Search Turns Serious When The Law Gets InvolvedSearch Turns Serious When The Law Gets Involved

Companies know law suits are a part of doing business, yet the legal discovery process has taken on a life of its own in recent years. The drivers? Electronic communication and the data glut it's created, complicated by new federal requirements for delivering electronic data in response to a legal request.

Enterprise search vendor Autonomy hopes to solve this problem with software it released last week that it says can track the life cycle of all the data within a company generated by telephone calls, voice mail, e-mail, instant messages, documents, and videos. The software, called Idol Echo, is built on top of the company's Intelligent Data Operating Layer 7 enterprise search platform.

If it sounds complex and expensive, it is. A typical Idol 7 implementation, with or without the Echo module, costs about $350,000, Autonomy says. That's not a lot in terms of enterprise software, but compared with free or considerably cheaper search alternatives, it is.

But the software offers what a Google-like search can't come close to. Idol 7 looks for patterns and relationships in content and can detect related content even if different yet relevant words are used. If someone is looking for information on a White House press conference, for example, Idol will pull content related to a press conference with the president in the Rose Garden but ignore stored data related to gardening and roses. Echo follows the traffic pattern of data, such as the path of an e-mail attachment or voice mail, Autonomy says. It tracks who has read, heard, forwarded, and retained a message, and follows it as it goes from one form to another, such as from a phone call to a document.

The payback from using Idol 7 and Echo would be reduced time and labor to sift through data; consider that attorneys conducting e-discovery might bill $500 or more per hour. Idol can support 60 million documents running on 32-bit architectures, and more than 330 million documents and 1,000 queries per second on 64-bit architectures.

E-discovery is expected to become more challenging following changes last December to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that require companies to provide electronically stored information within 99 days of a request.

UP AGAINST THE WALL

Autonomy's partners offer Idol 7 and Idol Echo in a services model, eliminating costly and complex integration with a company's IT infrastructure. DOAR Litigation Consulting offers them to assist law firms and companies with e-discovery. The legal industry has hit a brick wall in terms of trying to get access to data because of the impact of electronic communications, says president Nick Croce.

What's more, data storage is so inexpensive that companies are holding on to much more data. Investigators used to be able to make photocopies of the contents of file cabinets. It was a big but manageable process, Croce says. "Human beings can no longer use that same process," he adds.

It's unclear just how many companies will want these offerings. Gartner analyst Deb Logan writes in a recent report that various software vendors are stoking the hype and fear around e-discovery requirements, "reminiscent of that which surrounded Y2K." Yet vendors may ultimately be disappointed by their efforts to sell software based on the new legislation, she says, predicting that the "market will not take off fully until there is a clear understanding of definitions and procedures based on case law decisions."

What's more, the need for sophisticated and costly search offerings from Autonomy, Endeca, Fast, and others has been questioned with the rise of less expensive offerings, such as the Google Enterprise appliance, and free offerings like IBM OmniFind Yahoo. Yet, Autonomy's doing well: It reported a net profit of $13.3 million for its third quarter ended March 31, up 90% from the same period last year, and revenue of $65.5 million, up 17%. And its customers are a varied group, ranging from the U.S. Department of Defense to Boeing and Mercedes-Benz. This all goes to show that the demand for enterprise search, whether free and simple or costly and sophisticated, is strong.