Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Worldox Legal Hold: The Convergence of Legal Software and Electronic Discovery
August 22, 2012
The following guest post is from Christy Burke, President of Burke & Company, a legal technology communications firm based in New York City. Please note that Worldox is a client of Christy's but I was happy to accept the guest post because I do think there is increasing convergence between traditional legal software and e-discovery software and I am a big fan of Worldox which is used by many Sensei clients and has been for years though we are (again in the interest of full disclosure) now a Worldox reseller.
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Earlier this month, World Software Corporation announced the addition of a legal hold feature to their Worldox GX3 DMS, an expansion that represents a convergence between traditional legal software and e-discovery technology.
World Software President Ray Zwiefelhofer was strongly encouraged to develop this functionality within Worldox by lawyer and eDiscovery expert Tom O’Connor, now Director of Professional Services at Avansic. O’Connor saw that the legal hold options in the marketplace were very expensive, and many lawyers that need to place a legal hold cannot afford such a huge price tag. Worldox legal hold is available for no additional charge to all sites that own Worldox GX3.
E-discovery thought leader George Socha says, "The new legal hold feature from Worldox is the most recent example of a growing overlap between e-discovery and information governance. Expect to see yet more of this cross-over as e-discovery works its way further into organizational operations."
In fact, Socha and Tom Gelbmann created an Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) within the EDRM. IGRM’s mission includes examining how information governance and eDiscovery intersect and “to provide a common, practical, flexible framework to help organizations develop and implement effective and actionable information management programs.”
Before including legal hold, the Worldox DMS was already on the EDRM at the left in the Information Management and Identification phases. Now, legal hold extends Worldox into the Preservation phase, but the company does not plan to stop there.
Zwiefelhofer says, “Legal hold is a natural fit for Worldox, but the product also has built-in viewers and text searching, features you would find in a typical e-discovery product. Many of our sites have customized it for discovery document management and it can be used for front-end document review too.”
Time will tell as to how this convergence of traditional legal software and electronic discovery will continue. At base level, all of the vendors are in the business of managing, sorting, producing and viewing electronic data to support the practice of law, so expect a lot more overlap to continue in the future.
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