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Controlling eDiscovery Spend, Security, and Cloud are Top Priorities for Enterprise Legal Departments

4th Annual Survey of Legal Operations Professionals released at Legaltech 2020.

Waterloo, ON – 2020-2-4 – OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX), (TSX: OTEX) today announced findings from a new report launched at Legaltech 2020 in conjunction with Ari Kaplan Advisors. The report highlights the need to take control of eDiscovery costs, with AI, cloud and security all listed as top priorities for enterprise legal departments.

“To gain advantage in litigations, successfully conclude investigations, and competently deal with regulatory matters, decision-makers must be able to cull germane information in real time,” said Serge Savchenko, Vice President, Legal Technology at OpenText. “The demand for speed – amid escalating risks and ever-growing amounts of data – is pushing legal departments and law firms to automate routine tasks and inject machine learning and AI into daily operations.”

Key findings from the OpenText 4th Annual Survey of Legal Operations Professionals include:

  • Controlling eDiscovery costs is the ultimate goal: Legal operations teams are focused on controlling eDiscovery costs by gaining transparency from law firms on discovery budgets and review efficiency, centralizing eDiscovery management, benchmarking success and partnering with managed review providers. Corporate legal teams are standardizing their internal process for eDiscovery, and even providing mandates to external counsel. 77 percent contract directly with eDiscovery vendors, 74 percent control which eDiscovery vendors their outside counsel uses, and 71 percent have adopted a centralized approach to managing eDiscovery data. A full 42 percent have adopted a single vendor model.
  • Increasing use and spend on AI tools: The drive to improve eDiscovery efficiency, spend and outcomes is fueling AI spending and usage. 83 percent of respondents plan to increase spend in this area and 49 percent reported using predictive coding (also known as technology-assisted review) in the past year (+18 YoY).
  • Moving to the cloud is a key initiative to optimize operations: 69 percent of legal operations professionals saying their law departments are standardizing in the cloud.
  • Data security is top-of-mind: 94 percent (+3% YoY) of respondents reported they have data security concerns around distributing electronically stored information to multiple discovery vendors and law firms.
For the full survey of legal operations professionals, click here.

The OpenText team will also present highlights from the latest OpenText™ Release 16 Enterprise Pack 7 (EP7) during the conference. EP7 introduces powerful new features and enhancements to OpenText products in the Legal Tech portfolio, including automation, machine learning, and AI that make it easier than ever for lawyers and legal professionals to find, review, and assess information.

The OpenText Services Team will be on-site to discuss OpenText High-Efficiency Managed Review. OpenText Managed Review provides upfront budget certainty for eDiscovery and investigations document review with fixed fee pricing, reduces costs up to 80 percent and mitigates risk with measurably higher accuracy than alternatives. Specific innovations showcased this week will include:

  • The integration of OpenText™ Magellan™ text analytics into OpenText™ Axcelerate™ for eDiscovery, investigations, and regulatory response.
  • A new platform integration between OpenText™ Axcelerate™ and Veritone to automate machine translation on-the-fly, helping to reduce costs associated with manual translation and expedite the review of multi-language documents.
  • New enhanced templates for OpenText™ EnCase™ eDiscovery to help legal teams standardize methodology and reduce the time to create a new project by 75 percent or more.
  • The integration of OpenText™ eDOCS with OpenText™ MindServer™, an AI-powered search engine add-on, to provide quick and automatic search models.
  • A completely new UI for OpenText™ Decisiv™ reinvents the user experience and provides a mobile-responsive layout with an intuitive single search bar and robust smart filters.
For more information on the latest OpenText releases for legal technology, visit the OpenText blog.

Research methodology
Between July 9, 2019 and August 15, 2019, Ari Kaplan Advisors interviewed 35 legal operations leaders from a variety of corporations. Sixty-three percent of these corporations have annual revenues exceeding $10 billion and 83 percent have more than 10,000 employees. The discussions focused on law department innovation, the growing influence of legal operations, cloud adoption, auditing the technological competency of outside counsel, the use of artificial intelligence (AI), how legal teams are balancing outside counsel and providers of alternative legal services, how to measure success in eDiscovery, legal operations metrics, perspectives on data management and approaches to document review, including the use of predictive coding.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company™, enables organizations to gain insight through market leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit opentext.com.

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Certain statements in this press release may contain words considered forward-looking statements or information under applicable securities laws. These statements are based on OpenText's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the operating environment, economies and markets in which the company operates. These statements are subject to important assumptions, risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict, and the actual outcome may be materially different. OpenText's assumptions, although considered reasonable by the company at the date of this press release, may prove to be inaccurate and consequently its actual results could differ materially from the expectations set out herein. For additional information with respect to risks and other factors which could occur, see OpenText's Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other securities filings with the SEC and other securities regulators. Unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, OpenText disclaims any intention or obligations to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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Further Information:
Austin DeArman
OpenText
202-341-9181
publicrelations@opentext.com