You will have noticed the addition of another new logo to the collection of those who sponsor the e-Disclosure Information Project. ZyLAB joined up before Christmas, and I deferred writing my usual welcome piece because of a plan to go down and see them at their Bagshot offices. The snow put paid to that idea, and I did not get down there until last week.

My original connection with ZyLAB goes back to the dawn of modern search technology. The company brought out a text searching application for the then new PC in 1983, and I acquired a copy not long afterwards. Search in those days involved learning how to construct Boolean queries by hand – my first inkling that search technology and document discovery were made for each other. Not many of the players in today’s market go back that far.

ZyLAB was early in another respect as well – it has long had headquarters in Europe (in Amsterdam) as well as in the US. When US document demands for civil litigation, for regulation and for state-led investigations began to impinge on European corporations, ZyLAB was already there. They have always had UK clients, and they are now building on this to meet the growth expected to follow from the heightened UK focus on electronic disclosure in civil litigation, from the increase in financial regulation, and from the UK Bribery Act.

The product set includes systems for e-discovery and production, for compliance and litigation readiness, and for law enforcement and investigation. They cover the full EDRM (Electronic Documents Reference Model) from information management within a company all the way through to production of documents to opponents, with advanced search, text mining and analytics, data visualisation and machine translation built into their systems. The applications are available both for in-house use or as SaaS (Software as a Service). It is sold to both corporations and law firms, as well as to government and law enforcement agencies.

I spent most of a day with Ronald van Vuure, ZyLAB’s UK sales and marketing director, and his team. The aim of these visits is to exchange information – I give much the same talk as I give to lawyers about changing developments in the UK market, and I start to find out about the company’s products and services. It is a useful exercise on both sides.

There will be more about ZyLAB in these pages in due course. Meanwhile, it is good to be joined by such a long-standing player in the litigation search market.

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