Clearwell Expands Its E-Discovery Platform With New Modules For Pre-Processing, Review, And Production

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — August 17, 2009 — Clearwell Systems, Inc., a leader in intelligent e-discovery, today announced the addition of Pre-Processing, Review and Production Modules to its market-leading Clearwell E-Discovery Platform. With these new modules, available in the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform V5.0, e-discovery teams can pre-process, process, analyze, review, redact, and produce documents within a single enterprise-class product, eliminating the need to move data across multiple tools, and enabling an iterative, dynamic, and defensible e-discovery process.

“Keywords and search queries change even in the simplest of cases, creating back and forth throughout the e-discovery process,” said Jay Brudz, senior counsel, legal technology at GE. “As a result, it is very important for us to have an e-discovery product that can reduce the number of tools we use and eliminate the repetitive movement of data. The new release of the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform provides a single, integrated e-discovery product that allows us to deploy an iterative, dynamic and defensible e-discovery process.”

E-discovery is a fluid and non-linear business process. However, legal and forensic teams traditionally have been forced to use multiple, disparate products to conduct e-discovery, resulting in a rigid process that is costly to implement, takes longer to complete and increases the risk of errors. For example, in many instances, once case data is collected, keywords are applied using a simple search tool (i.e. tool #1). The resulting dataset is then converted into a load file using a separate processing tool (i.e. tool #2). Next, the load file is uploaded into yet another tool (i.e. tool #3), this time for review. This process presents many challenges when keywords change as case facts are discovered. With every change, IT and legal teams are forced to use these multiple tools all over again and manually manage the repetitive movement of data across each of these tools. As a result, enterprise and law firms face: a) higher costs, b) significant time delays that make it harder to meet deadlines, c) greater risk of errors, and d) potential chain of custody issues that diminish the defensibility of the entire e-discovery process.

Clearwell provides pre-processing, processing, analysis, review, redaction, and production, in a single, integrated product, eliminating the need for import and export of data between multiple tools, reducing manual errors and lowering the overall cost and duration of e-discovery. In addition, the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform automatically tracks all actions on case documents throughout the e-discovery workflow, ensuring chain of custody. Through one single product, enterprises and law firms can support the iterative, back-and-forth e-discovery workflow of the real world, making the process cost-effective and defensible.

Clearwell E-Discovery Platform V5.0 delivers three new modules:

1. Clearwell Pre-Processing Module: Interactive graphs enable e-discovery teams to quickly filter out data by known files (both NSRL NIST list as well as custom lists), custodian, date, file type, and size, significantly reducing downstream processing and review costs. Pre-processing analytics enable users to graphically view summary and detailed statistics by collection or by custodian. This allows users to easily confirm that all case data has been collected and accurately predict downstream e-discovery costs.

2. Clearwell Review Module: Redaction capabilities enable reviewers to quickly redact documents, apply reason codes, and verify redactions prior to production. Reviewers can auto-redact keywords, phrases, and personal information such as name, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and phone numbers. Decision-tree tagging using a multi-layer tree structure prevents errors and minimizes the number of clicks needed to accurately tag a document. Clearwell’s optimized-for-review user interface provides several new capabilities that increase review throughput, including: a) native viewer, b) ‘related items’ window, c) persistent hit highlighting, d) dual-monitor support, and e) breadcrumb navigation.

3. Clearwell Production Module: Image-based production capabilities allow users to convert any set of documents to TIFF or PDF at any time and burn redactions on the image. Users can choose from a range of production options, including bates stamping, watermarking, custom header/footer, and various export options. Rolling production support enables multiple productions at any point in the e-discovery process. Users can track the progress of each production in real-time and view produced document sets within Clearwell in the same format provided to outside parties.

In addition to these three new modules, the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform V5.0 delivers over 20 new features and enhancements in its industry-leading processing, analysis, and first-pass review module.

“A consistent theme articulated by our customers is their need to reduce the number of tools used throughout the e-discovery process,” said Kamal Shah, vice president of product management and marketing at Clearwell Systems. “With the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform V5.0, e-discovery teams can perform all the post-collection phases of e-discovery in a single, integrated enterprise-class application versus three or four tools. This enables customers to implement an iterative and defensible e-discovery process. The time and cost savings customers already experience with the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform will be substantially increased with the addition of these new modules.”

About Clearwell Systems
Clearwell Systems is transforming the way enterprises perform electronic discovery in response to litigation, regulatory inquiries, and corporate investigations. By automating the processing, analysis, review and production of ESI, Clearwell enables enterprises to accelerate early case assessments, effectively cull-down data, increase reviewer productivity, and ensure the defensibility of the entire e-discovery process. Clearwell was ranked a Top 5 E-Discovery Software Provider Overall in the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey. For more information, visit Clearwell Systems at www.clearwellsystems.com or subscribe to the E-Discovery 2.0 blog at: http://www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/.