Legal Technology Journal

12 November 2008 - Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, Calif.  - Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today released a new version of its Investigator & Early Case Assessment (ECA) software to enable banks and insurance companies to quickly assess litigation risk and exposure in the wake of the global financial crisis. Autonomy Investigator and ECA version 6 accelerates the risk assessment process by analyzing Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in-place to swiftly ascertain whether there is a case before the “meet and confer”. Advanced new features include the ability to macro-evaluate a case based on understanding concepts, establish links between audio recordings and emails, and automate preservation of relevant data through linkage with Autonomy Legal Hold.

Powered by Autonomy’s unique Meaning-Based technology, Investigator & ECA forms an understanding of large quantities of diverse ESI including email, text messages, documents, voicemail, audio recordings and video. Leveraging petabyte scalability and intelligent clustering, large quantities of information are analyzed to identify patterns between seemingly unrelated information enabling attorneys to reconstruct what occurred, develop informed case strategies and sweep aside non-responsive data. A seamless link with Autonomy Legal Hold software automatically provides a legally defensible preservation and collection process.

At the heart of Investigator & ECA is Autonomy’s core infrastructure technology, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), which can understand the meaning of content and establish links across data types, languages and geographical boundaries to ensure comprehensive evaluation of all information across the enterprise. Advanced visualization techniques such as communication link maps, message tracers, and 2-D and 3-D automatic clustering allow legal teams to quickly determine the custodians, their threads, and the key themes, giving the legal team a huge advantage during pre-trial conferences and negotiations. Legal teams can use Investigator & ECA to prioritize documents for review based on themes or people involved to quickly find the needle in the haystack and establish the merits of a case, resulting in massive savings.

“With eDiscovery costs routinely totalling millions even before a case has reached trial and the need to analyze data in hours or days rather than weeks or months, organizations are under increased pressure to really know their data and the risks it entails,” said Dr Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. “The current financial turmoil has exacerbated the problem further as investigators try to establish responsibility, resulting in a massive surge of cases. Autonomy’s enhanced Investigator & ECA software allows legal teams to quickly evaluate data, determine relevant custodians and prioritize review resulting in considerable cost-savings and a distinct advantage in and out of court,” added Lynch.

Investigator & ECA is the industry’s first and only solution capable of understanding concepts within ESI and intelligently clustering email, documents and multimedia data all on a single platform. As the smoking gun often resides within human-friendly formats such as email and telephone conversations the inclusion of all unstructured information in the litigation risk evaluation is critical.

Autonomy’s Investigator & ECA version 6 software offers unique capabilities, including: 

• Macro-evaluation of Cases – The only early case assessment tool employing intelligent Meaning-Based clustering technology that provides experts with a birds-eye view of the entire information corpus enabling them to quickly identify and prioritize relevant information, and thus assess the data, its constituent concepts, key themes, and custodians, and ascertain whether there is a case to answer.
• In-Place ESI Analysis – Unlike legacy technologies for which collection is a prerequisite for conducting comprehensive litigation assessment, Autonomy’s Investigator & ECA version 6 software is the world’s first solution that can analyze the data in place and find answers prior to creating a collection.
• Rapid Risk and Exposure Evaluation –IDOL’s unmatched unique Meaning-Based capabilities built into Investigator & ECA 6 make possible the comprehensive and timely evaluation of litigation and risk, enabling legal teams to assess exposure unlike ever before.
• Advanced Audio Analysis - The unparalleled multimedia capabilities in Investigator & ECA version 6 include intelligent audio analysis, advanced playback and “point in time” redaction enabling legal teams to trace verbal communications that might contain critical evidence.
• Industry-first custodian name expansion – This native integration to the enterprise directory systems streamlines the risk and exposure assessment process by enabling investigators to benefit from a unified view of all aliases for a certain custodian, virtually eliminating the risk of omission and ensuring a first-class user experience.
  • Unparalleled Enterprise Data Access – Investigator & ECA version 6 can connect with and analyze data from any of over 400 repositories supported through IDOL’s format agnostic connector technology, enabling experts to benefit from unmatched flexibility in evaluating corporate data.   
  • Seamless Connectivity with Autonomy’s Legal Hold - Investigator & ECA version 6 boasts seamless connection with Autonomy’s Legal Hold solution which mitigates the risk of spoliation and ensures that the potentially relevant information is preserved and collected in the forensically sound manner required under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
  Autonomy’s enhanced Investigator & ECA version 6 software is available immediately.  

For more information on Autonomy's pan-enterprise platform, please visit http://www.autonomy.com/enterprise-search.