ZDiscovery

ZDiscovery (by Zapproved, recently acquired by Exterro) is uniquely and relentlessly focused entirely on the needs of in-house corporate legal departments, rather than law firms. While massive platforms like Relativity focus heavily on the complex, multi-million document review phase, ZDiscovery focuses intensely on the critical, highly administrative phases that happen before the data ever goes to outside counsel: Legal Hold management and Early Case Assessment (ECA). The absolute core of ZDiscovery is its Legal Hold Pro module. When a corporation anticipates litigation, they are legally required to instruct employees to preserve relevant data. Historically, this was done via messy spreadsheets and easily ignored emails. ZDiscovery automates this entire process. It sends automated, trackable legal hold notifications to custodians (employees), manages escalations, automatically integrates with HR systems (to ensure holds are tracked if an employee leaves the company), and provides a highly defensible audit trail proving to a judge that the corporation took their preservation duties seriously. In addition to legal holds, the platform provides highly intuitive data processing and early case assessment tools. In-house counsel can easily process a hard drive, cull out irrelevant data (like spam emails or generic newsletters) using date ranges and keywords, and significantly reduce the sheer volume of data before sending it to outside counsel. Because outside counsel often charges per gigabyte for data hosting and review, ZDiscovery helps corporate legal departments save hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees by drastically reducing the data pipeline.