DENVER – LAWFUEL – US Law – Catalyst Repository Systems, a leading provider of secure, web-based repositories to the legal, business and financial markets, today announced a road map for enhancements to its CR review platform and the continuation of its “Litigation 2.0” initiatives in 2007. These enhancements include improved review and production modules, support for 70 foreign languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai) and enhanced analytics and visualization capabilities.
“Litigation 2.0 is a necessary outgrowth of the Internet Age and the resulting explosion of electronic content,” explained Catalyst’s CEO John Tredennick. “In an era where the world is exchanging as many as 60 billion emails a day, the litigation process badly needs an overhaul to keep up. Our clients are demanding new tools and methods to handle their burgeoning discovery and compliance activities.”
“Catalyst CR was designed from the ground up to meet these needs,” Tredennick continued. “CR is a web-based review and litigation support platform that enables distributed teams to efficiently search and review large quantities of electronic documents and work together across organizations on complex litigation matters.”
Litigating in the Internet Age
Litigation 2.0 is a term being applied to using technology to confront the two significant challenges associated with litigating in the internet age. First, cases are no longer limited to a single geographic area: witnesses, experts, lawyers, defense groups, plaintiff groups, consultants and others involved in the case often reside in multiple locations. Each of these people have unique roles to play in the litigation process and connecting them effectively with each other, and with the relevant case files and documents, is essential to managing litigation effectively.
Second, the world continues to generate electronic data at explosive rates. A recent IDC survey reported that the world created 161 exabytes (161 trillion megabytes) of information in 2006. By way of analogy, if you could print 161 exabytes, you would end up with 12 stacks of paper extending from the earth to the sun. Or, you would have enough paper to wrap the Earth four times over.
All of this information is potentially discoverable. As a result, attorney review time now constitutes the biggest line item on many corporate legal budgets, with review costs estimated at $10 to $15 Billion annually. Catalyst’s mission is to help cut those costs by providing a central repository with integrated search and review workflow.
Catalyst’s 2007 Road Map
Catalyst announces the following initiatives for 2007
1. Enhanced review capabilities to help manage global teams of reviewers. The new review module includes new review assignment capabilities, special review pages with hot keys, required fields, conditional fields and the use of AJAX technology to speed review pages.
2. An enhanced production module to automate the production process and allow remote users to create and monitor productions, conversions and delivery of documents to requesting parties.
3. Extended review auditing with field-level reporting, document audit tracking and review productivity measurements.
4. Complete foreign language capabilities for 70 languages including CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai). Catalyst CR is completely Unicode compliant.
5. New analytics features for concept search, concept clustering, email grouping and near de-duplication, and results side visualization.
“Many of these features are rolling out now with the rest coming online in the next few months,” noted Larry Barela, Catalyst’s CTO. “They add to existing capabilities including bulk tagging, web-based redaction, printing, review folders and analytical filters,” he continued. “They will help our clients manage documents more efficiently, cut review costs substantially and meet the growing demands of regulators and the courts.”
About Catalyst Repository Systems, Inc.
Catalyst provides secure repository systems to help corporations and their counsel deal with the explosion of digital content and work together on complex legal, business and financial matters. Its On Demand, hosted systems provide an alternative to traditional capital-intensive, in-house technology.
Catalyst’s products include:
Catalyst CR, the first grid-enabled document repository for review, compliance, litigation support and due diligence; Catalyst XE, a powerful collaboration tool to connect professional teams and their files worldwide for cases, claims, deals and other complex legal matters, and Catalyst Review, customized document review workflow for corporate, insurance and other regulated environments.
Catalyst’s products have been used since 1998 by many of the largest organizations in the world (e.g., five of the world’s ten largest companies and over half of the nation’s 100 largest law firms). For further information about Catalyst, please visit www.catalystsecure.com.
