AccessData Group, a leader in developing e-discovery tools, joins movement toward certification
AccessData Group has been a pioneer in designing software and engineering programs for e-discovery, computer forensics, and other digital investigations of electronically stored information (ESI). Now the company is on the industry’s cutting edge once again, with four of its employees joining the inaugural 2011 class of candidates for the Certified E-Discovery Specialist (CEDS) examination.
Founded in 1987, AccessData Group develops customized solutions to serve the diverse and demanding market of digital forensics needs. That market comprises more than 100,000 clients, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, law firms, oil and pharmaceutical companies, and other service providers.
More than half of AccessData’s employees are software developers and engineers.
"At our core, we are an engineering firm, not a marketing firm. We believe in order to solve our partners’ problems we have to provide software that meets the need in the time frame it is asked for," said Devin Krugly, Director of Corporate Development.
The company’s products cover a variety of needs, according to Krugly. Law enforcement and government clients, for instance, use Forensic Toolkit, a computer forensics product, for criminal ESI investigations. Law firms use the AD eDiscovery and AD Summation products for collecting, processing, culling and analyzing ESI in document reviews.
"If you look at the forensic space, all levels of government have our tools in their toolkit," he said.
The company is based in Lindon, Utah, with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Houston, and San Francisco, and international offices in the United Kingdom and Australia. In June, AccessData Corp. merged with CT Summation, a major e-discovery software provider with a suite of litigation and document review products.
"We are aggressively working to integrate and reinvigorate Summation technology to create a framework for seamless e-discovery capabilities," said Krugly.
The company plans to continue to increase its capabilities throughout the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) spectrum. The EDRM is a widely used diagram that offers a chronological view of the stages of e-discovery.
"We want to take someone from a litigation hold seamlessly through each phase of the EDRM. You don’t want to collect, process, and review data to then have to send it to someone else for the next phase," he said. "Every time you transfer data from one corporation to another, the data is processed again and again."
Krugly is one of AccessData’s candidates for CEDS certification, and will take the exam this year.
"Certification is going to be of great value," he said. "CEDS certification represents an immediate conveyance that we understand your overall business challenge and can forgo the orientation … so we can immediately move to solving specific business problems."
Certification also is an opportunity to continue education in a dynamic discipline and bring some consistency to the field, "which will hopefully lead to an increase in common language, concepts and context," he said.
Before joining AccessData, Krugly was project manager at the corporate headquarters of Exxon Mobil, where he worked for eight years. There, he brought the corporation’s e-discovery work in-house, and oversaw development of Exxon Mobil’s own e-discovery products.
Now in business development, Krugly sees e-discovery as a young field. "It’s an immature market now … many players are banging the drum saying, 'this is the best collection technique,'" he said.
"We want our clients to know we have skin in the game and share in the responsibility for solving e-discovery challenges," he added.
