Solo Practice

Interview with PSS Systems President & CEO Deidre Paknad

By Garrett Worley

PSS Systems makes Atlas, a powerful piece of EDD software. The following is an interview I recently conducted by e-mail with PSS Systems President and CEO Deidre Paknad.

1. How does PSS Systems’ Atlas software differ from other EDD software? Does Atlas provide its users with greater efficiency than competing software?

One of the challenges in the “discovery” and “compliance” arenas is the vast array of systems, tools, and services that fall into these broad, almost generic categories. To distinguish between the systems, there are two key questions to ask -

What does the system actually do?

Who really uses it on a daily basis in the course of their job?

The majority of EDD software is designed for processing, reviewing and producing documents in litigation and for use outside the corporate environment by outside counsel, reviewing attorneys and even contract attorneys. A small but growing percentage of tools are designed to collect data inside the corporation by IT and technical staff.

Atlas LCC is designed for daily use by paralegals, attorneys and discovery coordinators inside the corporation to help them manage anticipated and actual matters from scoping the custodians and data sources, issuing legal holds and reminders, interviewing employees, planning and managing the collection of diverse data across the relevant people and systems, and managing the volume of cases, custodians, and collections in a typical global company.

Atlas differs a great deal from its competitors, starting with its DNA! PSS Systems pioneered the legal holds and collections software category in late 2004 when it installed its first version of Atlas at an investment bank. After four years in production use in the world’s leading corporations managing over one hundred thousand holds and over a million custodians and data sources in preservation and collection, Atlas is the “gold standard” - it’s full-featured, trusted, and mature. Only recently have competitive solutions been introduced to market and few, if any, have production legal holds installations. With life spans shorter than most cases and a track record as a follower rather than a leader, these alternatives to Atlas may introduce more risk than they mitigate!

2. Many attorneys are intimidated by technology. How difficult is it to use Atlas?
Corporate attorneys are typically very busy, and their jobs are event-driven with sizeable case loads across global businesses. They don’t need “technology”, so it’s often a lack of interest or time rather than intimidation that keeps them away from software. Atlas LCC - literally Litigation Communications and Collections - was designed expressly for corporate counsel and paralegals to help them manage their day to day process (and, unlike other EDD systems, not for use by a technical investigator, an IT person, or an associate or contract attorney focused on high speed document coding and review). Ease of use is measured by the system’s impact on the user; the easiest systems to use are the ones that make the user’s life easier! Atlas LCC does that by:

• Maximizing its relevance to target users - it’s all about them and their tasks

• Ensuring that the system eliminates tasks and work for users rather than adds work or steps

In Atlas LCC, paralegals and attorneys who use the system daily benefit because it eliminates the tedious, manual, and clerical steps they would personally have to do and because it monitors the process to automatically alert them to issues that arise. Litigation leaders benefit because Atlas LCC enables them to improve their legal holds process with greater rigor and transparency without more effort or more staff. Reliably managing a good legal holds process and managing thousands of cases with tens of thousands of custodians are very difficult; the greater the volume, the greater the detail, the more critical to automate the tasks - and the more important the software maturity and sophistication.

3. Atlas ERM links retention rules directly with applicable laws to reduce retention periods. Are there any figures on the average savings (as a percent or a dollar amount) that result from reducing retention periods?
One of the largest financial services companies in the world was able to reduce their average retention period by about 8 years because Atlas ERM enabled them to easily and efficiently associate specific laws to specific records, jurisdictions, and retention schedules. Because both physical and electronic data storage costs recur year over year and this large company produces significant amounts of information, eliminating 8 years of unnecessary information storage is a tremendous savings.

By far the biggest savings opportunity from Atlas ERM comes from using it in conjunction with Atlas LCC . Together, they enable companies to conclusively determine what information they need to retain in response to both laws and lawsuits - and therefore what information they don’t need to retain. When companies can’t determine what to retain, they are often forced to retain everything — an increasing cost and frustration factor in the executive suite, litigation group, and IT department alike today.

4. What are the most important changes/improvements that have been made in the new version of Atlas?

Because our corporate clients our increasing the number of holds and the number of custodians and diversity of data sources in each hold, Atlas LCC 3.1 enhancements include:

• Dynamic scoping of legal holds across matters to leverage past work and learning
• Dashboards, interactive queries and visibility reports on holds by data source for both legal and IT staff
• Discovery cost forecasting to predict quarterly and annual discovery costs by business units
• Drag-and-drop repository mapping to rapidly and efficiently catalog where information is stored and more easily sustain data source maps
• Connectivity to various collection tools and data sources so that attorneys and paralegals can enforce holds and collect widely distributed data without burdening IT or business users.

ABOUT PSS SYSTEMS

PSS Systems started the legal holds and retention management software revolution in early 2004 when it anticipated the collision between the prevailing “save every­thing” practice and the inevitability of routine electronic discovery. It envisioned both the tactical crises that would occur and the strategic needs that would unfold - Atlas LCC helps litigation departments respond to the urgent challenges of much broader preservation obligations and Altas ERM helps companies restore rational information retention processes to ultimately reduce the volume of information and break the crisis cycle. Today, Atlas manages legal holds, collections, and enterprise retention to reduce cost, burden, and risk for the world’s leading corporations.

“Atlas LCC is a comprehensive workflow solution that helps companies effectively and efficiently manage legal hold and collection processes. Atlas ERM enables companies to revitalize their retention practices across disparate data sources in concert with meeting legal hold obligations. It’s a smart solution for addressing legal obligations, reducing risk and reducing cost.” - Cathy Muir, Senior Corporate Counsel, Sprint

PSS Systems continues to lead the industry through unparalleled innovation and thought leadership. The CGOC, which it founded in January 2004, is a practitioners’ community and “think tank” on retention and preservation. Through the CGOC, PSS has assembled an expert ecosystem to assist companies with these challenges and to ensure that PSS products are first and best in their class.

“The CGOC Forum, of which PSS Systems is the founding member, has done significant work in advancing the legal holds and retention practices of corporations. The Atlas Suite, which is designed to enable corporations to implement and automate legally defensible retention and legal holds operations, has achieved significant customer uptake and enjoys real customer loyalty.”- Vivian Tero, Senior Research Analyst for Compliance Infrastructure, IDC

Full post as published by Garrett Worley's Blawg on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).