Well-known UK litigation support provider Trilantic was acquired by Huron Consulting Group last November. I went to see Trilantic’s Nigel Murray to find out how the clients will benefit from the combined fire-power of the two companies.

Although Trilantic seems to have been part of the UK electronic disclosure scene for ever, it was in fact set up only in 2005. The founder and managing director Nigel Murray, however, has been in the industry since it began – he and I started at about the same time. Electronic discovery has changed somewhat. Then it involved scanning paper and coding documents by hand; it generally required a capital purchasing decision and the employment of staff to run in-house systems; it had yet to be renamed “disclosure” in the hope that relabelling would somehow make it better. Of all the changes, the only one which most lawyers readily grasped was the change of name – lawyers are always good at terminology.

They can be forgiven for being confused about the provider market, which first diversified, then consolidated: some providers specialised in the collection of data; others had specialist applications for processing the data or for reviewing it, whilst others offered consultancy and project management. Companies broadened out from their original starting points by expansion or acquisition: collection companies now offer processing and review applications and host the data on a transactional basis; specialist software companies enhance their products with consultancy services; some companies offer “end to end” products and services whilst others remain best known for particular niches. Downward pressure on costs makes price a less useful discriminating factor than it used to be, whilst any one software application looks much like any other to the novice. It is hard enough to keep up for those of us who have watched this market evolve and develop. It is extremely difficult for those who approach it from scratch.

Trilantic has always been a front door to a range of software and services, with its own staff, infrastructure and services, but calling on a wide range of others’ specialist skills or applications appropriate to the clients’ needs. Its web site inevitably draws attention to its ability to handle major work for big clients, but that ability scales down to allow it to do smaller jobs, whether as a continuing provider of choice for repeat business or for one-off jobs. Nigel Murray may spend a lot of time at international airports, but much of Trilantic’s business remains domestic and the company has always felt accessible to those facing their first e-disclosure case.

I left Nigel Murray alone for a couple of months to let things settle down after the acquisition and then went to see him to find out what the acquisition means for clients of all sizes. The bare facts are set out in the press release of last November but press releases, especially from public companies, have obvious constraints. Huron’s mission, Nigel said, is to serve global clients globally. This may appear trite, but it has meaning in a world where jurisdictional issues may erect barriers to international businesses beyond mere differences of language, law and custom. The most obvious example relevant to electronic disclosure / e-discovery is that companies are not necessarily free to move data freely from one jurisdiction to another and a presence on both sides of the Atlantic has more benefits than mere local knowledge. 10% of Huron Legal’s clients are EU-based, and Trilantic brings to that the solid nucleus of an established e-disclosure practice.

Trilantic is ramping up its forensic collection and analysis capability, with Martin Nikel taken on to manage it internally and a continuing relationship with Ian Manning of Raposa Consulting to do many of the collections – long-term followers of the e-Disclosure Information Project will recall that Ian Manning was the first to back the aims of the Project before it really existed, which is why Raposa’s logo tops the list beside this post.

Trilantic will move to a new Huron office shortly, completely re-equipped with new technology for processing and review which they will market collectively as “analysis”. They will rely on a strong suite of specialist applications such as Equivio and Relativity instead of (as Nigel put it) “putting paralegals in front of documents”, although there will be a team of semi-permanent temporary staff to provide a greater level of analysis than Trilantic has hitherto had in-house.

Nigel mentioned a job which involved in running 1.7 TB through Equivio>Relevance which gave me the opportunity to ask if this reference to a headline job implied that Trilantic was no longer interested in ordinary jobs for small and medium-sized firms. Nigel was quick to make it clear that the Trilantic/Huron team would continue to offer cost-effective services for such jobs, not merely for law firms but for companies looking to manage their own outsourcing.

Both Huron and Trilantic have offices in Dubai, and the Trilantic team will retain its existing third-party hosting environments in the UK and Germany. The ability to process and host data in Germany would be a major addition to Huron’s resources – coupled with the processing and analysis capability described above it will allow the culling of unnecessary documents and the removal of those affected by EU privacy and data protection restrictions before export to the US. There are plans to add a mobile processing and mobile review facility – Trilantic already offers this ability to work on site anywhere in the world at short notice, but the plan is to ramp up the technology and human resource which is required for this.

The result of the staffing and technology additions should be both breadth and depth, geographically and in terms of the range of work and size of both job and client which can be taken on when Trilantic’s EU-based experience is combined with Huron’s broad skills and financial muscle.

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