I have had several conversations over the years with Matthew Geaghan of Nuix about the cross-over between eDiscovery tools and skills and other areas beyond eDiscovery. I interviewed him again at Legaltech in New York and asked him where we were going with these developments.

Matthew Geaghan said that there are many overlaps between discovery and forensics, information governance and security. Nuix delivers large indexed repositories of data – “data intelligence lakes” – perhaps for discovery purposes. News spreads round the organisation of the capacity to search these large pools of data, and Nuix gets calls from compliance departments of clients; they have heard that all the company’s data is searchable and want that ability for their own purposes – for proactive identification of potential problems not just reacting to them.

HR departments also show interest because, as Matthew Geaghan puts it, they want to get in ahead of things which might be difficult in the future.

Matthew Geaghan gives an example of a company which wanted to do a global audit, marrying up structured invoice data with Bloomberg chats in order to pull out common entities where matches may be found across disparate data sources and data types.

Suspicion might be aroused, for example, by the juxtaposition of a phone call, a message and an invoice.

What Nuix is offering its clients “total data intelligence”. Data on its own is of limited value but, once assembled and analysed, it can be turned into knowledge.

I asked Matthew Geaghan who the users are for this. They include service providers working on behalf of clients, and people in legal departments who can now run their own searches against the data.

Nuix has seen a new focus on discovery with the acquisition of Ringtail. Matthew Geaghan, like everyone else I have spoken to at Nuix, was surprised and impressed by how Ringtail has developed. The power of its analytics is the chief benefit so far as Matthew Geaghan is concerned.

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