Microsoft Picks Clearwell for In-House e-Discovery

Clearwell Systems notched a fair-sized win Jan. 12. The company that positions itself as an “intelligent” e-discovery provider, announced that the world’s largest software company, Microsoft, has deployed its e-discovery platform as a component of its own in-house e-discovery strategy.

Microsoft’s legal and IT teams are using Clearwell to improve the efficiency of the e-discovery process for litigation, regulatory inquiries and internal investigations.

E-discovery is the electronic process by which records are gathered from data stores and processed for litigation. This includes anything digital: word processing files, photos, e-mail, audio and video files, instant messaging transcripts, Internet bookmarks — even data center users’ logs. Sales of e-discovery software are increasing as business stakeholders come to realize it as an important investment in their company’s overall security.

Clearwell is very good at clearing out the chaff in data and getting only relevant information to the lawyers and researchers.

“E-discovery costs are a significant portion of litigation costs,” said Rich Wallis, deputy general counsel of litigation at Microsoft. “With Clearwell’s pre-processing, processing and analysis, we are further streamlining our e-discovery processes.”

Clearwell says its e-Discovery Platform can be fully operational in less than 25 minutes.

Clearwell’s analytics enable users to eliminate irrelevant documents and false positives to lower processing costs. The product’s discussion threading and relevance ranking capabilities display documents in context, increasing review throughput. Responsive documents can be produced or seamlessly uploaded into litigation support databases via EDRM-compliant XML and other major load file formats.

Lastly, Clearwell automatically tracks all actions on case documents throughout the e-discovery workflow, providing a defensible e-discovery process.