Crane on Law by James Crane

I was part of the Altep group that attended the well-hyped and very crowded Legal Tech event in Manhattan last week. With hundreds of vendors hawking their services, it was, at times, a dizzying display of our beloved capitalism at work. Here are a couple of quick observations:

• Qualcomm : It seems like each of these events is dominated by the latest big case to be decided. In this instance, the Qualcomm case, which I wrote about last month, was on everyone’s minds. For the most part, like the Morgan Stanley case, Qualcomm is seen as an “extreme example” and basically a roadmap for “what not to do.” In-house counsel that addressed the case believed that they should bear the responsibility of identification, preservation, and collection. Meanwhile, outside counsel representatives all said that they can’t be afraid to ask the tough questions and carefully evaluate their client organization’s discovery processes. I agree. Every attorney involved, should be just that: involved. This all sounds like déjà vu to me, as Altep has been joining hands and minds with both in-house counsel and outside attorneys for many years.
• Ready, Set, … Let’s Compete : In the last year, there have literally been hundreds of new e-discovery companies start up. Some are former copy shops that now offer some “off-the-shelf” processing, and some are large companies that have been established in other industries for decades and want to add e-discovery as a new service line. Dare I say its an e-discovery “bubble”? I know at Altep, we welcome the opportunity to compete with everyone ~ we’ve been handling the nation’s most challenging cases in size, liability and complexity since 1994. My personal worry is for the clients that will suffer through the learning curves as the little companies surpass their limits and the big companies find their way. We expect there will be a lot of industry consolidation in the coming years, I advise everyone to please select your partner carefully.

We have a very busy conference schedule this year. You can see it here: http://www.altep.com/content/view/52/57/. If you would like to meet some of the Altep superstars at one of these conferences, drop us a line.