Clearwell Systems Named Among Red Herring North America's 100 Most Promising Companies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - May 22, 2008) - Clearwell Systems, Inc., a leader in Intelligent E-Discovery, today announced that Red Herring has named the company to its 2008 Red Herring 100 North America list, an honor awarded to the top 100 private technology companies. With deployments of the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform® across hundreds of enterprises, law firms and service providers, Clearwell consistently demonstrates innovation and market traction -- qualities that are required for consideration as a Red Herring 100 company.

"Having received more than 800 submissions, it is clear that we are witnessing a new outburst of creativity," says Joel Dreyfuss, editor-in-chief of Red Herring. "With venture capital flowing again, it's exciting to see technology innovators and business investors collaborate to create disruptive technologies. The Red Herring 100 North America companies are impressive up-and-comers, and definitely the ones to watch."

Due to the growing numbers of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries, and tremendous growth in electronically stored information (ESI), more enterprises and law firms are turning to Clearwell to streamline their e-discovery process. Clearwell reduces the cost, duration, and complexity of e-discovery, enabling customers to achieve significant return on investment within days of their deployments.

Aptara Being Courted by Large Indian BPO & IT Players

Here is an interesting article about Aptara, whom recently sold off its litigation support division to Ivize. Aptara, who changed its name from Tech Books in 2007, had gotten into the litigation support services business by purchasing Whitmont Legal Technologies.

MUMBAI: A couple of large buyout funds, foreign strategic players and Indian IT & BPO players, including Infosys Technologies, are learnt to be in the race for Aptara, a third-party BPO in technology publishing. Promoted by US-based Indian, Rakesh Gupta, the firm is one of the oldest and established players in the industry, having started in 1988.

No official confirmation was available, but sources said six players have been shortlisted and the sale could be concluded in a couple of weeks. Avendus Advisors is advising the firm on the sale process. The final deal could be around $150 million, a source said.

Till recently, known as Techbooks, the company changed its name to Aptara in 2007 to reflect its intent to diversify into services outside its core publishing and content business.

...last year, the firm also diversified into legal services by acquiring Whitmont Legal Technologies, a litigation support firm. According to information in public domain, the company has grown from about Rs 247 crore in revenues in 2005-06 to Rs 336 crore in 2006-07.

Google's New Subscription Pricing Approach for Email Archiving

Here is an interesting article about how Google is pricing its Postini email archival and e-discovery solution. With Google, Yahoo and now Dell, all entering the email archiving game through recent acquisitions, it will be interesting to see how the pricing models shake out.

Gartner MarketScope for E-Discovery and Litigation Support Vendors, 2007

Gartner evaluated 29 vendors across a number of criteria such as: Market Understanding, Innovation, Market Responsiveness and Track Record, Offering (Product) Strategy, Business Model, Customer Experience, Marketing Strategy and then rated them based on their findings.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To be included in the final published report, a vendor must meet
the following criteria: Have an IT targeted tool or tools that enable the identification, preservation collection and initial processing of files requested by a legal or compliance officer to cover the steps of RM, identification, preservation, collection and processing of the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM).

OR
Have software that enables legal personnel to review documents and process them more quickly, shows relationships between documents or persons mentioned in or originating documents – or any other functionality that can be shown to reduce attorney review time to cover in covering the processing, review, analysis,
production and presentation steps of the EDRM.

AND
Realizes at least 25% of its revenues – or revenues from an ediscovery business unit from a software tool or service that performs identification, collection and preservation of files in various locations – OR an “attorney review platform” that allows enterprise end-users to upload and review documents.

In addition to the above criteria, it was necessary to assign a cutoff date for inclusion in this report.....