(with a special note on FRONTEO’s new CEO,
Craig Carpenter)
By:
Patrick deHahn
31 March 2017 (New York, NY) – eDiscovery technology continues to dominate the legal industry. Yet, even with all of its great innovation and exciting development to streamline processes done by firms, there are issues to address.
As we all know, cost is a huge factor. No matter what size the organization is, the concern is how to manage the cost of document review and analysis. The devil is in the details and no group want to let slip a project through the cracks — so the search is on for the best service or the strongest process.
“Especially right now, one of the current issues in the industry that everyone has as their top find is moving into the cloud. We’ve seen that happen in every other industry and, right now, Relativity is getting ready to move into the cloud. That puts a lot of price and pressure in the industry and everyone is talking about how to handle that.”
However, as many learned from the Legaltech conference, many organizations are addressing these issues in eDiscovery.
FRONTEO, involved in several facets of eDiscovery, sees the many issues facing clients in the legal industry and is at the front lines working to address them. In fact, FRONTEO is working with kCura to host Relativity tools in their services, possibly alleviating some cost and cloud transition concerns. Said Brock:
“FRONTEO’s actually one of the first service providers, a certified partner, of RelativityOne. That is going to be available for our clients in terms of helping them manage that price-differential for them with that shift to the cloud.”
Fronteo’s cloud support is a strong selling point; however, the focus of the business has always been in managed review:
“We provide end-to-end eDiscovery in terms of document review, from everything forensic selection and analysis to get that documents and data, to providing certified attorneys to staff in doing that review, and then we have a great team of review managers nationally and globally to manage those projects. So, we can handle everything from hosting a small project to a large global cross-border project if needed.”
She gave us an overview on the many pieces of the FRONTEO strategy: RelativityOne, end-to-end document review, business intelligence, their ROI Analyzer, and more in this video piece:
|
|
As noted in the interview, FRONTEO provides review as their ultimate service, taking pride in their well developed and individualized process in document analysis, as they expand their global footprint and bring forth more eDiscovery tools to fill the gaps of eDiscovery issues.
Their TRUST Business Intelligence portal was featured at Legaltech, which is a tool to summarize data from several sources and help visualize workflow.
Another great resource from FRONTEO is their free ROI Analyzer. It is an interactive calculator where anyone can insert the demands of their document review, then see how much they would save if they outsourced some, most, or all of their work.
It is apparent that FRONTEO has focused on presenting a base service of comprehensive document review, while developing a slew of new eDiscovery tools.
This is a strong strategy, perhaps reflective in Brock’s choice of her least favorite buzzword in the industry, which she shared as “ends-to-ends” in the above video interview. As we discussed off-camera, even admitting to using it herself, she dislikes the phrase for its vagueness. FRONTEO is in a way trying to depart from scratching the surface in the document review processes to bring strong tools in some of the individual eDiscovery steps of these processes.
FRONTEO is balancing an obvious strength in managed review, seen as a basis in the legal service industry, to push their new tech out to an existing and growing client base. Exciting things are in store.
… and a salute to Craig Carpenter
It was recently announced that Craig Carpenter had been appointed the new CEO of FRONTEO. You can read the press release here. And for a great interview with Craig on partnerships and artificial intelligence as the defining characteristics of e-discovery’s transitional period click here.
We have known Craig for many years. In 2010 (what seems like a prehistoric age right now) we had our first deep dive into the wonderful world of predictive coding, predictive sampling, and automated review. At the time, Craig was Recommind’s Chief Technology Officer. We had numerous chats with him (and we did no less than four video interviews) and he was instrumental in providing us a treasure trove of information to begin our understanding of what all of this technology could do. A quote that stuck with us from one of those interviews:
This is not easy stuff to master. You need to work at it. I think what you have to do is try to understand at a deeper level what’s happening semantically. What this technology tries to do is “marry up” a very highly scalable system for dealing with unstructured information – and the kind of database you need for doing that is different than what you would utilize for online transaction processing. But it also marries that up with a very deep knowledge of machine learning, which is the root of our company and where our post-docs were doing their research, to help understand what the key pieces of information in the sea of textual stuff are. And once you understand the key pieces, then you can put that into applications for further use or you can provide it to business intelligence applications to make sense of, or you can feed it elsewhere. But that’s very different from dealing with very structured data that most people are familiar with.
For more information on FRONTEO please contact:
