Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers ediscovery software for quickly and inexpensively collecting and reviewing documents and email in small cases (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a cloud practice management app with desktop-class features and per-case rather than per-user pricing, a practice management system that automatically captures email correspondence, integrates with Outlook, and offers a secure client portal, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.
Early case assessments and internal investigations can save time and minimize liability. These situations call for speed, not perfection. You want to quickly search the email and documents of one person or at most a few custodians. Using a document review platform with lots of bells and whistles at this stage can seem like fishing off a supertanker.
MetaJure SPOTLIGHT … in One Sentence
Launched recently, MetaJure SPOTLIGHT is lightweight ediscovery software designed to capture data from specific devices and make it searchable.
The Killer Feature
SPOTLIGHT costs as little as $1,000 per case regardless of the number of custodians or the volume of data. Companies can install it locally on a server or use it in the cloud (hosting by LexisNexis Managed Data Services is also an option; additional charges may apply). Ideally, companies have a retention policy and install the free SPOTLIGHT Agent on every computer they deploy to facilitate collection at any given time. Alternatively, you can install the Agent onto custodian computers whose data you need to review on an ad-hoc basis.
Either way, the Agent captures all email and local documents, and sends this data to the server. SPOTLIGHT can also collect data from billing systems, document management systems, file servers, and other data stores in an organization. The software automatically performs OCR where needed using ABBYY technology, and parses metadata such as to, from, cc in email messages to support advanced search features. This capture process takes a few hours after which you can begin running searches.
"SPOTLIGHT gives lawyers an easy, powerful tool to quickly gain insights from a mass of documents, emails and other materials," says MetaJure CEO Rob Arnold. "While every case requires smart and thorough analysis, not every case justifies expensive ediscovery software. SPOTLIGHT is the ideal, value priced document search and analysis tool for small cases and internal investigations."
Other Notable Features
SPOTLIGHT runs in any web browser, offering a search interface similar to other MetaJure products not to mention Google. To the left you'll find several filters that you can use to browse documents or to narrow search results. Location filters enable you to focus on a custodian or a specific data source. File Type filters include email, Word, PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel. As intimated above, SPOTLIGHT supports Boolean searches such as author, recipient, exact, fuzzy, proximity, and wild card.
The search results lists folders whose names match your search at the top because of the strong likelihood of relevance. Below any matching folders, you'll find documents and email messages listed by relevance accompanied by their date. You can list documents by date instead.
SPOTLIGHT preserves folder paths, groups duplicates for more efficient review, and maintains the connection between email messages and attachments for context. Click a document to view it in the Text Preview Pane on the right side of the page. Clicking the Open button opens the document in its native application.
What Else Should You Know?
When you hit the jackpot, clicking the Export Results button packages all the documents in the search results into a ZIP file that you can share and review offline. Learn more about MetaJure SPOTLIGHT.
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