Global ediscovery giant FTI Consulting is to launch a new hosting centre in Australia for Ringtail Legal, the popular document review and case management platform used by many law firms and government agencies for document review.

David Bowie, managing director of FTI Technology in Australia, said the co-located site in Australia would scale to handle matters concerning multi-Terabytes of material with many hundreds of users accessing it concurrently.

"FTI has invested a significant sum and this reflects a confident attitude towards the Australian market," he said.

Deloitte also host Ringtail Legal in Australia under the AFTnet brand and is preparing for the launch of its $A10M data centre in Sydney .

Ringtail Legal hosting was previously offered exclusively in in Australia by Ringtail Asia Pacific, acquired late last year from CCH Workflow Solutions by e-law Australia. e.law has commenced proceedings against FTI in the NSW Supreme Court in relation to reselling Ringtail.

Bowie would not comment on the dispute with e.law in regard to Ringtail Asia Pacific.

"Deloitte is a channel partner of FTI and we expect them to offer a complementary service, although we operate in the same market," he said.

“The data centre breaks new ground in the Asia Pacific region for its support for large-scale litigation and investigations,” said Bowie.

“With global capacity and full-service Ringtail offerings, FTI continues to set the standard for easing the complexity and lowering the overall cost of e-discovery for our Asia Pacific and global clients.”

Independent industry expert, David McGrath, commented that the investment was the latest in a long line of significant investments in Australia and confirmed a number of industry trends.

"In Australia, there is an increase in demand for ASP services as SME law firms and corporates take up the e-discovery challenge. There is also a greater focus of the enormous value offered by a rapidly growing Asian marketplace."

"Globally, we are also seeing the emergence of a number of providers positioning themselves to provide multinational organisations and large, cross border litigations." he added.

Hosted Ringtail

FTI sponsored a recent IDC white paper that found e-discovery is growing increasingly complex and expensive. Legal matters involve greater volumes of data, take longer to resolve and are increasingly global in nature. These trends underscore the need for corporations to utilize cost-effective e-discovery tools that can scale to large, multi-national matters.

Developed in Australia, the Ringtail platform offers integrated review, analysis, redaction and production capabilities within Ringtail can streamline the e-discovery process while in compliance with local data privacy requirements and other jurisdictional rulings.

For example, Ringtail’s production features help legal practitioners comply with native file discovery obligations under the Federal Court of Australia’s Practice Note 17 for Advanced Document Management Protocols.

The Asia Pacific data centre complements FTI’s existing data centres in Europe and North America. All of the FTI data centres offer state-of-the-art networks, power architecture and top-level physical security of the data, including access control lists, security officers and biometrics.

In addition to opportunities in the SME market, Bowie said the new data centre would offer capacity for existing Ringtail clients inside medium to large law firms, government and corporate.

"The scale of litigation in the Asia-Pacific is starting to increase and what we now offer is a way to reduce the cost of large scale matters."