Paul Rome is Director of Technology Development at NightOwl Discovery. I spoke to him at Relativity Fest in Chicago about NightOwl’s development of applications designed to keep corporate clients informed about the progress of their matters.

Paul Rome said that NightOwl is increasing its ability to enable clients to review activity, not just for single matters but across all their matters in parallel. There are a lot of stages from ingestion through to billing, and corporate clients want an overview of what is going on, what stages have been reached and, of course, what it is costing.

The owner of the application is usually a project manager or senior paralegal in the GC’s office. They are used to getting point-in-time statistics but NightOwl gives them a reporting platform for interactive review of all the matters in hand.

The longer the relationship, the more value there is in this information as clients are enabled to see trends over time. They can look at the history of a single or multiple matters and apply that history to their current matters, enabling informed decision-making.

Most of this involves litigation, regulatory or internal investigations, and other eDiscovery functions. They might, however, involve other things: a recent example, Paul Rome said, was the analysis of a US federal government public response where data was collected from websites, mailings and in-person talks, all similar in kind to eDiscovery processes. There is no limit for the uses for this type of technology.

This was a recurring theme at Relativity Fest. 2019 may be the year in which we start looking back to eDiscovery and seeing it as the parent of a very much wider range of data management purposes.

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