Cisco is using Axcelerate to take a more proactive, strategic approach to eDiscovery. One of the drivers of increased eDiscovery costs is the explosion of enterprise content, which ironically Cisco is helping facilitate with its technology that simplifies the creation and transfer of large files, such as videos. Cisco wanted to have its own enormous stores of enterprise data easily accessible ahead of any legal issues that might arise. They also wanted greater cost containment and predictability so that legal costs do not dictate when they settle and when they fight a legal challenge.

Axcelerate offers customers like Cisco a powerful, end-to-end platform for eDiscovery management. First, Axcelerate's Predictive Analytics™ capability automatically categorizes documents and enables deep analysis of the data at the start of a legal process, before major costs have been incurred. This greatly reduces the amount of expensive manual labor by legal experts as they decide which documents are relevant and/or privileged in a case. It can create a taxonomy on the fly based on the content and/or work with an existing taxonomy. Here is a sample Review and Analysis screen.

Here is a diagram of how the entire process works.

Second, Axcelerate's Predictive Coding™ technology and workflow automatically analyzes, prioritizes and codes all documents in a collection. After a knowledgeable attorney reviews and codes a small number of documents, the software can automatically sort through all remaining documents on its own, in the process flagging all other pertinent documents while setting aside the rest. This dramatically expedites the document review process, slashing eDiscovery timelines and costs by 50%-90%. 

Third, Axcelerate's Predictive Sampling™ methodology provides metrics on the accuracy of the Predictive Coding process, thereby making Predictive Coding not just the fastest review but also the most accurate and defensible. The availability of a specific accuracy rate makes courts far more comfortable with the process, as it goes well beyond what is considered "reasonable" - far more so than traditional linear review. Here is a sample Predictive Sampling screen.

Craig said Recommind offers both on-premise and private cloud options. The private cloud option has been growing fast (over 500% in 2010) as firms see the cost savings and flexibility of cloud solutions and become more comfortable with them.

Recommind offers other search-based applications as well. We briefly spoke about Decisiv Categorization, which many companies use for information management and governance. It uses Recommind's patented Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) technology to look for patterns in the text within documents and automatically categorize them. I think that as the explosion of content continues there will be increasing applications for the technology that Recommind brings to the market.