eDiscovery Daily Blog

• May 31, 2019

Despite what the title might suggest, this is an eDiscovery related post, not a psychological one.  Certifications have become increasingly important in eDiscovery today and a couple of recent events illustrate how “committed” CloudNine is to eDiscovery professionals who are “certifiable”.

I can’t believe it has taken me this long to mention it, but I was recently interviewed by Jared Coseglia, founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners for Legaltech^® News regarding our training and certification program for our CloudNine LAW product (The LAW PreDiscovery Certification is Back).  In that interview, Jared and I discussed the direction of LAW and how much CloudNine has invested in the product since we acquired it (along with Concordance and Early Data Analyzer, now rebranded as CloudNine Explore) in terms of doubling our development and customer success staff for the products.  As a result (shameless plug warning!), we have rolled out a number of new features and capabilities, including our new 64-bit ingestion “Turbo Import” module that has increased ingestion speed as much as 1200 percent in our tests.

But, another big part of LAW being back has been re-instituting the training and certification program for LAW.  While all these changes in functionality mean updates to the training and certification program, we have been working hard to make those updates to support a training and certification program that reflects those updates.  The end result is a certification program that reflects the most recent updates to the product and CloudNine will be looking to implement a two-year renewal to make sure that certified LAW professionals have certified training on the latest features.

If you’re an organization that uses LAW (or develops the product, like we do), that up-to-date certification will become more and more important in hiring eDiscovery professionals with experience in LAW.  Let’s face it, given the choice between two otherwise equivalent professionals – one who has an up-to-date certification in LAW and one who doesn’t – who wouldn’t pick the one who has the up-to-date certification every time?

Which leads me to the other event: yesterday’s announcement that CloudNine has renewed its partnership affiliation with the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists (ACEDS).  How far has ACEDS come in the past three plus years?  ACEDS today has 20 chapters across the globe, and over 10,000 professionals tuned into their weekly newsletter, which is great and it’s due to the leadership of ACEDS executive director Mary Mack and VP of Client Engagement Kaylee Walstad (and the team that support them).

Like CloudNine and our eDiscovery Daily Blog, ACEDS has been committed to education of eDiscovery professionals in a variety of ways, through webinars (some of which we have partnered with them on) and other educational programs, and especially through certifications.  It wasn’t that long ago that an industry survey showed that eDiscovery professionals were only slightly more than 50-50 on eDiscovery certifications, but the ACEDS certification today has clout like never before.  The ACEDS certification could make the difference between getting that important eDiscovery job and not getting it.  So, if you’re certifiable – and you’re committed – that could actually be a good thing (at least from an eDiscovery standpoint, if not a psychological one).

So, what do you think?  Do you have an ACEDS certification or some other eDiscovery related certification?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.