John Tredennick, Argyle Executive Forum Conversation

Argyle Conversationsby Argyle Executive ForumSM

John Tredennick, CEO andFounder of Catalyst RepositorySystems, discussed ways to makee-discovery more efficient andthe advantages of using onevendor to provide a centrale-discovery repository to managee-discovery documents.

Argy le Conversat ionsMay 29, 2012

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Scott Robbin: Can you start by giving us a better understanding of your background at CatalystRepository Systems and what your company does?

John Tredennick: I spent the first 25 years of my career as a trial lawyer and litigation partner at Holland & Hart,which is the largest law firm in the Rocky Mountain region. Back then there was no “e” in front of discovery. It wasall about paper, volumes of which you could fit in your briefcase and take home to look at while you got ready fortrial. In the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s I saw things evolve to filing cabinets, war rooms and then ultimatelywarehouses of paper that had to be managed. In turn, we saw the rise of paralegals and multi-office teams incases.

By the mid-1990s I was convinced that there had to be a better way to manage all the paper and the newlyemergent electronic files that were coming along, so we began developing systems in the firm to tackle that. By1998 we were providing repositories on cases involving hundreds of different law firms and clients, and I realizedthat there was real value to a central approach where everybody connected via the Internet securely. People weresoon coming to us to provide these systems even when we weren’t lawyering. In 2000, I suggested that we spinthis out as a separate business and so we formed Catalyst. We were one of the first to provide this service.

In a nutshell, Catalyst is an industrial-grade e-discovery platform built to handle the largest cases in the world. Wehave over 150 employees in the United States and in Asia and provide end-to-end technology services around whatI call the “heart” of the litigation lifecycle. That is the point after collection where you start with processing,loading, indexing, search analytics, review, tagging and ultimately production or preparation for trial. Our goal hasbeen to automate that process from start to finish. Unlike many in the industry, we deliver a big, industrial-gradesearch platform that offers sub-second search for complex queries even with millions of documents. Our systemalso handles languages better than most of our competitors. We especially do a lot of work with Chinese, Japaneseand Korean documents. We built a data center in Japan to provide an alternative for hosting in the U.S. for ourAsian clients.

So just to dive in, why does Catalyst deliver its e-discovery services in the cloud? What are thebenefits to that, such as safety?

It’s safer than most of the alternatives and far more effective as a delivery mechanism. But the main reason I wasattracted to the cloud back in 2000 was the realization that we could provide systems which would handle largevolumes of documents and provide the sophisticated services our clients needed, whether for multi-language orteams of hundreds of reviewers. Our grid has thousands of servers over four data centers that can spread thework load, so there is no problem assigning large review teams or queuing up large productions. The cloud is theonly way to do this. Most clients are not looking to invest millions of dollars into proprietary hardware and softwarejust to run processing, review and productions themselves. It doesn’t make sense for every corporation out thereto invest in a similar infrastructure along with a team of people to manage, maintain and upgrade it.

I should say that we provide a private cloud. All of the data sits on our servers and in our data centers. As far assecurity goes, we have a team dedicated to security issues, and we have thousands of monitors and other tests towatch over the domain. The U.S. Justice Department has investigated and certified Catalyst’s systems to managethe most sensitive of federal criminal documents. I think people realize now that the data centers are more securethan keeping information in your offices.

So what is innovative about your new platform and what are some of the benefits it offers to ageneral counsel?

We’ve been working on Insight for more than two years, rewriting our platform from the ground up. Insight is thefirst unified search system on the market, using an XML database rather than the traditional SQL paired with DTSearch. The system is faster than anything I have ever seen and offers powerful analytical tools for early caseassessment, visual analysis and data reduction. Because it is unified, the index is always up to date. When youupdate a record, it is searchable immediately—both the fields you tagged and all the other text in the document. Whether you are under a tight deadline for document production or preparing for a deposition, you know that youare searching a database that is always up to date.

This system is designed to scale to handle big data sets and to provide sub-second response even for complexsearches. We have tested searches of 1.5 million characters and they brought results in seconds. One test site has

W W W . A R G Y L E F O R U M . C O MA R G Y L E E X E C U T I V E F O R U M 1 2 2 W E S T 2 6 T H S T , 2 N D F L O O R N E W Y O R K , N Y 1 0 0 0 1


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over 65 million records, yet it performs with Google-like speed with sub-second search response. Because ofCatalyst’s unique architecture, you can run complex searches across terabytes of data and update recordsimmediately across all matters.

But clients are looking for more than just speed and scalability, so we set out to automate our processes from startto finish. Clients can send their data automatically to Catalyst using our enterprise integration tools (OnRamp andFast Track) and then have the data processed, loaded, searched and queued up for review automatically. Thisgives our clients the power to run the system like it is a locally-installed box or look to Catalyst or one of ourpartners to do the work. That starts with automatic loading and processing of data, right on through to automaticsearches, review workflow and production.

We have years of experience with automation. We’ve run 75,000 document loads through our fast-trackloading-processing system without human intervention. So what sets us apart from our competitors aside fromspeed and scalability is a product mindset that lets you serve yourself or request additional services and expertisewhen you need them.

One of the benefits of storing information in a single cloud repository is the ability to reuse data that has alreadybeen reviewed and tagged in future or multiple cases. Rather than replicating documents on different servers, wehave the capacity to store and index single documents to save money and increase search accuracy.

How does that automation work and how important is it to work with one vendor in e-discovery?

Our clients find that there are a lot of benefits to centering on a single e-discovery repository platform, the firstbeing that it leads to far fewer mistakes. When you’re handing data off to a number of vendors – one forprocessing, one for ECA one for review, another for production, etc. – you open the door to errors and data loss,which can lead to sanctions, costs and uncertainty.

Second, things move predictably and far more quickly in one seamless system with automation andstandardization. You’re not at the mercy of having to move data from vendor to vendor, with inconsistent load filesand the possibility of lost data. The more hands you have in the mix, the greater the potential for problems.

Third, it allows you to establish best practices and consistent procedures that you can use over and over, whetherit’s an investigation, litigation or compliance request. That ultimately allows you to target work to the teams thatare most efficient, because you can re-use data and have a group of privileged specialists that are making thecalls, rather than having that done by each of your law firms. So, there are a lot of benefits to a central approach,the last being that you are going to get better prices when you consolidate your spending with one vendor thanyou would spreading costs over a dozen of them.

One of our large corporate clients has reduced outside counsel billable time in the first 90 days of every case by75% with automation, standardization and reporting.

Can you go into more detail about the foreign language capabilities in your platform and how theycan benefit a global company?

We were one of the first to provide multi-language capabilities in our platform back around 2007, at a time whenfew were even talking about the issue. We found there was a huge, unmet demand for e-discovery platforms thatcould handle foreign-language data properly. Suddenly there was huge demand for our services. Litigation hadbecome (and now is) a global phenomenon, reaching to and beyond Asia and Europe. Not surprisingly a lot ofother vendors jumped on the bandwagon announcing that their systems were now “Unicode compliant.” They andtheir clients quickly learned that there was a lot more to handling foreign languages. Foreign-language-search is aspecialty, particularly when you’re talking about one of the more challenging languages like Chinese, Japanese,Korean and perhaps Arabic. Most of the standard e-discovery search products can’t properly search thoselanguages.

For instance, many Asian languages don’t use punctuation or spaces in the way Westerners do. If the indexingengine doesn’t know when words start and stop, it can’t create a proper index for searching. As a result, it endsup indexing the individual characters, which means you lose context. Instead, it would be like searching onindividual letters in the alphabet-- As and Bs and Cs and so on. You’re either going to get way too much or too



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little or probably both in the same result set. Character by character indexing increases false positive by as muchas 50%, increasing review costs significantly.

Our system employs special technology that understands these different languages. Specifically, we can determinewhen the symbol combinations denote a word or a phrase, and index them accordingly. We do the same for yoursearch terms so they properly match what is in the data. We are still one of the few platforms that handle thechallenging Asian languages properly, which is why people have recognized us as the best for global e-discoveryprojects.

Our language specialists work with clients to prepare a glossary of key terms used in a case. By integrating theglossary with our machine translation system, we are able to produce far more accurate translations than otherproviders, reducing the numbers of documents that need to be manually reviewed. With one recent case, our “enhanced machine translation” process saved the client more than $600,000 in review and translations costsalone.

Where do you see trends going in the industry when it comes to this technology and e-discovery?

On the e-discovery side I think a lot of corporations have realized that the least efficient and least cost-effectiveway to manage these increasing volumes of discovery is to leave it to their law firms to choose their preferredvendors. They are now realizing that the only chance of getting a handle on costs and developing best practices isto choose a preferred repository vendor that they can use for all their counsel and data. That’s where I think theindustry’s heading. Corporations are looking to identify vendor partners to standardize, automate and reducecosts.

In that regard, a big issue for our clients is review. We know review makes up 70% of e-discovery costs. We havebeen working on Predictive Coding techniques for the past 4 years and have seen impressive reductions of reviewcosts. Our case studies have shown a cost savings of up to 65% compared to manual review without sacrificingquality. The courts are just laying out the ground rules for this but we believe the trend will continue andaccelerate. Clients are increasingly turning to our Predictive Coding offerings as a way to avoid or reduce the costsof linear review.

Before we conclude is there anything else you want to add?

We’ve learned the hard way that it’s not just technology that is going to meet the needs for these corporateclients. We’ve seen corporate clients or legal departments that suddenly find themselves faced with lots of biglitigations and are not staffed to manage that. So while they need the technology, they also need a team to backthem.

That’s why we developed our enterprise consulting services, which offer teams of technology veterans withexperience in managing e-discovery projects. Many corporate legal departments engage our team to help themcoordinate counsel and manage these processes, because their staff was already busy when cases hit. We workwith partner organizations that provide highly efficient teams that also know our product, our technology and knowus.

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BIOS:

John Tredennick

John Tredennick is the CEO and Founder of Catalyst Repository Systems, a leading hosted, multi-languagee-discovery platform with offices and data centers in the U.S. and Japan. Prior to founding Catalyst in 2000, hewas a trial lawyer and litigation partner at Holland & Hart, the largest law firm in the Rocky Mountain West. John isa former chair of the ABA's Law Practice Management Section and past editor-in-chief of the Law Practicemagazine. He also founded and for years edited the ABA Webzine “Law Practice Today.” Over the past twodecades, he has written or edited five best-selling books and countless articles on litigation and technology issues.He was also named one of the "Top 100 Global Technology Leaders" by London's CityTech magazine and served as



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a member of the Short Course Faculty at the U Va. Law School where he taught a course called "ElectronicDiscovery in a Global Environment."

Scott Robbin

Scott Robbin is a senior content associate at Argyle Executive Forum. In this role, Mr. Robbin manages contentdevelopment, editorial speaker recruitment, and execution for 20+ annual business events. He has over five yearsexperience working on the production and implementation of senior-level events. He holds a Bachelor of Arts fromColumbia University.

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