By Ari Kaplan with Ian Campbell.
Ari Kaplan speaks with Ian Campbell, the President and CEO of iCONECT a developer of e-discovery software
Ari Kaplan
Tell us about your background and the genesis of iCONECT.
Ian Campbell
We have a rock solid piece of code and 20 years of experience in this industry. We have made money since day one and are a profitable company. We've done everything under our own steam and haven't taken on large VC funding. We know what has to be done and stay focused. I originally started out as a Concordance trainer and developed a web front-end for Concordance back in 1999 and 2000, which turned into iCONECT, morphed into Oracle in 2003, and SQL in 2008. We have our elastic version 11 coming out in 2022 and are always looking for what's next.
Ari Kaplan
I have been tracking trends for seven years through the E-Discovery Unfiltered report. How have you seen the e-discovery sector change over the past two decades?
Ian Campbell
The volume of information has skyrocketed, which is one of the reasons that we've done so much development on the back end of our platform to make sure we can manage the volume, search the volume, and provide a quick response. We have found that the decision makers changed. It used to be that everyone in IT drove what was going to be purchased in e-discovery. Then, lawyers focused on usability so in 2011/2012, user interface became key. That has morphed again in the last few years as expectations have changed due to the widespread use of smartphones. People download an app and start using it, which is the level of expectation for their e-discovery platform. They want to be able to jump in on day one and because it is so intuitive, just start clicking buttons and doing work. That's something that drives us and we are always looking for ways to require the fewest number of clicks. There is another area we call transactional friction, which provides enough of a buffer to ensure that there are guard rails around usability. There's nothing worse than giving someone a delete button, with no second choice. Also, many of the available applications feel like each other so the movement and the migration to a new, more modern tool that may be more in sync with one’s business model is not as much of a barrier anymore. Like a smartphone, users can download the app and jump right in, which is a key thing for us moving forward.
Ari Kaplan
What should leaders consider when adapting to market shifts?
Ian Campbell
Everyone needs to make an effort to brainstorm and look over the horizon to figure out what's next, but it becomes a problem when you have too many ideas and an uncertain direction. We're laser focused on e-discovery review, which has been our singular concentration for a long time. There are other items that are tangential to what we're doing and over the course of the next few months, we will also be emphasizing areas that relate to discovery so that users can leverage our technology and address new business problems.
Ari Kaplan
The use of artificial intelligence, came up a number of times in my E-Discovery Unfiltered research. Where are litigants finding the most success with AI?
Ian Campbell
Anywhere that it's invisible. No one wants to learn a new tool. No one wants to export it from part A of the tool into part B of the tool, do the work, then have to move everything back into part A of the tool. It has to be invisible. When you go on Spotify and it actually compiles a playlist for you every day. It's a daily ‘Ian’s Playlist’ that shows up on my Spotify. How does it do it? I don't really care. I don't have to do it, and I don't have to go out to another app, create my playlist, and import it back into Spotify. It happens automatically. And, I think that's an area that has to be in play. People are getting inundated with technology these days, and that's important that anywhere that we can add AI, where we can make it invisible to the user, but yet give them huge value, I think that's where everyone's going to benefit. So, the whole idea is, you click the next button and what do you get? The next most relevant document. What kind of magic was in the back end? What tool was being used to give you that next document? People don't really care.
Ari Kaplan
How do you see the use cases for AI developing?
Ian Campbell
In a situation where someone does not want to use AI, we have developed Oversight, which looks at every coding decision that a legal team makes and identify any outliers. It is built right into the platform and the users do not know it is there. It gives supervisors greater transparency into the decision-making and the opportunity to evaluate individual reviewers to see if anyone is struggling and adjust the process. It helps them adjust their training and make adjustments quickly. It is invisible and running in the background, but it has tremendous value so more teams will begin using this technology to monitor manual review for cases.
Ari Kaplan
Why did iCONECT decide to purchase the source code to Ayfie’s Inspector application?
Ian Campbell
We have been working with Ayfie for about four or five years and they have some great technology. They were looking to divest that business unit and we have made a lot of advancements and integrations with the application so it made business sense to acquire the code. The access and control to that core functionality will put us in a better position to meet the needs of the marketplace going forward. The move is also a very strong statement that we're committed to this market. We have been doing this for 20 years and know a lot, but are continually evolving and developing our software.
Ari Kaplan
How does this development specifically benefit iCONECT’s users?
Ian Campbell
We're an idea company, an innovator and an inventor. There is an array of different ways that we use this enhancement in our core e-discovery platform, but also in related technologies that will offer benefits to our users. In addition, they will see more rapid turnaround for bug fixes and feature requests, as well as greater agility in new development. We expect to accelerate the growth of the platform and our feature set.
Ari Kaplan
How do you see interest in and the value of artificial intelligence for e-discovery evolving?
Ian Campbell
The use of AI goes beyond e-discovery because I think some of the challenges that e-discovery teams are no longer limited to litigation, such as DSAR and FOIA redactions. We have such an intuitive interface that users can upload their PDF documents, click a couple of buttons, and export fully redacted records seamlessly as part of their workstream using AI in the background, again, invisible to the user. We are also getting more involved in breach detection and identifying potentially vulnerable details pursuant to government requirements. In fact, more companies are facing data retention challenges in discarding ‘ROT-Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial’ information, and are leveraging AI to review millions of records and produce a summary report that identifies the material at issue, with the ability to easily conduct a review of any necessary files. We are also finding a lot of legacy data is in forms and we are using AI to extract the form information to create metadata for review. We are now able to solve not only the e-discovery problems but others related to FOIA, GDPR, DSARs so it's a very exciting time to be in this space
About the Author
Ari Kaplan (http://www.AriKaplanAdvisors.com) regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology at http://www.ReinventingProfessionals.com and his series at Legal Business World