Rachel Teisch, senior director of product marketing at OpenText, talks about the recent growth of OpenText Legal Tech’s extensive software suite, and how it can help users of legal technology in particular.
CCBJ: Let’s start with a bit about your background.
Rachel Teisch: I’ve been in e-discovery for about 20 years. I joined OpenText in January 2019 when Catalyst, where I served as vice president of marketing, was acquired by OpenText. I’ve worn a lot of hats in my career, from business development in my early days to head of marketing roles and now to product marketing for the Legal Tech business unit at OpenText. I never thought I’d be doing this type of work, but after cutting my teeth at a litigation consulting firm shortly after graduate school, where I was literally carrying bankers boxes of documents to and from hearings, I realized there was a growing market for technology that could help lawyers and their staff do things an easier way.
OpenText’s product suite is for more than just the legal space, but is your focus on working with consumers of legal technology specifically?
OpenText Legal Tech is focused primarily on solving the legal information management needs of enterprises, spanning the entire e-discovery, knowledge management and legal document management technology realm. We have a number of different products: OpenText Insight, an eDiscovery platform recognized for its leadership technology-assisted review based on continuous active learning; OpenText Axcelerate, a flexible and comprehensive end-to-end eDiscovery platform; OpenText Decisiv, which offers AI-powered enterprise search; OpenText EnCase eDiscovery, the gold standard inforensically sound collections; OpenText Legal Hold, a legal hold platform that automated interrelated hold notification activities; and, eDOCS, a legal content management platform for matter-centric work.
It’s a really exciting time for us as a dedicated business unit for the legal industry because we have all of these products coming together as part of our enterprise legal information management vision. Now we’re focused on tying the pieces together to make legal information management a more efficient experience for the customer.
Can you discuss the most recent product update, Release 16 Enterprise Pack (EP) 7?
OpenText™ Release 16 Enterprise Pack 7 (EP7) introduces powerful new features and enhancements to products in the OpenText Legal Tech portfolio designed to improve the speed, productivity and efficiency of corporate legal professionals and law firms. These enhancements — which include automation, machine learning and AI — make it easier than ever for lawyers and other legal professionals to find, review and assess information in the legal information management lifecycle. Here are a few examples.
In Axcelerate, we introduced automated machine translations through an integration with Veritone, which a lot of our customers in EMEA need. It translates about 30 different foreign languages, including complex CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) languages, into English. It’s particularly relevant for European customers, and we definitely see opportunities there.
That’s a partnership, right? Veritone is not in the OpenText family.
Right, we have a strategic relationship with Veritone and a platform integration.Rather thantime-consuming and costly manual translations, Axcelerate users can literally select documents for translation and press a button from the Axcelerate interface – and it sends them over to Veritone to translate. It just takes the text, not the entire document – for security reasons – and the translated documents are seamlessly sent back to Axcelerate into the review workflow.
Our software can analyze a document and determine whether it is mostly positive, mostly negative, or neutral in tone. –Rachel Teisch
What other innovations are you excited about in the new release?
Another innovation is the integration between Axcelerate and Magellan, which is our artificial intelligence (AI) platform – specifically Magellen’s text analytics features that are now integrated into Axcelerate Smart Filters. This allows for for sentiment analysis. Basically it can analyze a document and determine whether it is mostly positive, mostly negative, or neutral in tone. It’s very helpful for attorneys to be able to make this assessment. And it can also extract people and places, allowing for a more efficient andthorough level of investigation of a data set. There also are important use cases for dataprivacy compliance – especially with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) rules related to requests from data subjects. It can identify people and places very quickly and home in on the person you’re looking for, but it also brings up other people and lets you redact their information. So you’re complying with privacy requirements while meeting the request of the data subject.
We also made important enhancements to eDOCS. EP7 adds advanced find to eDOCSwith OpenText™ MindServer™, an AI-powered search engine that provides quick and automatic search models to find the most relevant information available, including related matters and authors. MindServer securely crawls and indexes information from inside eDOCS, saving legal teams valuable time while gaining more complete case, project and client knowledge.We’ve also integrated InfoCenter, the user experience introduced last year, with Microsoft Office business applications to increase user productivity by allowing them to remain inside their favorite Microsoft authoring application while content from eDOCS.
All of these enhancements are designed to help lawyers accelerate access to information and increase the speed at which they’re getting work done.
How many clients would you say are using these products right now?
We have thousands of end users worldwide due to our products’ rich track record and global presence.Take Axcelerate, for example. Its flexible architecture and deployment models are appealing to clients of all sizes, types and locations. We have a fully on-prem model, which some Fortune 10 clients have installed on site, because they want tokeep all of their data and manage all of their processes themselves. Then we have some clients that are just using the Axcelerate Early Case Assessment (ECA) product, which is on-prem and has connectors to data sources for collection, ingestion processing, and analysis. Clients can move that data for full review, on-prem or in the Axcelerate cloud. For clients needing a temporary on-prem discovery solution, the Axelerate portable solution sits behind the client’s firewall, no internet connection, and can run an entire discovery project from collection through production within the client’s firewalls. That’s really useful in countries with stringent data privacy laws in which data needs to stay in jurisdiction or on site, conducting a discrete project in isolation from external cybersecurity threats, or even identifying and keeping high-value and sensitive data on-site, prior to moving eDiscovery data sets to the cloud for full review.
Do any of the OpenText products or platforms help with dealing with legal holds?
OpenText Legal Hold automates and centralizes the interrelated legal hold notification processes that are often manual, time-consuming and risk prone. Data can be preserved and put on hold and then moved to one of our review platforms for review.
What are you looking forward to as far as new developments in 2020?
We’re really focused on continuing to help clients solve existing and emerging challenges around legal information management—whether that be DSAR reviews, incident response related to cybersecurity breaches, traditional litigation, or internal investigations. As you can imagine, regulatory compliance mandates and growing cybersecurity threats are driving up the stakes and volume of legal work.
Are you seeing – or anticipating – shifts in the way clients are organizing their departments?
It depends on the company, but no doubt the role and number of legal operations professionals is growing, and they’re taking greater control over budget, legal technology and vendor sourcing. Law department leaders are being asked to do more with less—while being tasked with high-performance and optimal results—and legal operations leaders are helping them be more strategic about technology investments, spend, the optimal balance between insourcing and outsourcing workload.
A specific example would be how law departments are looking at document review, which is the costliest part of litigation. Rather than the traditional piece meal approach of sending documents and data “over the fence” to various law firms and vendors, which is inefficient and can result in unforeseen costs and risks, more enterprises are centralizing around a single vendor and integrate that into their business processes—optimizing how and where gets work done, and who does that work. So, using a single vendor (like OpenText) to manage and conduct a review working closely with the client and their counsel, leveraging in-house attorney reviewers, machine learning consultants and our technology-assisted review, centralizes and standardizes processes, while overall costs and improving business outcomes.
We’ve been talking to a lot of legal ops people and general counsel and others about how technology solutions are being integrated into business functions. Whether it’s e-signatures or there’s a litigation matter and when they’re collecting from a business unit they’re finding that they need to consult with them in a different way. Are you seeing anything shift in that way?
Law departments generally want to control more of their data, limit throwing data over the fence to a number of third parties, and manage budgets better. They also need to do more with less, so they need technology and processes to be synergistic. OpenText is where documents are created and stored. When you think about it that way, there are so many upstream opportunities for integrations into archives, enterprise content management systems, different data sources, and that’s where OpenText really excels. We host so much of that data, so it’s about leveraging strengths. Companies are looking more and more at those types of synergies for efficiency, rather than operating each business unit with a discrete set of technologies and processes.
There’s a lot of flexibility around Axcelerate, which gives it a lot of deployment options globally. –Rachel Teisch
Do you see differences in the ways that clients are working with your products for litigation versus government investigations or criminal investigations?
The approach to reviewing documents for an internal or regulatory investigation differs significantly from a typical litigation production context. Recognizing this difference and the unique challenges of a compliance investigation is the key to designing an efficient and effective document review protocol using Axcelerate or Insight.
The objective of a typical litigation review is to proceed, from a reasonably known set of facts, to locate most of the relevant documents relating to the dispute, with the least amount of review effort. The emphasis is on document review, primarily to present the best documents for review and determine whether those documents relate to the underlying fact pattern. To that end, a litigation review is loosely designed to develop a model of positive, or relevant, documents and find most of the similar documents quickly, to the exclusion of other documents.
In an investigation, those facts are either not known or not well developed. As a result, an investigation review is crafted to quickly find pertinent documents that will establish that fact pattern. It is not necessary to locate all, or even most, of the documents that may ultimately be relevant to the ultimate fact pattern. It is most important to be certain that the critical documents are available for review and to locate those documents quickly. An investigation is an effort to find the pieces of a puzzle and put them together to define a cohesive fact pattern.
Given this difference in objectives, there are several steps that can be taken to refine and implement a document review protocol to achieve the objectives underlying a compliance investigation. This includes leveraging our products for immediate and discreet preservation and collection, use of communication analytics to locate additional witnesses, use of efficient machine learning techniques, such as technology-assisted review (TAR) based on continuous active learning, as well as effectively exploring the unknown using modern TAR tools that locate documents that are contextually diverse from everything that is known to that point in time. The more contextually diverse documents that are seen over the course of the review, the less likely that the review, and, in turn, the investigation, will miss critical issues that are unknown at the outset.
Published February 7, 2020.
