I recently had a chance to catch up with Matt Hamilton, Senior Director of Sales Engineering, and some others at Casepoint. Casepoint is an e-discovery cloud based provider that claims to offer data-based intelligence and full-spectrum eDiscovery. It includes cloud collection, data processing, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence tools. The platform enables review and customizable productions.
I have been a fan of Casepoint for a while and have written about it before here and here. I like Casepoint because it was laser focused on its product offerings in the eDiscovery area and its products appear to be intuitive and incredibly easy to use. In my experience, both are critical to success in the legal field. I have preached about the ability of lawyers to use the Casepoint tool, not just for eDiscovery production. But also to enhance their own cases and prepare for depositions and trials.
The Casepoint products handily enable litigators to find documents and materials they need to take meaningful depositions and prepare for trial
The Casepoint products handily enable litigators to find documents and materials they need to take meaningful depositions and prepare for trial. I was so impressed by what it could do, I remarked, after playing around with it, that I got the itch to return to litigation to use the tool to prepare for a document intensive deposition. If I had this tool while practicing full time, I might still be doing so. (Yeah, that was a stretch: it would take a lot more than that to get me back full time).
I noted that the cool thing about the Casepoint products is that they help us lawyers do what we need to do easier and do a better job. As a litigator, I know the value of being able to personally access the materials and documents. As the person in charge of the case and who had formulated the overall plan, I have the best idea what I needed to tell the story I wanted to tell. We often have to rely on others to help sort through materials and give us the ammunition we need to tell our stories because doing it ourselves is too expensive. However, when we can ourselves bend tech to do that task, the results are so much richer. I wrote that the Casepoint products seem to do just that.
I was interested in talking to the Casepoint team recently for a couple of reasons, though. First, my primary contact at Casepoint was David Carns, who was the Chief Strategy Officer of Casepoint for several years. In addition to understanding the Casepoint mission and what litigators really need, he was an interesting guy with good perspectives on the legal tech world. Sadly (for the legal tech community), David recently left Casepoint to become the Chief Innovation Officer at Beveridge & Diamond. I was interested to see if the vibe at Casepoint had changed as a result since he was the face of the company for so long.
The second reason I was interested in talking to the Casepint folks was the recent announcement that Casepoint was offering an enhanced automated legal hold tool and expanding its product offerings. For a company that had been so focused, I wondered if the new product offering would represent a culture change.
I am happy to report that the Casepoint culture is alive and well.
So I caught up with a group of Casepoint folks and the ALM LegalWeek a while back and had the chance to chat via Zoom recently with Matt Hamilton. I am happy to report that the Casepoint culture is alive and well.
I had met Matt a few times along the way when talking with David Carns, but I just didn’t recall it till we talked on Zoom. Matt is every bit as knowledgeable and savvy as David. And like David, he’s a good guy and interesting to talk with. I got the feeling that Matt lives and breathes the Casepoint culture (he has worked there longer than Carns). So with him carrying the torch, little has changed at Casepoint.
And thankfully, Dave’s departure seems to be a cordial one; Matt even remarked that Dave had gone from marketing Casepoint to a client of Casepoint.
And as far as the expansion of Casepoint into legal hold, Matt told me it was in direct response to requests by clients. He candidly told me that the product was not intended to be as robust as that of other providers such as Exterro. Instead, it was designed to do the majority of things with legal holds that most customers need. Matt says the Casepoint tool can do about 70-80% of what the big players in the field offer.
The legal hold tool has an intuitive dashboard that lets administrators manage and automate most legal hold tasks. Matt told me that it is easy to set up and allows the administrators to employ the full range of tools or spread out implementation over time.
The legal hold tool is thus a natural extension of what Casepoint has been providing for several years. The advantage of the legal hold tool is that it layers on top of the eDiscovery management tools that Casepoint provides. This means that Casepoint clients will no longer have to move between product providers to complete standard eDiscovery tasks. Matt rightfully pointed out that anytime you have to move between products made by different providers, there is a risk of problems. Hamilton noted that we see this when an operating system like Apple’s is upgraded, and some apps get wonky. In eDiscovery land, this kind of disruption could be a real problem.
Casepoint’s products also offer the ability for clients to choose whether outside counsel will play a bigger or smaller role directly with them in the eDiscovery process. Matt also agreed that the ease of use and quick retrieval of hold-related information would be valuable in discovery negotiations in the age of proportionality.
Casepoint does seem to recognize that ease of use, intuitiveness, and transparency are hallmarks of a good vendor and valuable litigator products
Of course, I haven’t put the Casepoint products through the paces in an actual matter. But Casepoint does seem to recognize that ease of use, intuitiveness, and transparency—particularly about what its products do and don’t do–are hallmarks of a good vendor and valuable litigator products. According to Matt, the idea is for Casepoint’s products to enable partnership, trust, and transparency in the eDiscovery process.
(According to Casepoint, it offers an upgrade to its legal hold solution to meet the evolving needs of corporations and government agencies. The expanded Legal Hold capabilities substantially streamline and accelerate the legal hold process across roles and departments and include many new customer-driven features that address the increasing requirements of both corporate and government users for litigation, investigations, and compliance).