing, ECA and Review. The traditional approach involves a law firm
or corporation handing over a large dataset to a service provider, typically
with no prior insight or knowledge regarding the contents. The problem
with that model is the client doesn’t know upfront what to expect and, there’s
usually a lot of time and money spent processing and reviewing irrelevant data.
Q: So, how does EDT change this traditional approach?
Frank: EDT enables our clients to dramatically cull document
volumes down prior to review or predictive coding. This reduces
costs and enables a proportionate approach. One of EDT’s unique features
is the dynamic budget calculator that adjusts real time to show the cost and
review time impact of various culling options, prior to committing them. That
puts lawyers in control of the case from the moment they receive the data.
They can try out keywords and other culling criteria before committing to them
and can iteratively work out which ones they want to use based on the budget
time and cost impact. The whole approach delivers massive
savings.
Q: Jo, you’ve grown the company in the UK, Australia and Asia
over the last 10 years. How different do you think the US market will be for
EDT?
Jo: The scale of the litigation here is, of course, a little
different, however the problems are the same everywhere. Clients
are looking for ways to reduce costs and keep ediscovery proportionate.
They are not prepared to pay for irrelevant data to be processed and reviewed
anymore and the courts, worldwide, are starting to focus in on Proportionality
which is a great thing. While we have not been active in the US, per se,
over the last decade we’ve established a client base elsewhere that includes 4
of the top 10 global law firms, large international corporations and consulting
groups. These firms are committed to making litigation more efficient and
to delivering real value for their clients.
Q Has the market been receptive to this new approach?
Frank : We have had an extremely positive response.
Our clients are genuinely excited about the new proposition EDT delivers. In fact,
the market interest is quite overwhelming. We have many projects now
running on EDT and we’re thrilled to be delivering this exclusive and
unique solution to our clients. We are expanding our team to accommodate
the demand and to service the projects that are flowing in for EDT.
Q What have you learned from early projects using EDT?
Frank : We introduced our clients to EDT as a unique ECA
solution. It’s been very successful in that domain with most of our early
adopter clients seeing data reduction rates of between 80- 95%. However,
the interesting development was the fact these clients also decided to use the
EDT Review platform that is integrated within the same product.
This is another big saving because it’s not necessary to process load files or
to move data around between tools. We were anticipating our clients might want
to export to traditional review platforms like Relativity, Summation or
Concordance once they had completed the culling exercise in EDT, however, they decided
to use the Review component too. So, we now have large scale reviews
running in EDT very successfully.
Q: Jo how are you feeling about this partnership with Empire?
Jo: I’m over the moon about the partnership with Empire because
our firms have similar motivations, culture and values. Both teams are
nimble, creative and committed and between us we have over 400 years of
eDiscovery experience, so working together, it’s a powerful combination.
For more information on EDT check out www.discoveredt.com/
For more information about Empire check out www.empirediscovery.com
For more information about Empire check out www.empirediscovery.com
