Essays

The startup Entegrata applies a new contextual normalization approach to a unified firm data lakehouse. What does that mean and why should you care? Global law and consulting firms utilize a bewildering array of communication, collaboration, billing, project management and document management systems that rarely talk to each other or your financial analysis systems. Managing partners struggle to understand productivity, client engagement and profit without a [...]

Relativity provided one of my few truly private briefing opportunities at the new Legalweek. The trek to their floor at 30 Hudson Yards let us bypass press releases (see below) and instead dig into the executive team’s long-term vision for a broader legal data intelligence platform. Today, 55% of the data coming into RelativityOne comes from non-litigation use cases. That shift defines both the [...]

Exterro’s pre-Legalweek announcements including ISO 27001 certification and their eDiscovery Day survey results underscore a deliberate focus on trust, compliance, and real-world data risk challenges rather than chasing headline-driven innovation. The Exterro team continues to expand their flexible cloud architecture to support new usage cases from a unified platform powered by AI. That aligns with the 60% response rate that AI, automation and data governance will define [...]

I was pleased to see the Level Legal booth in the Legalweek exhibit hall. My first briefing at Legalweek 2023 I bluntly asked, “Why brief me when you are all about quality services instead of technology innovation?” If you have not noticed, I rarely cover pure service players. Daniel Bonner answered with enthusiasm and made an impression worth following up. Then my friend David [...]

Had to resort to biking in NY traffic to make my Legalweek schedule I approached my short 2 days to cover Legalweek 2026 at the new North Javitz Center venue with a healthy dose of skepticism about the move to what a local described as an ‘amenity desert’. The lack of adjacent hotels and offsite meeting/dining options did indeed boost exhibitors [...]

The Microsoft PM teams added roughly 380 new features to their Roadmap since my December update to my tracking table. They updated the release dates on a lot more, hence the large number in the below table of those with potential eDiscovery impact. For Purview users, we are getting Copilot summarization and extraction of keywords from natural language (i.e. discovery request) content. That may [...]

ALM’s moving Legalweek conference to Javits North seems to have increased the number of exhibitors and sponsors. Maybe it is just the AI effect boosting startups and new AI driven offerings. ALM stopped releasing hard attendee metrics after they peaked at 10k in 2016 and then declined after the rebrand and market shifts. It will be interesting to see booth traffic and overall impressions [...]

Jason Lemkin wrote an excellent analysis of the CS Disco’s loss of$2.25 BILLION since their IPO. Harry DeBari’s additional commentary caught my attention and got me thinking about the “eDiscovery IPO curse” that Barry Murphy and I used to joke about. eDJ Group was a boutique analyst group covering a ‘nascent market’ back then. The Guidance Software (Encase) IPO was a big deal [...]

Since at least the late 1990’s (my recollection) our premiere legal technology conference has been hosted at the midtown Hilton New York in February. Legalweek New York 2026 has moved to the North Javits Center. Bob Ambrogi’s 2018 article provides excellent insights into the 1982 origin and evolution of LTNY into Legalweek. I have to wonder if the new venue will be an [...]