Clearwell Upgrades e-Discovery Platform, Adds New Templates

By David Roe May 26, 2010

At the beginning of February Clearwell Systems (news, site) announced that it was in the process of upgrading its e-Discovery platform. That upgrade is now complete and recently v5.5 was released with a number of pre-built templates designed to make e-Discovery relatively easy.

The result of analyzing best practice workflows implemented by their extensive client base in both the public and private sector, the new version with new templates targets companies that wish to bring e-Discovery processes in-house, but who are limited in the resources they have to do this.

According to Clearwell, the combined templates offer not only efficient and speedy e-Discovery requests, but can also cut costs by providing extensive early case assessment abilities.

Data Processing And e-Discovery

At the core of v5.5, in keeping with features in previous versions, is the ability to process data at speeds of one terabyte per day as well as the ability to scale to 100 million documents on a single appliance.

Anticipating the varied nature of e-Discovery, it also enables enterprises to link to other applications and appliances through an interface that provides central management for all processes linked with e-Discovery requests. In v5.5 additional features include:

Support for many different email formats dispensing with the need for data conversion
Email encryption support enabling review and analysis of encrypted emails using PKI certificates
Information extraction from image files using integrated OCR
Enhanced review functions
Multi-processing for managing complex document types

These new additions to the e-Discovery platform are in addition to the comprehensive list of features that were introduced last August when it finally hit v5.0.

Clearwell v5.0

Version 5.0 provides a single, integrated e-discovery product that enables users to deploy an "iterative, dynamic and defensible e-Discovery process.”

This means that users can fulfill e-Discovery requests using the filters, processes, analysis, and review features of a single application that eliminates the need for import and export of data between multiple tools.

Apart from reducing the many manual errors that are possible in these requests, it also lowers the overall cost and duration of e-Discovery. Version 5.5 does all that as well as simplifying the process with the new templates.

In-House e-Discovery

However, what might really turn heads is if it does, in fact, enable companies bring e-Discovery in-house. Many enterprises have been tinkering around with the idea in recent times, but are not entirely clear about a strategy and the costs.

Clearwell, for example, estimates that the cost of keeping records in-house with future e-Discovery processes in mind will cost an average of US $5,000 per GB for processing and attorney review costs.

If v5.5 can cut some of those costs at the root, then it really is going to attract attention for enterprises considering in-house e-Discovery as a real, cost saving option.