Legal Commentary

OK, you know you are in California when there is a Best Buy Express vending machine by United's Gate 70 (the SF/LA gate) selling iPods, Bose headsets, digital cameras and other portable electronics. See CenterNetworks blog and Gadling blog.

According to Gadling, the units are from San Francisco's ZoomSystems, and there are more than 650 of them thru-out the country now. The first airport site was Dallas-Fort Worth, it sez.

Call me crazy, but I just would feel queasy about buying a $300 tech item via a vending machine -- but I guess if you are addicted to your iPod or QC2, and you lose it before a 6-hour flight, it might be worth it. And the blog sez that a machine at Atlanta, way back in '06, was pulling in $55,000 a month, and sellin' about 7 iPods a day. Wow.

Speaking of Best Buy, I popped into the Anaheim (Orange) store today looking to upgrade my CardScan (I may have to order it online) and found this nifty Belkin 5-outlet mini surge protector/extension device -- and snapped it up in a second. I'm so tired of having to crawl under desks or call the front desk ... You'd think hotels would be wise up to the fact that we carry a lot of electrical devices these days and have power strips in the rooms.

Anyway, it is about 4 inches long, and it includes 3 plugs and two USB charger slots with a cable that will support Motorola phones. (You can NEVER have enough phone chargers) -- The plug rotates so the device can be horizontal or vertical, and it even has a nifty protector for the plug.

Anyway, before I arrived at LAX, I was upstate (oh my, I have indeed become a NYer, they never call the Bay Area upstate) ... anyway, my colleague Michelle Ball and I spent Friday in the South Bay visiting the gangs at Interwoven Inc., IntApp, Clearwell and Kazeon.

First, another Tech Tip: Garmin's Jill (vanilla Nuvi 200) is so so so so much better than Hertz's Magellan NeverLost. Let's just put it this way -- Michelle got from one destination to our next stop in 5 minutes, via 101.  NeverLost routed me on the slow, scenic route on El Camino in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 30 minutes.

Anyway, moving right along: Our first stop was Interwoven, where we met up with prez Max Carnecchia ; Matthew Work, veep, e-discovery strategy; and Dave Packer, director of mktg and Jenni Balthrop of WagEd, and got into an animated discussion (as usual, anytime Work is around) about EDD cost containment and the need to educate the users so they stop being so afraid.

The last time we met up with Work was in June, up in his Presidio digs of Discovery Mining. He seemed just a little too happy. We figured out why a few days later when it was announced that SF-based Discovery Mining was being  bought by the San Jose-based Interwoven. The deal closed on August 4.

The addition of Discovery Ready was a good fit with Interwoven's agenda to provide wide ranging content management services, explained Packer and the guys. Interwoven has a broad brush, addressing 12 industries from accounting to manufacturing, and offering an increasing portfolio, many web-based, of services.

John Hall, CEO of IntApp, and Dan Bressler, vp of marketing, take a very different view of their potential market. They want to focus only on legal, the two Stanford grads explained to us over a yummy lunch at a new Palo Alto restaurant, The Oxacan Kitchen. (The reviewers kinda hit it on the nail: still a few kinks to work out, but a tasty bistro indeed)

John and Dan say they are specifically focusing on the unique challenges of the legal industry, and resisting any temptation to grow beyond legal.

IntApp provides software that connects and centrally manages legal programs, with the goal of increasing attorneys' billable hours, reinforcing client confidentiality and maximizing firm   productivity. The company offers "Time Builder," to help timekeepers with automated activity tracking and reporting; "Wall Builder," to manage risk, protect lateral hiring activity and comply with regulatory and client confidentiality requirements; and "Integration Builder," to streamline business processes, such as new business and new personnel intake, and provide users with  accurate, timely information.

Next stop was Clearwell, in Mountain View, to check in with president/CEO Aaref Hilaly and meet with Kurt Leafstrand and his team for a quick demo of Transparent Search, which was debuted at the August ILTA meeting.

Available with the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform 4.0 version, it is designed to help corporations and law firms during the e-discovery search process. Key features include:

* Search Preview: "Provides visibility into matching keyword variations for wildcard and stemming searches prior to running a search. Users can selectively include relevant variations or exclude false positive variations in their search query, removing irrelevant documents from search results."

* Search Filters: "In real-time, users can filter results by individual queries or variations, and sample the filtered documents to evaluate the effectiveness of their search. This also provides more opportunities for users to rapidly identify false positive documents prior to review."

* Search Report: "Creates a comprehensive report that documents all search criteria and provides detailed analytics of the results for both the overall search and the individual queries within the search.The report tracks search terms that were included and excluded during search preview providing a defensible audit trail of search refinement decisions."

* Multiple Query Search: "[Runs] large numbers of queries simultaneously and provides reporting for both the overall search and the individual queries within the search. Queries can be tested in minutes not days, dramatically decreasing the turnaround time needed to iterate and evaluate the effectiveness of keyword searches."

Our last stop of the day was to Kazeon, also in Mountain View (a gorgeous city, btw). President and CEO Sudhakar Muddu (left); Karthik Kannan, vp of marketing and biz dev; and marketers Andrea Laughlin and David Morris  joined us for yet another insightful discussion about the legal profession's challenges with e-discovery -- especially the Baby Boomer leadership (can you say "afraid?") who still do not understand why they need this technology to survive.

I keep feeling like there is so much that LTN -- and the vendors -- need to do to help legal professionals understand e-discovery and other technology. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I get so frustrated (esp. in EDD) when so many vendors using the same six words to describe every single product they offer. (And if one more vendor tells me how their product is "revolutionary" I think I will croak.)

David  had a WONDERFUL expression for it -- he called it "talking about the baby" -- how too many vendors drill sooooooo far deep into the endless details (like new parents who suddenly can only talk about their offspring and seem incapable of normal conversation), rather than providing listeners with what they want and need to hear. It was a great dialogue.

As for Kazeon, the company offers a range of products, including e-discovery, information security and privacy, governance risk and compliance, and storage. Late last month, it released Information Server IS1200-ECS 3.1, with a new "in-place legal hold, KazHold, and a new agent-less product for in-place analysis of and collection from laptops/desktops." It is designed to help users streamline EDD collection, analysis and processing, and "help users discover all relevant and necessary information for any litigation related activity."

The program is designed to assure that there is no spoliation of data and no modifications to metadata attributes of files and e-mails, the company says, while reducing costs.

It was a heady day, full of lots of ideas for stories and articles. One concrete idea came out of several discussions about Socha/Gelbmann's decision to no longer rank vendors. If you jump over to the EDD Update blog, you'll see that I'm asking everybody to suggest the top 5 questions potential users should ask their potential EDD vendors. Dive on in with your ideas.

That's it! Time to enjoy the SoCal weather for an hour before I head on over to Angel Stadium to watch my po' boys get wholloped by those Devils, oops, I mean Angels of Anaheim /L.A./ San Diego /Oxnard /Costa Mesa / Tijuana .. whatever :)