While the market for mobile e-discovery tools may still be
in its infancy, we also know that EDD is established and quite
profitable. There are more than 600 vendors offering products and services, and, according to Gartner, the EDD market reached $1.4 billion in 2012 and is expected to hit $2.9 billion by 2017. Vendors must move quickly, yet cautiously, to
develop, test, and release products and build markets.
As we go to press, Legal Tech New York 2013 is right around
the corner. This year, as always, these e-discovery vendors
will debut both new and improved products — so this is an
ideal time to explore how vendors view the mobile market,
For legal professionals, the Citrix
approach can be a relatively easy
segue into mobile e-discovery.
and what they are— and are not — doing to embrace or spur
it. We reached out to a cross-section of vendors, and what we
gleaned from these discussions is that right now there are no
easy answers to how mobile EDD products will be used, and
how features and interfaces should be designed.
But trends and guiding principles are starting to emerge —
best practices that vendors need to embrace now if they are to
develop applications optimally suited for mobile users.
MOBILE-FRIENDLY FEATURES. When it comes to
mobile e-discovery, “the market is clamoring for something
— but exactly what they want, we are still waiting to see,” says
Anita Engles, vice president for product marketing at San Francisco-based Daegis ( www.daegis.com).
In November, the company launched Daegis Mobile, a
mobile interface to its Daegis eDiscovery Platform. In devel-
oping its mobile product, Engles and the company’s vice pres-
ident of technology and innovation, Doug Stewart, explain
that Daegis has a good idea of how customers view EDD-to-
go. “There are going to be things better suited for a laptop or
a workstation,” says Engles. “If you are out running errands
you’re not going to be in a position to start a big batch review.
The mobile use they envision is a more lightweight use, like
checking the status [of a review].”
But the mobile EDD market is so new that Daegis couldn’t
say for sure that that predicted use will actually become the
predominant use. So the company’s initial strategy was to pro-
vide mobile access to the full functions of its existing product
and see how customers responded.
Indeed, mobile users, says Stewart “can do everything they
can do on the platform” — checking documents in and out,
redacting, monitoring status, predictive coding, searching and
processing documents. “Obviously there is a little bit less real
estate [on the screen],” adds Stewart, “but so long as users are
okay with that, they can do everything.”
To enable this sort of full mobile access, Daegis relies on
desktop virtualization technology from Citrix Systems Inc.
( www.citrix.com). Founded in 1989 and based in Fort Lau-
derdale, Citrix is a leader in the virtualization and cloud com-
puting markets (2011 revenue of $2.21 billion). Its technology
gives remote users access to applications running not on their
device but on a server back at a data center. In essence, Citrix
transmits screen shots of the application — in this case, Dae-
gis eDiscovery Platform — to the mobile device, and sends the
user’s keyboard and touch inputs back to the server, which
then acts on those commands and transmits more screen shots.
By facilitating this back and forth, Citrix enables a mobile user
to interact with the application, even from thousands of miles
away. The actual processing is all done back on the server, but
mobile users see and work with the program just as if it was
running on their tablets.
