Open Text Embraces Recommind, Expands eDiscovery Tool

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Dec 9, 2008

Open Text has partnered with Recommind, a provider of enterprise search and eDiscovery solutions, to offer a new product called Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment.

The solution promises to minimize the need for third-party processing and help control the high costs of legal reviews by culling irrelevant information before it goes for review by outside counsel.

New Open Text eDiscovery Solution Overview

Shortly after a slew of announcements at the Open Text Content World conference, the ECM vendor is solidifying its position in the Enterprise CMS market by offering a complete eDiscovery solution that can potentially help companies reduce eDiscovery costs with in-place Early Case Assessment, collection, legal hold, culling and processing tasks from one platform.

The goal here is to let organizations quickly assess the legal merits of a case and defensibly manage legal holds and collection for eDiscovery, regulatory and compliance requests.

With Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment organizations can:

Centrally search, explore in place and preserve electronically stored information (ESI) from disparate sources: Directly connect to content in Open Text’s ECM Suite and other data repositories from a single remote location.
Reduce the volume of content to be reviewed: Cull document sets by identifying duplicates in user files, e-mails and attachments; automatically categorize ESI within a hold to reduce the size of the data set.
Reduce the cost of third-party processing: Export ESI in a hold directly to a review application to reduce or eliminate the need for and costs associated with third-party processing.

For more information on the product, check out Open Text’s Web site.

Open Text and Recommind’s Embrace

The backbone of the new solution from Open Text is Recommind’s Insite Legal Hold application. With Recommind’s expertise in eDiscovery, Open Text can leverage Recommind’s platform to offer comprehensive litigation and eDiscovery readiness solutions. Add to that the fact that it can be integrated with Open Text’s own records management and e-mail management offerings — all within the Open Text ECM Suite — and there will be customers thirsty for this offering.

“The recent financial crisis has highlighted more than ever the need for effective information management. Poor information management is impeding organizations in their ability to understand the legal risks they and their executives face from lawsuits and investigations… enterprises must be nimble and prepared,” said Robert Tennant, CEO of Recommind.

“The days of shrugging off litigation as a cost of doing business are over. Customers are looking for better, more cost effective ways of meeting legal and regulatory requirements,” added Stephen Ludlow, program manager for eDiscovery Solutions at Open Text.

Open Text in Current eDiscovery Landscape

Corporate data stores are exploding in size and complexity and the process of identifying, preserving and collecting data for regulations or litigation is a tremendous pain-point for organizations. Many enterprises still seem to rely on manual processes or one-size-fits-all solutions that create more work for IT departments and dramatically raise the cost, risk and time needed to conduct investigations or respond to litigation.