CS Disco Pushes Big Upgrades, Quietly in Cloud

CS Disco, a Texas-based eDiscovery services provider, announced on Wednesday a major upgrade to its SaaS solutions product, making it easier to print documents and view redactions, among other improvements.

As a result of the upgrades, users can now view the complete history of changes to a document, generate print-ready PDFs of groups of documents, and make redactions to documents visible on the main viewer screen.

One of the unique features ofCS Discois that is it a cloud-based platform. Gabriel Krambs, a co-founder and director of operations and training, said using a cloud-based platform is better for users who don’t have to worry about installing upgrades because the CS Disco team can do it for them seamlessly.

“With Cloud software, you can push updates all the time,” Krambs said, adding, “We are generally pushing updates every two weeks, but big, new feature rollouts like this” are less frequent.

Krambs also said the company’s 25-person development team in Houston spent months working on the upgrades, but were able to roll them out incrementally over the past two months thanks to its cloud upgrades to the CS Disco software.

Still, even Krambs acknowledged there is a negative stigma attached to cloud-based platforms, which law firms sometimes view as less secure than software on an internal data center. “We sometimes shy away from that word,” he said. “I think it sometimes gets a bad reputation.”

The company lists a number of high-profile law firms as clients on its website: Diamond McCarthy, the firm that is clawing back profits from former partners at Dewey & LeBoeuf as well as other failed firms.It also lists Wilson Elser, Ice Miller, and other AmLaw 200 law firms.

CS Disco charges based on the data that the clients send to CS Disco to manage in eDiscovery, according to Krambs, who described the price as varied but around “a few dozen dollars per gigabyte per month.”

The upgrades tie into a broader strategy by CS Disco, said Krambs, who called out other eDiscovery vendors,ZylabandSummation, for marketing products that “look pretty” and create complex visual histories of email exchanges, but are not all that useful.

“We want to make it more powerful, without making it more complex,” he said."With our competitors, many of them have a lot of features, but questionable utility.”

Zylab and Summation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.