Legal Tech Round Up: Flat-Fee Pricing on E-Discovery and Other News

• UnitedLex announced Tuesday it will begin offering upfront fixed-fee pricing on e-Discovery, so that corporations can pay on a per project basis.

Eric Gonzales, a senior vice president of legal solutions for UnitedLex, said the per-project cost would cover data collection, processing, hosting, document review and all professional services. The only thing not covered would be native redactions, and also data hosting charges would cover 12-month periods.

“We used to sit back and just hope our data volumes would grow because that’s how we made our money,” said Gonzales, who added that most e-Discovery vendors are not incentivized to be efficient.

But two years ago, UnitedLex developed Questio, its e-Discovery services offering which includes a proprietary tool used to cull large data sets before the document review phase. It’s been so successful at culling the size of data sets that require review that the company realized it could create a fixed-fee, per-project pricing structure. It is standard practice in the industry to charge separately for data hosting, or charge based on the number of documents reviewed, or hours of review, said Gonzales.

“E-Discovery is a dirty word sometimes within the legal industry,” said Gonzales, explaining that bills often balloon and are difficult to parse. “We’re putting our fees at risk with this if we’re not performing.”

But he also acknowledged that every data set is different and some sets will have more relevant documents than others. Although Questio leverages the company’s own proprietary technology, the company licenses kCura’s Relativity for document review and LexisNexis Law for processing. “If we’re not as efficient as we can be, we’re going to lose some of those, but we’re confident in technology that we’re going to win more than we’ll lose,” said Gonzales.

The company said the price starts at $650 per gigabyte up to a certain amount of gigabytes and with the price increasing for larger data volumes. It declined to give any other details.

• FTI Consulting Inc. has released a new tool, called Radiance, to assess large data sets in the context of an investigation or for before an e-Discovery production.

Here’s how it works: A company uploads its data to Radiance, which creates a single database of the various communication formats — chatrooms, emails, SMS messages, documents, cloud repositories and social networking information. Companies can use the program to analyze the data and metadata and produce visualizations that show connections, such as which individuals communicated with each other.

J.R. Jenkins, senior director of product marketing for FTI, described the tool as “the flipside” of e-Discovery document review software: During document review, a large number of users tag, annotate and produce metadata on a data set. In contrast, Radiance is designed for a few users to analyze preexisting metadata in order to cull a large data set.

“We’re taking metadata upfront to use it as an exploratory level,” said Jenkins.

The product utilizes a NoSQl database and will initially only be available on FTI’s servers through a secure connection. Jenkins said the company will utilize a Microsoft Azure AD connection among other authentication tools.

• The Berkeley, Calif. cloud-based e-Discovery software firm Everlaw announced Tuesday that it is partnering with Rational Enterprise, which produces an information governance platform that organizes data residing on servers and in the cloud.

“The partnership enables the seamless transfer of content collected through Rational directly into the Everlaw cloud platform, without the need for processing,” according to a press release .

• Switzerland-based Yerra Solutions AG announced Tuesday it has acquired U.K.-based Lex Connect on undisclosed terms. Both companies advise corporate legal departments in Europe on a range of issues including e-Discovery, office spend management, compliance and knowledge management.

Jerome Raguin, who founded Lex Connect in 2013, said his company has three employees. Raguin will join Yerra as chief operating officer. At the moment, the company, which has around 100 employees, has a small number of clients, but they are large financial and pharmaceutical companies, he said.

Lex Connnect started out as a directory of legal vendors for in-house legal departments but has grown into a strategic advisory firm helping to select vendors and set strategy around intellectual property. Yerra offers consulting and e-Discovery services. The company plans to expand in the U.S. in 2016, said Raguin.

• HighQ, a London-based cloud content management and collaboration software, announced it has raised $50 million in growth equity investment to expand in North America. One Peak Partners, Morgan Stanley Merchant Banking and Goldman Sachs Private Capital all participated in the investment.

The company currently has 180 employees in London, New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Sydney and Ahmedabad.

(UPDATED: This post has been updated with pricing details from UnitedLex and to clarify that Questio is an offering that includes proprietary technology and that Radiance will connect through Microsoft Azure AD and other standard authentication tools.)