January 5, 2009: Open Text is expanding its eDiscovery capabilities with an early case assessment solution powered by Recommind.

It allows organisations to quickly assess the legal merits of a case and defensibly manage legal holds and collection for discovery, regulatory and compliance requests. This can significantly minimise the need for third-party processing and control the high costs of legal reviews by culling irrelevant information before it goes for review by outside counsel.

To offer the solution, Open Text announced a strategic relationship with Recommind, a leading provider of enterprise search and eDiscovery solutions for the enterprise, to combine its Insite Legal Hold application with the Open Text ECM Suite. The combination not only addresses the critical need for eDiscovery in an age of growing regulatory and legal challenges, it also lets customers tightly integrate eDiscovery within their broader ECM initiatives.

The need for practical solutions that reduce the cost and risk of eDiscovery has never been greater. Corporate data stores are exploding in size and complexity - the process of identifying, preserving and collecting data for regulations or litigation is a tremendous pain-point for organizations. Many enterprises, however, still rely on manual processes or one-size-fits-all solutions that create more work for IT departments and dramatically raise the cost, risk and time needed to conduct investigations or respond to litigation.

Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment allows enterprises to explore information where it resides quickly and accurately before it is collected and placed on hold in response to an investigation or lawsuit. This Explore in Place technology is claimed to provide a paradigm shift in legal hold methodology as competitive solutions simply index and aggregate large amounts of data without any ability to determine relevance prior to collection, resulting in the collection, preservation, storage, processing, review and analysis of far more information than required.

"The recent financial crisis has highlighted more than ever the need for effective information management. Poor information management is impeding organizations in their ability to understand the legal risks they and their executives face from lawsuits and investigations. With rapidly rising costs and rapidly shortening timelines for performing risk assessment, collecting data, processing and reviewing information, enterprises must be nimble and prepared," said Robert Tennant, Chief Executive Officer of Recommind.

"Combining our industry leading legal hold and early risk assessment solution with Open Text's deep expertise in enterprise content management fills a massive need in the enterprise space by providing the only practical, automated, powerful and reliable legal hold solution for organisations around the world."

With Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment organisations can:

- Centrally search, explore in place and preserve electronically stored information (ESI) from disparate sources: Directly connect to content in Open Text's ECM Suite and myriad additional data repositories from a single remote location; gain rapid visibility into relevant keywords, concepts, case issues and content in preparation for the meet and confer process; and collect and apply legal holds on only the data necessary for any given proceeding in a highly accurate and defensible manner.

- Reduce the volume of content to be reviewed: Cull document sets by identifying duplicates in user files, emails and attachments; automatically categorize ESI within a hold to reduce the size of the data set.

- Significantly reduce the cost of third-party processing: Export ESI in a hold directly to a review application to reduce or eliminate the need for and costs associated with third-party processing.

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