Catalyst made a major announcement at LegalTech New York this week — the preview release of Catalyst Insight, its new-from-the-ground-up automated discovery platform. Two years in development, Insight is a complete rewriting of Catalyst’s flagship e-discovery product using the newest and most powerful search technology on the market.

“The goal, quite simply, was to create an entirely new e-discovery platform, one that could scale to handle the largest matters in the world without the compromises usually required by traditional industrial-grade, full-text search engines,” John Tredennick, Catalyst’s founder and CEO, said in a press release. “Insight takes a revolutionary approach to search using one of the first XML data engines on the market.”

“This technology is unique,” added Larry Barela, Catalyst’s CTO and application development lead. “The fact that this is a true XML search and database engine solves a number of tough issues that have challenged search efforts since the beginning.”

A problem with many full-text search engines is that their indexes get out of sync with the data, Barela explained. Many systems have to be shut down before they can be updated for user changes. In contrast, the Insight search engine is transactional—when a user changes a record and saves it, that record is immediately indexed and searchable. This means that searches are always up to date, no matter how large the volume of data or how many reviewers are at work.

The XML data engine also solves a number of other major problems that bedevil users torn between using a database or full-text software to manage large document populations. Specifically the Insight XML engine offers these features:

• Unlimited scalability. Insight is grid based with the capability to scale easily to almost any volume of documents.
• Google-like speed. Insight provides split-second search for any volume of documents.
• Flexible, powerful search. Insight provides one of the most powerful search engines ever.
• True XML data structure. Because the system is pure XML, Insight offers unprecedented flexibility, allowing users to add fields on the fly.
• Powerful analytics. Insight provides powerful analytics not available with most e-discovery products. It features field and text “facets” (providing instant value counts), visual analytics such interactive timelines and social networks, entity and term facets extracted from underlying text, and key concept and key document clustering.
• Handles multiple matters. Insight’s XML architecture is the first on the market to offer true multi-matter support for large corporations that have many or large cases.
• Multi-language search and review. The Insight engine provides some of the most versatile multi-language capabilities in the market, supporting search and review of over 300 languages.
• Language localization. With the click of a button, users can change Insight’s interface — all labels, text and menus — to their own language. The preview release supports Japanese, Chinese and Hindu along with English.
• End-to-end automation. Insight is fully automated to allow users to set up cases, load and process raw data, search and analyze documents, organize and assign documents for review, and produce documents.
• Secure, cloud-based. Insight is one of the first comprehensive e-discovery platforms to take full advantage of the economies and scalability of the cloud.
• Stunning user interface. Insight’s UI uses the latest JavaScript and jQuery technology. It supports desktop-like features such as drag and drop, individual views and forms, column sizing and customizable logos and color schemes.
• Supports multiple browsers. Insight can run on Windows, Mac and Linux systems and is compatible with all major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer, and is available on browsers for mobile devices like the iPad and Android.”

With the preview release of Insight, Catalyst will solicit user reactions and feedback as it finalizes development. Insight is slated for final release in the second quarter of 2011.

Read more about Insight’s features and benefits in this week’s news release.