Minneapolis, MN, May 18, 2010 – NightOwl Document Management Services, a leading provider of technology-driven litigation support services, is pleased to announce that it now offers the recently released version 5.5 of the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform.

Version 5.5 features best practice workflows gathered from hundreds of enterprises, government agencies and law firms who have successfully streamlined their eDiscovery processes using Clearwell. Features include:

Unmatched Performance and Scalability: Enables processing of data at the speed of 1 terabyte per day and supports up to 100 million documents per case on a single appliance.

Expanded Email Support: Supports diverse email file formats such as MBOX, OST, and EMLX – eliminating the need to convert data with external tools.

PKI Encrypted Email Support: Users can process, analyze, search and review digitally encrypted emails after simply uploading PKI digital certificates.

OCR Support: Integrated optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities extract text from image files including PDF, in multiple languages, during processing.

Review Enhancements: Delivers several offerings, such as hidden content notification and auto-prompting for required tags, to increase reviewer productivity.

Mixed-Mode Productions: Provides flexibility in the handling of complex document types. Users can choose to produce some file types as images while leaving others in their native formats.

“We are very excited to offer our customers the latest features of Clearwell 5.5,” said Tom Palladino, President of NightOwl. “These new capabilities not only maintain Clearwell’s lead as the industry’s premier hosted eDiscovery platform – they increase it.”

About NightOwl
NightOwl is a leading provider of technology-driven litigation support services that enable clients to capture, analyze, manage and produce electronic documents. The company’s services help clients increase efficiencies, reduce costs and improve the likelihood of success in litigation.

Contact Information
Scott Sterkel
Director of Marketing
NightOwl Document Management Services
(612) 337-0448

Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
March 27, 2009
By Jennifer Niemela
Staff Writer

The Internet plus the recession equals big gusiness for one Minneapolis legal-document review firm.

NightOwl Inc., which handles paper and electronic discovery for law firms and companies engaged in litigation, has seen its electronic-storage business increase 600 percent over the past two years.

The growth comes from an explosion in the volume of electronic data that needs to be reviewed for litigation, combined with cost-cutting measures by law firms and companies that might decide to outsource time-consuming tasks like document review.

“Our clients are faced with a very difficult situation,” as review costs have risen sharply, said NightOwl’s CEO Andrea Wallack. Costs of $10 million to $20 million for corporate-litigation cases are not uncommon, she said. “It becomes cost-prohibitive to try your case, with typical matters running millions of dollars just on document review.”

Legal-document review, especially on the e-discovery side, is a market area that’s been growing for some years and doesn’t show any signs of slowing, said Michele Lange, director of legal technologies for Kroll Ontrack Inc., based in Eden Prairie.

“There’s a need that, as litigation budgets contract, all of us are trying to do more with less,” Lange said. “Document review is on of the most time- and resource-intensive parts of litigation, and there’s certainly opportunity for efficiencies and cost-savings.”

NightOwl, and the scores of other legal document and e-discovery service firms that have cropped up in the past few years, hire attorneys on a contract basis to review document at a fraction of what it would cost a law firm to have an associated do it. At NightOwl, the reviewers work on-site in two shifts, a day and an evening shift. The attorneys are typically either fresh out of law school or between jobs.

“Minnesota happens to have a preponderance of unemployed attorneys because we have a number of law schools, and there’s a limit to the number of positions available to them,” Wallack said.

The document-review industry is a good place for attorneys to find temporary work while they search for permanent positions, said Cindy Eidnes, director for Beacon Hill Staffing Group’s legal division in Minneapolis. Although the pay isn’t great, at $25 to $30 per hour, it’s about the same as some entry-level lawyer positions in the public sector, and it keeps people in the industry.

“It gives they legal experience, as opposed to other jobs to just fill the gap,” Eldnes said.

NightOwl is planning to keep growing, especially in e-discovery.

“The focus is to continue to expand the business and increase the size of the review facilities to handle more and more volume,” Wallack said.

NightOwl Offers Technologically Advanced E‐Discovery Platform ‐ Clearwell

NightOwl Document Technologies, the Minneapolis‐based leading provider of technology‐driven litigation support services is a provider of e‐discovery solution Clearwell.

A Top 5 E‐Discovery Solution in the 2008 Socha‐Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey, the Clearwell EDiscovery Platform offers NightOwl clients the quickest and most cost‐effective system available to meet their e‐discovery needs.

Fully operational in 25 minutes in comparison to the hours it takes other competitive operating systems, Clearwell accelerates document processing allowing the client immediate access to case facts. Traditionally, e‐discovery systems use keyword filtering often resulting in large volumes of inaccurate data.

Clearwell uses a sophisticated review process that utilizes discussion threads and linguistic analysis to group documents by relevancy, eliminating up to 80% of false positives.

Founded in 1991, NightOwl’s services have evolved over the years uniting constantly changing technology and the practice of law. NightOwl is a leading provider of technology‐driven litigation support services enabling clients to capture, analyze manage and produce both paper and electronic documents. The company’s services helps clients increase efficiencies, reduce costs and improve the likelihood of success in court.

For more information, please visit http://nightowldms.com

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