SEATTLE, June 12, 2003 – Attenex Corporation, a business-to-business software provider for the legal services industry, and KPMG’s Forensic Technology Services, which provides investigative support and evidence-collections services, today announced an alliance to deliver a robust product for matters requiring the culling, review and production of large volumes of electronic documents for litigation or compliance applications. The alliance brings together KPMG’s Computer Forensics/Digital Evidence Recovery services, Discovery Management, and scalable and secure hosting facilities, with the Attenex™ Patterns™ E-Discovery Platform, a concept-based document processing and visualization tool, to form a broad discovery services offering. The companies’ combined services, software, hosting and production capabilities can eliminate the need for corporate legal departments and their law firms to seek, manage and coordinate multiple service providers to handle an investigation or discovery matter. Corporate and law firm clients can turn to KPMG LLP for broad discovery management or complement their own resources from a menu of KPMG forensics and discovery services, tools and resources.
In response to current corporate data preservation requirements and government regulation, the KPMG-Attenex product also delivers a compliance and business management tool for C-level executives to help manage risk efficiently and proactively.
KPMG's Discovery Management software, Discovery Radar™ and Discovery Radar.net™ offer a full-featured document image and text search and retrieval system specifically designed to facilitate the discovery process. The integration of Attenex Patterns E-Discovery software and Discovery Radar can substantially streamline and speed the electronic document review process for review sets of any size, thus offering an advanced means to help manage the costs and meet the time requirements associated with discovery, while assisting in improving the quality of review and integrity of the tracking process.
“Electronic data is not going away,” said Chris Paskach, national partner-in-charge of Forensic Technology Services for KPMG LLP. “It is multiplying and will be a major concern for our clients’ legal departments for years to come. It is time for a smarter approach.”
Attenex CEO Skip Walter said, “Just 18 months ago, the largest matters our customers were reviewing were in the range of 50 gigabytes. Twelve months ago the largest matters were a couple of hundred gigabytes. Today we are seeing matters of several terabytes or more. This represents a thousand-fold increase in the amount of electronic data being reviewed in a very short period of time.”
Attenex Corporation’s Patterns software transforms the efficiencies surrounding the process of electronic discovery by pairing computer power with lawyers’ brain power to substantially reduce the time spent on clerical and technical tasks associated with discovery. Instead of treating electronic documents solely as bodies of text that can be indexed and keyword searched, Attenex Patterns also approaches them as collections of concepts, and displays them in aggregate as a visual map showing clusters of conceptually related documents. This allows attorneys and legal practitioners to review and make high-quality decisions on a much higher volume of documents per hour, quickly separating the clearly relevant from the clearly irrelevant documents. These efficiencies provide law firms and corporations with a way to proactively manage the time and cost associated with the review of potentially discoverable documents.
For example, the KPMG-Attenex product was applied to a recent review of some 6 million pages of electronic data, under very limited time constraints with a geographically dispersed review team in multiple offices across the United States. The original plan was to fly 30 members of the review team to the client site for a three-month review. However, by using the KPMG-Attenex model, the review team was reduced to 10 people working from their remote offices, thus eliminating unnecessary travel costs, and the review time was reduced by 78 percent. The client ultimately saved approximately $1.25 million in review and travel costs.
About KPMG LLP
KPMG LLP is the accounting and tax firm that has maintained a continuous commitment throughout its history to providing leadership, integrity and quality to the capital markets. The Big Four firm with the strongest growth record over the past decade, KPMG offers clients the scale, global reach, industry insights, and multidisciplinary range of services they demand. KPMG LLP (www.us.kpmg.com) is the U.S. member firm of KPMG International. KPMG International’s member firms have nearly 100,000 professionals, including 6,600 partners, in 150 countries.
About KPMG Forensic Technology Services
KPMG ForensicSM comprises three segments: Dispute Advisory Services, Investigative and Integrity Advisory Services, and Forensic Technology Services. As part of Forensic Technology Services, KPMG’s Cypress Technology Center (CTEC) is housed in a highly secure 40,000 square-foot facility in Orange County, California, staffed by systems and network engineers, database designers, software developers, litigation support personnel and industry-focused professionals. CTEC’s vast technology infrastructure has the capacity to meet the most complex and challenging client needs. Using either Web-based or direct-connection access, legal team members can share documents and work product and collaborate from virtually anywhere on a real-time basis. CTEC services include a centralized repository; secure access via the Internet, fixed-line connection or direct dial; controlled access to client data; backup and disaster recovery; administrative, managerial and technical support; and Help desk support 24/7. For more information about KPMG’s CTEC, contact us at 714-934-5400 or visit our Web site at www.cypresstechnologycenter.com.
About Attenex Corporation
Attenex was formed by Preston Gates & Ellis LLP as a result of the firm’s 10-year technology initiative to discover new ways to manage costs, improve efficiencies, and provide better service to their clients through the use of innovative technologies. Headquartered in Seattle, this business-to-business software company provides tools, and best practices to corporate legal departments and their law firms to improve the efficiency of document intensive processes, such as electronic document discovery in litigation and drafting of complex legal documents. More information about the company and its products can be found at www.attenex.com.