You'll recall that, many months ago, Logikcull ended eDiscovery.
Even so, there is still confusion over whether and why it needed to die, what has replaced it, and what it all means.
That's because the legal tech industry is at an inflection point. Practitioners are faced with two basic alternatives. Behind one door are legacy solutions that tout "robustness." These are, in general, high-calorie tools that are highly customizable, training intensive, supported through heavy human and technological infrastructures and updated infrequently. But, if used properly and for a price, they can be deployed to powerful effect. As it stands today, they are necessary in the fraction of matters that are extremely complex and data intensive.
But behind the other door is a fast-rising breed of solutions that, while for the moment lacking the sheer horsepower to go toe-to-toe in a drag race with the most high-end legacy tools, are lightweight, intuitive, user-friendly, instantly deployable, updated continuously, require little training, and, to boot, increasingly powerful.
Such forks in the road are the norm for maturing technologies. Consider the camera, where dry plates gave way to film, which was supplanted by point-and-click digital. Today there's a high-powered camera in each of the 2 billion smartphones on the planet. And while you might not use a Galaxy S to shoot, say, the Rhine for a gallery, it's a convenient and sufficiently powerful application for 95% of all the pictures you'll ever need to take.
Below is a conversation between Above the Law writer Zach Abromowitz and Logikcull CEO Andy Wilson that gets to the heart of that debate. In the context of this industry upheaval, they discuss the disruptive force of cloud computing, the power struggle between corporate clients and their legal service providers, and, toward the end, some truly groan-worthy Game of Thrones puns.
