LegalTech New York: FTI Technology Helps Address Top E-discovery Challenges

NEW YORK, NY January 26, 2010 – FTI Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:FCN), the global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance their enterprise value, announced that its comprehensive portfolio of e-discovery software, services and consulting will be on display at the LegalTech New York conference beginning February 1. The company’s products and services help corporations and their law firms address key e-discovery pain points, as highlighted in a recent IDC report sponsored by FTI Technology, Corporate E-discovery Trends 2009: Doing More with Less While Facing Increasing Complexity in E-discovery (by Vivian Tero, IDC, November 2009). A complimentary copy of the IDC white paper can be requested at the FTI booth (2100) and is also available for download at the FTI Technology site.  

“IT departments are under an incredible amount of pressure to handle more data, for more litigation events, and with smaller budgets,” said Vivian Tero, Program Manager, GRC infrastructure for IDC. “These pressures are compelling organizations to adopt best practices, develop technical protocols to automate key processes, and take a more strategic approach to the acquisition of enabling technologies.”

The white paper features the results of an IDC white paper of 115 IT professionals on a range of key e-discovery issues, including budgets, international litigation and search technology. The results indicate that despite adoption of a number of e-discovery best practices and technology, e-discovery is growing increasingly complex and expensive. Legal matters involve greater volumes of data, take longer to resolve, are increasingly global in nature, and must be managed under falling or flat e-discovery budgets.

Among the key findings in the IDC white paper:

• Multinational litigation is growing more common. Close to 70% of panelists indicated that their companies are involved in legal matters with multinational requirements.
• Most large matters take more than two years to resolve. 64% of respondents said their largest matter took over two years to resolve, and 35% indicated that their largest matter lasted for more than five years.
• Data collection volumes are growing. The proportion of panelists whose average ESI collection per matter was larger than 2.5TB increased 18 points from 19% of panelists in the 2008 study to 37% of panelists in the 2009 study.
• E-discovery budgets are flat or decreasing. 36% of respondents said their budgets were flat and 42% said their e-discovery budgets were declining.

IDC’s latest white paper illustrates the need for corporations to stay on top of the continued growth in corporate data and the increasingly global requirements of e-discovery,” said Mike Kinnaman, senior managing director of FTI Technology. “Rather than juggling multiple vendors and managing the handoffs between providers, companies today want a single provider that can support an organization’s global e-discovery requirements. FTI is excited about this year’s LegalTech and the opportunity to demonstrate how our comprehensive solution delivers a more cost-effective and complete approach to e-discovery for our clients.”

FTI will demonstrate several new technology and service offerings along with the latest versions of its award-winning e-discovery software products at LegalTech New York booth 2100. FTI will also host several in-depth product and best-practices sessions throughout the conference. Attendees can register to attend these sessions in advance by visiting events.ftitechnology.com. New and updated products and services on-display at this year’s LegalTech include:

Ringtail® Legal™ - New and enhanced analysis and production capabilities deliver further time and cost savings to clients for legal projects of all sizes. The latest release includes the complete integration of the patented Attenex® review interface, advanced conceptual document clustering that scales to a million documents and significant enhancements to the application’s production module, securing its reputation as  the market’s most powerful, flexible, and secure document review and case management platform.

Ringtail® QuickCull® - Designed to support the growing e-discovery and early assessment needs of corporate legal and IT teams, QuickCull is an e-discovery appliance that deploys quickly for on-premise data culling and analysis prior to review by outside counsel. Using QuickCull, corporate teams can quickly identify key insights about their collected data and

Attenex® Patterns® - The latest version of the award-winning product suite delivers a number of new features and performance enhancements, including the ability to import Concordance load files. The new import capability helps clients apply the patented Attenex visual analytics capabilities on incoming productions to quickly identify patterns and key documents in materials received from another party.

Harvester for Microsoft SharePoint - New for 2010, Harvester is an integrated technology and service offering that enables clients to identify, preserve and collect documents from Microsoft SharePoint environments. Unlike competitive approaches that rely on keywords, Harvester provides a custodian-based approach using Microsoft Active Directory so that corporate legal and IT teams can quickly and confidently preserve and collect data from SharePoint sites upon a triggering event.

System Inventory Tool for Electronic Discovery – Built on Microsoft SharePoint, the system inventory tool is a hosted application and is delivered with FTI expert consulting to identify a client’s structured and unstructured data systems across the enterprise for use in all legal matters. Once deployed, clients can easily update and maintain their inventory of enterprise systems and the tool can be used to quickly identify sources of information when preparing for a Rule 26 conference or similar state court proceeding.

Through its comprehensive portfolio of e-discovery software, services and consulting, FTI is transforming the way corporations and their law firms globally manage e-discovery for legal and regulatory events. FTI e-discovery services and consulting help streamline the entire e-discovery process and can provide clients a single point of e-discovery accountability. The award-winning portfolio of FTI Technology software, including Attenex Patterns, and Ringtail Legal delivers advanced technology for the most mission-critical and costly steps of e-discovery. Unlike competitive offerings, FTI e-discovery software can be deployed either on-premise or on-demand as a hosted solution. This hybrid capability helps clients scale to the unique demands of each legal matter without sacrificing a consistent and cost-effective e-discovery process. Altogether, FTI Technology provides a smart and comprehensive approach to improve the e-discovery process, contain costs without cutting corners, and manage client’s critical enterprise information demands.

For more information on FTI Technology, please visit www.ftitechnology.com. 

About FTI Consulting
FTI Consulting, Inc. is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance enterprise value in an increasingly complex legal, regulatory and economic environment. With more than 3,400 employees located in most major business centers in the world, we work closely with clients every day to anticipate, illuminate, and overcome complex business challenges in areas such as investigations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, reputation management and restructuring. More information can be found at www.fticonsulting.com.

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