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A New Search and Collect Pricing Model for eDiscovery
A litigator recently suggested that lawyers should treat electronic documents like conversations and thus eliminate their production during discovery. His joke served as a poignant commentary on the spiraling costs of reviewing increasing volumes of data, some of which such as Facebook Posts didn't even exist a decade ago when the famous Enron email messages first put eDiscovery on the map. To make matters worse, litigators not only face an ever-growing number of products to choose from, but a bewildering array of pricing models that are difficult to compare. Last week, a new product emerged designed to save litigants boatloads of money on eDiscovery.
PowerSearch … in One Sentence
DATAssimilate's PowerSearch is a desktop eDiscovery application with a unique pricing model that enables you to identify and collect relevant electronically stored information.
The Killer Feature
PowerSearch has something rare in the litigation software industry — a clever and memorable slogan: Cull before you collect. Its slogan underscores its unique pricing model.
You can download as many copies of PowerSearch as you want free of charge. So you can give everyone in your legal department or law firm a copy without having to crunch any numbers.
To use PowerSearch, you point it at a collection of electronic files such as an Outlook PST file, and then conduct searches to find relevant documents. Once you identify the documents you ultimately want to collect, you pay DATAssimilate only for those documents.
Thus, instead of paying to collect all of a custodian's documents even though you know that most will prove irrelevant, you instead pay after your review for only the relevant documents. Cull before you collect.
PowerSearch uses a token system. Each document you want costs one token. Pricing ranges from .05 cents to .001 cents per token (document) depending on how many tokens you purchase. The minimum purchase is 1,000 tokens (documents) for $50. By creating a business account in the token bank, you can share tokens among multiple computers. According to the company, PowerSearch can reduce your collection costs by 80% or more over traditional pricing models.
"We designed PowerSearch to give the legal industry an easy and affordable way to access data," DATAssimilate CEO Girts Jansons told us. "There is no cost to deploy or use the robust features of PowerSearch, and users pay only fractions of a cent for files they ultimately decide to save. We have received very positive responses from beta testers."
Other Notable Features
PowerSearch doesn't just search files, it indexes and searches through them fast. For example, Jansons told us that PowerSearch performed a complex search on those famous Enron email messages in less than two seconds. Before you can search, you must of course index. PowerSearch indexes across a 100 MB network at a speed of 500 files per minute. As an added bonus, the optional OCR technology converts document images to searchable text at a rate of 45 pages per minute.
DATAssimilate claims that PowerSearch requires minimal training. You just follow the navigation tabs through the workflow to select, index, analyze, search, and then save relevant files. Context-sensitive help provides best practices as you move through each step.
PowerSearch handles a wide variety of file types in their native format as well as file bundles such as NSF, PST, and ZIP. Other features include the ability to search within search results and filter your search results, generate reports, export using various options such as retaining email attachments and folder structures, and produce a defensible audit trail.
What Else Should You Know?
PowerSearch runs on Windows PCs. As noted above, it costs nothing to download and use. You pay only when you want to pull relevant documents from a data source. Learn more about PowerSearch.
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