Anyone wandering through the exhibit hall at LegalTech New York last week could easily have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of e-discovery products and services on display there — and they represented only a fraction of the overall industry. With so many vendors offering so many seemingly similar or overlapping services, how do you choose the one that is the right fit for your case?

A new website, still in its beta version, aims to become the premier system for helping litigation professionals choose e-discovery providers and products. Called Apersee, it is being developed by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, two names well known in the e-discovery field for their annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey and for their roles in developing the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. With the launch of this site, Socha-Gelbmann will discontinue their survey.

The core feature of Apersee is a search tool it calls its Selection Engine. Using this tool, you select the criteria that are important to you in an e-discovery vendor and then rank each selection on a scale of 1-to-5, from “appreciated but unimportant” to “critical and required.” Once you set your priorities and weights, the Selection Engine searches every product in the Apersee database and assigns it a score. A product that meets all of your requirements would receive a score of 100.

The Apersee 'Selection Engine' lets you select criteria.

The criteria used in Apersee are derived from those used in the Socha-Gelbmann survey and from the EDRM framework. Thus, if you are looking for a product to handle review, analysis and processing, you would select those three criteria and then rank each of them for importance. Some criteria allow you to drill down deeper into subcategories. If you select “review” as a criteria, for example, you can then select within subcategories for “review services” and “review software.”

Other categories of criteria let you search by such factors as:

• Geographic coverage anywhere in the world.
• Language capabilities, including character sets, multi-language functionality, translation capabilities and more.
• ESI type.
• Search type.
• Numbers and types of matters handled.

With the site in beta, categories are still being refined and new categories will be added, George Socha told me during a telephone conversation about Apersee. Currently, the site incorporates roughly 2,000 criteria and it will eventually have as many as 4,000.

That is nowhere near as overwhelming as it might sound, because the site is set up so that a user need only select from top-level criteria. If the user wishes to be more specific, then he or she can drill down into more specific criteria.

Other features remain in the planning stages and are targeted for launch later this year. One would be a form of provider accreditation, by which George and Tom would vet information supplied by providers in order to provide consumers with a higher level of confidence in their claims. Another planned feature is to allow consumers to post comments and ratings about vendors.

Search is Free to Consumers

Use of Apersee is free to consumers searching for a provider. The site plans to draw revenue by offering providers something similar to the Google advertising model.

Every provider will have a company page and pages for each of its products and services. Providers will be able to enhance these pages by adding elements such as PDF brochures, white papers, videos and photographs.

To maintain these enhanced listings, providers will purchase blocks of “views” — anywhere from 100 in a block to several thousand. Each time a consumer views one of the provider’s pages, the provider is charged one view. When the block runs out, the provider will have to purchase an additional block of views.

Notably, providers will be included in search results regardless of whether they purchase views. Even those who opt not to pay a penny will be listed. The difference is that those who do not pay will have only a basic listing, not an enhanced page.

In any event, the site will charge nothing to providers for the first two months after it comes out of beta, George told me. It should come out of beta, he said, within one or two months.

Initial Impressions

It is important to keep in mind that the site is in beta and that further refinements are planned. I suspect that Apersee’s developers will hear some complaints about the criteria. Some will say there are too many, others will say there are not enough, and still others will complain that some of the criteria are not right. But those issues are likely to be ironed out fairly quickly.

No one can argue that the concept is commendable. As I said at the outset, consumers are confused by the sheer volume of e-discovery companies out there. Even worse, it is sometimes difficult to tell from their websites exactly what products or services they directly provide. A tool that lets consumers hone in on key criteria will no doubt prove valuable.

Apersee is not the first such tool. At least one other is the eDJ Tech Matrix from eDiscoveryJournal.com, a tool that lets users compare features in e-discovery applications. Apersee is broader in its scope, covering both applications and services, and incorporates a larger number of criteria.

The key distinguishing point for Apersee may end up being the experience of its developers, George and Tom. They know this industry well and years of compiling their survey has undoubtedly given them a deep understanding of the criteria that are important to consumers.

I hope any of you reading this will check out Apersee and share your thoughts with us in the comments below.