NY lawfirm speeds up e-discovery with Digital Reef

By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer, SearchStorage | May 25, 2010

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A law firm is using data classification Software as a Service (SaaS) to cut down the amount of data submitted to attorneys for legal review and speed up the e-discovery  process for clients.

Nick Eglevsky, litigation support manager at New York City-based Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, said his firm has been working with Digital Reef Inc.'s Virtual Governance Warehouse data classification software, delivered as a service, for approximately a year to quickly classify and analyze data.

Digital Reef claims its data classification and search algorithms are more advanced than previous generations of data classification products. The product contains a "similarity engine" that can identify overall contextual similarity of files in a repository rather than simply matching keywords. Digital Reef came out of stealth last May with the intention of marketing its product for unstructured data management. The vendor has since added litigation support and e-discovery features, following a path similar to predecessors such as Kazeon Systems, now a part of EMC Corp.

For scalability, Digital Reef software consists of three layers. Each layer can run on clusters of hosts. An access tier can be tunneled through a firewall if necessary, a service tier acts as a job router for requests that come into the system and an analytics tier processes data. Within the analytics tier, the software also checks large jobs to see if they need to be load-balanced or restarted.

Eglevsky said it was performance that first attracted his firm to Digital Reef's service. The data sets Kelley Drye works with are not that big -- "to us, a large data set is anything over 40 gigabytes," Eglevsky said -- but it needs to be analyzed, classified, and culled within two or three business days and sometimes as soon as overnight.

The goal for Kelley Drye is to eliminate irrelevant data before the data set is sent to an attorney for formal legal review because culling irrelevant data through an attorney's billable hours is expensive for both the firm and its clients.

"We don't want the review team going through documents that aren't relevant," Eglevsky said. "So we're not paying attorneys to review fantasy football and news alert emails." These considerations are growing more critical as corporate data everywhere increases in size, and e-discovery gains prominence as a standard IT practice, particularly in the regulatory climate following last year's economic recession.

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