It is a pleasure to welcome UBIC as a new sponsor of the eDisclosure Information Project. Theirs is a name which I have known about for some time, but it was only at LegalTech that I had the opportunity of meeting them, thanks to the indefatigable Sasha Hefler of Strategic Brands on Fire, who knows everyone and who introduced me to Marketing and Business Developer Manager Sunil Mudunuri.

Although UBIC began work in eDiscovery as a Japanese company specialising in the languages of the region, it is also a mainstream player in US eDiscovery. Its client list includes NEC, Panasonic and Ricoh all of whom, with many other Asia-Pacific companies, have eDiscovery requirements which cross borders, particularly to the US.

The traffic passes the other way as well, as corporations in the US and in Europe are increasingly involved in the Asia-Pacific region with its language issues and diverse data protection and privacy regimes.  If you can handle those, then you can certainly handle the implications of purely domestic US eDiscovery, earning UBIC a place as a Visionary in Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for eDiscovery.

UBIC has proprietary software called Lit i View which handles collection, analysis and review, and production. The analysis component includes “CJK TAR” predictive coding / technology assisted review capable of processing Asian languages for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as near-duplicate detection. Functions include “Search Simulation” which helps in Early Case Assessment by refining the key word list as well as quickly providing the statistics derived from the keywords. Hosting is provided in startegically-placed locations.

Consistent with its close involvement in multilingual, cross-border eDiscovery, UBIC sponsored a panel at LegalTech with the title Surprises, Setbacks and Success in Cross-Border eDiscovery, which discussed the differences between the broad US eDiscovery processes and those which obtain in EU and Asian countries with their privacy and data protection laws.  The speakers were Stephen Bennett of Jones Day, Marla Bergman of Goldman Sachs, Scott Carlson of Seyfarth Shaw, John Talotta of Hogan Lovells and Atsuzo Tomii of Ricoh, with John Bace of the John Marshall Law School as moderator.  Seeing this lineup made me rather sorry that I had not been introduced to UBIC earlier, since I would certainly have put up my hand to join speakers of this quality on a panel dealing with this subject.

This brief welcome will be followed in due course by a another when I have had the opportunity of  working with UBIC. I very much welcome the opportunity for further involvement in the Asia-Pacific region – I am off to Hong Kong shortly for the LegalTech Asia Technology Summit – as well as in the US and in Europe.

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