How we’re reshaping what legal technology does for you

We’re really excited to be announcing today our new product lineup. We think it’s pretty much the cat’s meow and are pumped to be showing it off, and also really excited for our customers who get a whole bunch of cool new technology that solves a lot of currently intractable problems for them.

Our new products, Nextpoint Preservation Clouds and Nextpoint Discovery Clouds, build upon our industry re-defining Trial Preparation platform, now called Nextpoint Trial Clouds for consistency across our product line — and to hopefully define for lawyers, in a very clear and obvious way, what each product does.

By providing an integrated solution for ESI, from preservation through trial, we’ve answered our customer’s pressing needs to simplify their technology infrastructure. Now an email entered as a trial exhibit can be tracked to the original collected email box, with the entire discovery history of the document preserved – relevance, review, redactions, production history, and so on. A groundbreaking achievement that no other single platform can offer today.

We can offer these products at breakthrough prices because of our commitment over the past five years to research and development in cloud computing. Our products represent the state of the art in the legal industry today — with unprecedented security, uptime and speed — at a price point that will reshape the entire legal technology landscape.

Our mission has always remained the same — to provide a technology service that delivers comprehensive, speedy access to all evidence, allowing lawyers focus on the complexities of their cases instead of electronic data management. We’re excited by the latest advancements furthering that cause and are confident you’ll find them a significant addition to your practice.

Nextpoint’s Litigation Technology is now:

Nextpoint Preservation Cloud
Highly secure, instantly scalable storage and processing resource to preserve and manage large volumes of ESI. Basic file processing allows exectution of keyword extractions, date restrictions, as well as customized billing reports to capture storage costs. Each instance can be individually branded and includes a comprehensive account dashboard for data custodians.

Nextpoint Discovery Cloud
Extended native file processing service paired with a robust, web-based review platform for litigation teams. Run complex searches, define, and refine document reviews quickly and easily. Simple, intuitive interface with bates-stamping, redaction, and privilege log generation tools.

Nextpoint Trial Cloud
This web-based trial application is a powerful, straightforward and elegant solution to managing evidence in civil litigation in a single, integrated environment. All key evidence types — documents, depositions, and transcripts — are instantly available from comprehensive search engine. Patent-pending functionality includes the most advanced tagging, coding, and deposition designation tools available on the market today. Built-in presentation tools allow trial teams to generate and save document callouts quickly and easily, electronic exhibit stamping eliminates an outdated, manual paper process. Seamless integration from Nextpoint Preservation and Discovery Clouds.

The LA City Council Approves Cloud Computing

At times there are little milestones along the way that I think any technologists looks at and says, wow, that really signals a change. 

While our existing customers have bought into our vision of next-generation technology, I will at times unfortunately  find myself in conversations (and I use that term loosely) with legal technology types who are skeptics, doubters, nay sayers of cloud computing and the impact of SaaS on legal technology.

So I found the fact that the City of Los Angeles approved the outsourcing of it’s email system to Google one of these milestone events. Its a story and an analogy I’m sure I will use a lot in the coming weeks.

• It’s a great deal.  $7.25 Million for handling all of the applications, storage and uptime of 30,000 employees.  That’s right, thirty-thousand! There are law firms who have spent a million dollars on getting a dozen custodians’ email in order, much less the email for 30,000 people.
• It was a unanimous vote.  Unanimous.  Besides a resolution congratulating the Lakers for their championship season, what else could the LA City Council possible totally agree on? Apparently, the benefits of cloud computing.
• Law enforcement is going to use it.  So much for security concerns. And no one has said there isn’t work to be done, but the clear take away is this.  There is no security compromise by using cloud computing. None, nada, zippo, zilch. Far from it.  When someone uses security as the reason to not explore cloud computing, I know I’m talking to someone who either doesn’t understand the technology or is concerned about losing their job/budget because of it.
• They got it right. The City of Los Angeles is going to spend less money, get better applications and uptime, and securely manage their email for 30,000 people by outsourcing it, freeing resources to run a city — not run servers.

So what questions does this bring up for law firms?

• Is your law firm playing catch-up technologically with the City of Los Angeles? 
• Are your law firm partners not as technology savvy as the LA City Councilpeople?
• Are your security concerns greater than those of the LA Police Department?
• Why isn’t your firm outsourcing more technology and continuing to invest in legacy technology?
• Will it take the acute pain of an critical failure or the slow erosion of business to the competition to force your firm to change its ways?

If the LA City Council can get it, so can a law firm.

Nextpoint Scores 4.8 out of 5 From TechnoLawyer

TechnoLawyer recently published an in-depth review of Nextpoint’s cloud-based, Trial Preparation platform written by Brett Burney of Burney Consulting.

Download and read the entire review here: Nextpoint Review in TechnoLawyer

In giving the Nextpoint application a near-perfect 4.8 score, Mr. Burney wrote: “Nextpoint fills a conspicuous gap in current offerings — a simple, streamlined, and straightforward system to prepare documents for trial…delivering a software platform that you might actually enjoy using.” Mr. Burney goes on to say, “Nextpoint is one of the slickest and easy-to-use litigation support applications I’ve used.”

Needless to say, we were (and still are) happy to garner a comprehensive review by an independent, and recognized publication in the legal industry. The high-praise from Brett Burney, who we consider to be a true thought-leader and influencer in the legal space, was a decidedly nice bonus.

 

“It’s not water vapor!. All it is, is a computer attached to a network.”

Larry Ellison elegantly unpacks “cloud” as a either being scary or unknown.

Is The Cloud A Collections Problem or Solution?

Craig Ball per usual has an entertaining and enlightening article on doing an e-mail collection out of the cloud. The great thing about Craig is that he’s a technologist – not just a lawyer talking about the implications of technology, so he details here his workaround to harvest emails from Yahoo Email.

Interesting to note that Craig presumes – even with the implications of cloud-based adoption he himself identifies – that there is something one can do about jumping to the cloud.  That e-discovery concerns are in and of themselves enough to prevent people from going to the cloud.

That time has passed.  Collections from Facebook or Twitter are an inevitability.  Enterprise Gmail – which Nextpoint uses – has a robust collections engine built in.  It’s primarily why we went to it, all of our email is searchable and exportable in minutes enterprise wide via Postini.

The Cloud in fact is not a collections problem.  It is the collections solution.  There is no answer to the platform interoperability issues, the scale issues and the cost issues besides having a collections tool that is cloud based.

And long-term this is a gift to GC’s.  Future thinking in-house counsel who align themselves with the CFO’s of their company to push their CTO’s and CIO’s into the cloud for email, document management systems, and customer management systems will see greatly reduced costs for collections, streamlined early case assessment, and develop a powerful new ally in the C-suite.

How Cloud Computing Will Change The Legal Industry

With so much mainstream attention on the business impact of cloud computing such as a Business Week special section on How Cloud Computing Will Change Business – BusinessWeek and the New York Times Magazine article on mega data centers I’m talking a lot more about what we’re doing with the cloud.

And the first issue I generally approach is that we’re using the cloud to manage ESI, not as a potentially discoverable source of ESI!

But inevitably we think the coming developments will impact e-discovery in a significant way because it will be the defining technology model that decides who survives and who is made obsolete.

Technologies that can be deployed in cloud environments – not hypothetically, or on a whiteboard but actually operating in a multi-tenant cloud environment – will survive and winners from there will emerge.

Technologies that don’t operate in the cloud – like legacy document management and litigation databases, hand-tooled and local install-based native file processing work flows, analytics tools that are not scalable, the list goes on and on frankly – will be obsolete.

So the corollary is that the entities that adopt cloud based models – be it service bureaus, technology companies, corporate legal departments or law firms – will also survive, emerge and reshape themselves in a new landscape.

Companies and firms in any part of the ecosystem are faced with a set of choices.

Do we adopt and move toward the cloud? Do we place one foot in each camp? Or do we reinvest in competing with the cloud?

Companies that get it, will be fine, and can get back to work.  Companies that try to do both will do neither well.  And finally, companies and firms that attempt to compete with the clouds from Amazon, Google, Sun, IBM, or Oracle will do what legal entities have generally done over the past twenty years. Which is to throw money at the problem, with no strategic or business plan in place, and no measurable results.

The question for those entities is not if they will be successful.  That much is clear, they will not be.

The question is can they survive being wrong.  Any legal entity – corporation or law firm – that either under-invested or invested poorly in legal technology could survive before.  Technology was not a true differentiator in the legal space.

It is now.  So the ramifications of being wrong are much higher.

You don’t need seat warmers in Texas.

Let the arguments start rolling in.  Sure, you might need seat warmers in Texas for any number of reasons but most likely those aren’t the primary uses of the car.  Keeping bagels warm?  Probably doesn’t justify the extra expense.

Every time I make a big purchase, like a car, I get pulled into more and more options that I never thought I’d need.  It’s the value hunter in me.  I can get $4k in options for $2k.  Nevermind that $2,500 of those options I don’t really want.  But what you forget about is the long term complexity that gets created by that upgrade.  It’s not that I spend extra money for things I didn’t need once.  But that I won’t get that money back on resale, and that those options are expensive to maintain, and in many cases make the vehicle more difficult to operate.  If you need seat warmers, those little buttons are welcome additions.  If you don’t, they are just buttons that accidentally get pressed in the summer heat while you are getting your car washed.  Not fun on the ride home.

E-discovery technology is no different.  Most people make a list (or find one on the internet) of the features that they are expecting to see in the application.  Then they evaluate the options based on cost per feature, not realizing that unneeded features are costing them money up front and throughout their use by adding complexity.  If you only need 5 features, you should buy the product with 5 features… even if it costs the same amount of money.

And here’s the kicker.  In my experience, fewer features means higher quality.  Aren’t those extra features just distracting us from what really matters?  Safety, performance, and economy.  Okay, and maybe style.  Those are the most important factors for buying a car or e-discovery technology.  Save yourself the hassle of buttons you don’t need, accessories that always fail, and a sweltering tail end.

Breakthrough Technology Means Breakthrough Pricing

It’s an exciting day for us today here at Nextpoint.  We’re excited to be announcing our new product lines and the pricing.

But more important than that, we’re excited because we believe these products represent a breakthrough set of technologies, offered at a breakthrough price. The same great technology we’ve been developing for and providing to leading companies and law firms is packaged and priced so anyone can buy it.  And we mean anyone.

What’s the price?

Native file processing as low as $50 to $250 per GB, including a free month of storage. Review, preparation and presentation platforms at $50/GB, and an archival storage cost of $10/GB.

It’s a price at which any size corporation or law firm, from 1 lawyer to 1000 lawyers, can get great, defensible litigation technology to build work flows, procedures, and best practices around.  It’s a price at which lawyers and law firms can stop worrying about what they are going to do with data and get back to being lawyers.

It’s a price at which anyone handy with a computer – lawyers, paralegals, consultants, IT support staff  – can process, review, prepare and present large volumes of electronic data quickly and easily with no upfront investment, with no installation required, and at a great price. It’s a great value.

Why This Price?

It’s simple.  Because we can do it and still be profitable.  And that feels right.  Not a predatory profit, but a fair and right deal.  A deal that makes sense for both us and our customers.  Isn’t that what being in business is about?

Our customers need this pricing. The legal process is demanding this pricing.  The merits of cases are being ignored because of the costs.  It’s crazy. And we can do something about it.

Why this price?  Because it feels right for our customers – both our existing ones and the future ones.

Couldn’t you charge more?

A question many people have asked me who got a sneak peak.  The answer is yes of course.  But we don’t because of innovation. When great innovation does what it does – make heavy lifting not so heavy, make things faster, better, and easier – that drives costs down.  Always has and always will.

So we could charge $1000/GB, but our technology is better than that. It’s way better. The challenge is to get an industry that associates higher price with better quality to learn that technology works differently.  True technology breakthroughs make things less expensive, not more expensive. It has been the major problem with legal technology for the last 20 years – it has had the perverse effect of making the process more expensive and difficult rather than easier and less expensive.

How is it possible reviewing a native word processing document is more expensive than copying,  scanning, ocr’ing and coding a typewritten letter?  It makes no sense. I’ve heard lawyers say it’s cheaper in paper.  How is that possible?

It is time for a change.

What is it?

Nextpoint delivers four applications for each step in the litigation process:

• A processing engine and storage cloud
• A document review platform
• A trial preparation platform
• A set of trial presentation tools

What is guiding the development?

These products have been developed around certain core values — not feature sets.  Here are the values that drove our development.

• Designed to address the every day needs of lawyers in organizing electronic data
• Easy to use and self-service so people can help themselves
• Simple set up without requiring any IT support to get started
• Flexible enough for any phase of litigation, and powerful enough for every phase of litigation
• The data should be integrated in a systematic way

What does it mean for me?

• Great litigation technology that gives you command of your evidence.
• A great value, that’s core to every objective we set out to achieve above
• Powerful functionality that is already meeting the needs of leading companies and law firms are already using us on a daily basis.
• Web-based, meaning no IT support required.  A huge cost savings.  A huge time savings.  A huge hassle savings.
• Easy entry and easy exit – user facing import/export tools mean our customers control their data and where it goes, not us.  It’s their data after all.
• World class customer support – it’s central to everything we do.

So if you’ve been wondering what Nextpoint is all about, we hope you sign up and give us a try.  We think you’ll find what our existing customers already know – we are a great value because we help them get back to doing what they love – practicing law.

Technology Madness Is A Time Suck

I love the articles about lost productivity during the NCAA tournament.  First off, I love the tournament, we turn it on here at the office and don’t think twice about hanging out with our colleagues for few minutes watching it. But every year there is a spate of articles about how productivity gets crushed by the tourney, which of course is bogus.  A good article in Slate deconstructing the clever PR machine that generates this annual hand wringing.(March Madness and bogus stats about worker productivity. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine)

That said, there are lots of real technology problems that are a huge time suck that seemingly go under the radar screen.  If you want to talk about productivity loss, here are some of the real culprits.  Not just because they are time consuming, but because they are time consuming, and then they don’t work!

• Poor technology buying processes.  Or actually, no technology buying process.  “People here just do what they want”
• Multiple databases for the same case.  Just the documents have multiple databases, transcripts are a separate database in a separate application of course.
• Highlighting transcripts.  Dozens of people billing hundreds of hours to color.  And color badly by the way.
• Physically applying stickers to documents.  Can’t we get a montesorri class in here to do it?
• No databse at all, the old “digging through boxes technology” model.  Let your fingers to the walking. Because humans scan and index information better than computers.
• A separate virtualized OS when running local versus tied into the network matrix.  A law firm IT special.  Unspeakable time drain.
• Trial teams too busy to plan their technology.  Like the lumberjack too busy to sharpen the axe.
• An entire courtroom watching a disorganized lawyer fumble through a binder.  A huge cost to our legal system.
• Checklists for software purchases
• Network protocols.  Release and renew your IP address and maybe you can access our system.  Blech.
• Installing an OS, wiping a hard drive, finding drivers.  I’d rather have a stick in the eye.
• Downloading and installing a patches at inopportune times (are you ready to reboot?)
• Comparing specs on anything.  A totally manic inducing time flusher.
• RFP processes when companies are just looking for spec consulting work.  Really, its not nice.
• Technology committees.  Need I say more.
• In-person demo’s, I’ve given dozens of these, and while I love because it gets me out of the office and talking to people, on more than one occassion I’ve wondered if its isn’t an elaborate ploy to allow people to ask dumb questions and not feel bad about it.
• Did I just read a tweet that someone lost their glasses?  Sheesh.

Changes in Law Firm Management

A good first-person point of view from a practitioner that hits on the top level impact of technology and why law firm management should be interested.  A quick disclosure that McDermott is one of our customers but we haven’t worked with the author of this article.

And really this good set of values for evaluating any new technology you are considering.

1. Does it help us get paperless?  Can we stop printing?
2. Is it instantaneous or not? Can everyone see the changes immediately?
3. Can I access it from anywhere via the internet and how easily can I access it?

We base our development decisions with these criteria first in mind.  If a feature or product compromises any of these values, we’ll opt against it because soon enough, it will be an anachronism.  This is where we’re headed.