Charles Christian’s Orange Rag brings us a helpful summary of the recent round of acquisitions in the eDiscovery sector with the heading The Great eDiscovery Shakeup – or is that Shakeout? and predicts that 2012 will see yet more of them.
Charles describes Google as the elephant in this particular room (in the proper sense of the very big thing that no-one mentions), drawing the conclusion that Google’s appointment last summer of Autonomy’s Jack Halprin is a sign that Google wants a slice of the eDiscovery market.
I raised much the same point last summer when Halprin was appointed asking “why, exactly, does Google want a senior client-facing executive with the word ‘Enterprise’ in his job title?” on the eDiscovery side.
Charles Christian sees this potential development as an encouragement to smaller eDiscovery players to “look for an exit”, that is, to get themselves acquired as soon as possible. There are many other reasons why they might want to do this, of course.
The Orange Rag article to which I have linked is part of the latest issue of the American Legal Technology Insider, a copy of which can be obtained here.
eDisclosure Information Project 