In October I interviewed Simon Price, UK managing director of Recommind, when he sounded a confident note both about the benefits of Recommind’s acquisition by OpenText and about the wider context of cloud adoption of software for eDiscovery and for wider data management purposes. You can find that interview here.

That confident tone continues in a report of an interview with Simon Price on Legal IT Insider published on 23 November and headed Recommind: strategy and a change of direction?

Among the things reported there is that a couple of deals have already been made among existing OpenText clients. This was an important part of the OpenText rationale for acquiring Recommind and it is clear that no time has been wasted in introducing Recommind’s benefits to OpenText’s large client base. Simon Price says that Recommind “delivered double-digit growth to OpenText in our first quarter”.

Simon Price talks also about Recommind’s appointment of Legastat as its first ever Axcelerate cloud partner in the UK disclosure market, a deal which, as the Legal IT Insider article observes, “implies that OpenText are not going to kill off eDiscovery”. I have to say it did not enter my head that they might.

Predictive coding and analytical technology generally is a large part of the attraction of Recommind, particularly when coupled with its availability in the cloud. This has been a good year for the adoption of predictive coding technology, with England and Wales and Australia showing that it is not just the US whose courts are ready to adopt new ideas for dealing with large volumes of documents quickly and proportionally.

The question whether predictive coding can yet be described as “mainstream” is addressed in an article by Adam Kuhn of Recommind called Forrester’s TAR Report Underscores Different Predictive Coding Methodologies. One of the points made by Adam Kuhn is the growing realisation by corporations that the technology can be used for more than litigation – fact investigations and due diligence are mentioned; there are others. Adam Kuhn includes a trailer for the OpenText LegalTech 2017 session which is to be called Enough already! Predictive coding is for every matter. You can see Opentext’s LTNY sessions here.

I moderated a panel at the IICE Summit in London in May when Hal Marcus of Recommind joined me, US Magistrate Judge David Waxse, and others to talk about various aspects of the use of analytic technology in litigation. The anecdotal word since then (and not just from Recommind) is of increasing interest in advanced technology being shown by London lawyers and UK corporations.

Home