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February 27, 2009: Australian organisations have traditionally looked to outsource their data processing and data entry needs to offshore countries, but a new venture is looking to move further up the food chain.

Sydney based company Gradatim (Australia) s now offering a full e-Discovery outsourcing operation based in Chennai, India. Gradatim has exclusively engaged with the legal division of the multinational law form Merrill Technologies, also based in Chennai, India.

Gradatim Australia’s Managing Director, Sunil K. Jha, said the venture promised "huge" cost and efficiency savings.

"We are working with the Ringtail Legal litigation document management platform which is widely used as the standard in the Australian legal industry," he said.The venture is looking to compete as a low cost alternative for the labour intensive process of indexing/coding the vast amount of unstructured data that must be reviewed as part of an e-discovery order.

The entire process of e-discovery is based on the following steps:1. Data Acquisition,2. Analysis & Culling,3. Processing & Conversion; and4. Case preparation.

E-discovery is fast becoming an industry standard with courts demanding it from law firms. This entire process can be a fairly expensive exercise for the end clients, specially when cases get settled out of court.

The venture has consciously decided not to offer scanning services in Australia but will work with local imaging bureaus. Sunil insists “This will bring about a sense of local collaboration and partnership”.

Companies that are concerned about their sensitive internal data leaving the country will be reassured by the opportunity to load all their scanned information onto aCitrix server based in Sydney, with Indian operators logging on via thin clients to process the documents. This is a secure platform with all data hosted in Australia to provide the highest levels of security and confidentiality of Information.

"We have lawyers working with our operators in Chennai to identify documents that need to be indexed and reviewed," said Jha.

Once the indexing is completed the documents are loaded into a Microsoft Access database before being input to the Ringtail platform. These documents can also be provided to clients in a searchable Word or PDF document, in case they do not have Ringtail.

“Gradatim also offers data/document hosting facilities on Ringtail at attractive rates,” said Sunil.

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