kCura’s has acquired Content Analyst, developers of the CAAT® analytics engine which kCura has long used to drive the analytics in Relativity. If this tells us something about kCura’s ambitions, it also emphasises the growing importance of analytics in eDiscovery.

kCura’s own press release is here. It emphasises that use of Relativity Analytics has grown by nearly 1,500% since 2011, with more than 70% of current kCura customers having Analytics licenses. It also, interestingly, draws attention to the England and Wales decision in Pyrrho Investments Ltd v MWB Property Ltd & Ors as a potential catalyst for yet wider use of analytical tools.

The same point is picked up by Cheryl Mackinnon of Forrester in her article
kCura Puts the CAAT Into The Bag . . . Acquires Long-time Partner Content Analyst Company. She emphasises the benefits to kCura and its customers of having control over the Content Analyst roadmap, concentrating on kCura’s core eDiscovery function but also broadening the potential uses of Relativity into investigations and broader business insight programmes.

Bloomberg DNA refers in its article headed “eDiscovery software shift” to Content Analyst’s concept clustering with email de-duplication, foreign language detection and other features which “can be found in half a dozen other eDiscovery software platforms”. Content Analyst said that it will honour outstanding business agreements with other companies in the discovery software market because, as Kurt Michel, Content Analyst CEO, says “we share a lot of the same corporate core values [with kCura] and one of those is doing the right thing”.

It remains to be seen what other providers who incorporate Content Analyst will do.

There has been a lot written recently about the uses of analytics in eDiscovery. Taking the first three which came up in response to a search of my own data store:

The Rise of Analytics in eDiscovery by JR Jenkins of FTI Consulting

Analytics LTNY16 Recap by Adam Kuhn of Recommind

Analytics for Beginners: What Every Attorney Needs to Know by Andrea Beckman of kCura.

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