10 December 2010 -  Last week I attended the IQPC e-discovery conference in Munich (in addition to EAM Capital I own a company called Project Counsel that is involved in all-things-legal-technology-and-litigation).    In Munich at the same time was one of many, many software  developer/tech head “unconferences” that occur around the world.   This one seemed to focus on semantic technology, virtualization, all-things-media … and ediscovery.  Folks from Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, etc. were in attendance.  I was able to skip out of IQPC for a bit and attend a few sessions and grab a dinner with some folks (my CTO is ex-Google).

Search technology in the e-discovery/litigation game is a bit different than the search/semantic technology field we all follow and are involved in and recently discussed at LeWeb.     The e-discovery folks are somewhat wrapped up right now in artificial intelligence, predictive coding, non-linear vis-à-vis linear approach to the review of document databases, etc.

Surprisingly (maybe unsurprisingly) many at the developers’ conference knew all about it – in fact enough to know that legal technology software developer Recommind calls their process “predictive” coding while FTI Technology calls it “suggestive” coding.  But not much respect for e-discovery vendors who they find “amusing”:  “You e-discovery guys have this mega-market and the vendors involved have €1 budgets and commoditized technology that consists of 2 cans and a string”.  Ok, you’re right.  We’re a cottage industry despite a multi-billion euro/dollar market.

What these folks are doing with search is an eye-opener.   Of course with $8 billion R&D budgets, why not.  Themes/discussion: semantic search, metadata, semantic web, ontology, BI 2.0 (which has been retagged “advanced analytics” of late), etc., etc.   Just a sample of something I saw:  IBM has this analytics that identifies the “alpha” individual in its customers’ calling circles — those people who’d be most likely to take other customers with them should they switch carriers — so that it can cater to those individuals.  They also have text analytics they apply to all forms of social media to “detect sentiment” (not just chase keywords) in order to gauge customers’ reactions to brand advertising and then adjust marketing channels and messaging accordingly.  It’s industry-specific — healthcare, insurance, telecom, consumer goods, etc. – and they are in the process of applying it to the litigation world.

The IBM analytics are quite amazing.  The various programs can integrate gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of unstructured data from web-based repositories, collect a wide range of unstructured web data stemming from user-defined seed URLs and extracts/enrich that data using unstructured information management architecture.    While its purpose is to leverage unstructured data strategies/support decisions (business intelligence) its application to text analytics for litigation is a step away.

The private equity folks were actually the keenest to discuss the legal technology market because of an anticipated surge in M&A activity in 2011 in that market.  Stay tuned.