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Legaltech 2015 Wrapup: The Intersection of Ediscovery, Big Data and Security

Accusoft’s troops are home from LegalTech 2015, NYC edition — there will be a second LegalTech 2015 in Frisco this summer. And not surprisingly, they say eDiscovery was the main refrain, both on the exhibit floor and in the session rooms.

The Accusoft booth saw brisk traffic and, at times, a packed house of legal technology vendors and in-house developers exploring the role HTML5 viewing can play in the eDiscovery solutions they’re planning, building or enhancing.

“There’s still quite a few companies who either will move to a viewer like ours in the near future, or who don’t even yet realize they need a viewer,” reports LegalTech attendee Tim Kannapel, an Accusoft software development manager. Kannapel also spoke to current Accusoft customers who had come to see the latest enhancements to the Prizm Content Connect HTML5 document viewer, and to try to get a peek at the roadmap for what’s coming up.

“They see the huge strides we’ve made over the last year in functionality,” Kannapel says, “and they are betting on us continuing that trend.”

The burgeoning interest in eDiscovery is being accelerated, in part, by judges who are requiring ever-greater retention and production of documents in electronic form, whether they originated digitally or on hardcopy.

“More judges and courtrooms are going paperless with eDiscovery and case management tools,” says software development manager John Kennedy, “meaning a fair portion of the electronic files will be scanned hardcopies, faxes, and so on.”

Kennedy sees that trend not only as a natural fit for the integration of a file format-agnostic viewer like Prizm Content Connect, but also as a window of opportunity for Accusoft’s industry-leading document cleanup technology that boosts capture accuracy from scanned documents and is built into Accusoft’s PICTools, ImageGear, FormSuite and other software development kits.

Security and Big Data were also hot LegalTech topics, our attendees say, with security grabbing the first-day keynote slot and Big Data on the lips of vendors working on solutions for dealing intelligently with case files that may included millions of documents. And given that eDiscovery, security and Big Data would all seem to work against each other — eDiscovery is about accessibility and manageability, security is about restricting access and Big Data is about unmanageability — it’s no wonder attendees were eager for solutions.

Were you at LegalTech last week? What caught your ear? Share in the comments below.