There are more than 600 companies offering e-discovery software and services, according to the most recent Socha Gelbmann survey of the electronic discovery market. If you spend any time trying to differentiate the hundreds of products and services being offered, you will find a wide variety of marketing claims being made about every product. But one fact about the e-discovery industry that most vendors probably prefer you didn’t know is that many of the software products being offered are not very different once you start poking around inside.

Despite the proliferation of tools for reviewing large collections of electronic evidence, most vendors are simply licensing the same computer source code to build their products. These common components find, index, extract, and search digital documents, the core function of any e-discovery product. “What the industry doesn’t want you to know is that, like the desktop PC industry, the same guts are inside the box,” says Austin, Texas-based e-discovery consultant Craig Ball. “The rest is mostly branding and some bells and whistles. How much faster can one product really be over another when they use the same code?”

This does not necessarily mean that the e-discovery industry is populated with hundreds of identical products differentiated only by advertising. Some observers maintain that despite this common use and reuse of the same computer code, it is still possible to offer unique products. “Everyone needs to have building materials to work with. If I’m building a house, I need wood or bricks. If I’m building software, I need certain basic components,” says George Socha, an attorney and e-discovery consultant in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also helps conduct the Socha Gelbmann survey. “Just because you use the same components doesn’t mean they’re all the same. There are different settings and different ways to implement these tools.”

Licensing off-the-shelf software components is common practice in the software industry; there’s no sense in building from scratch when someone else has already invested the time and money in building a useful tool. There are a number of options software makers can use in acquiring components, either by paying another software company to use their code, or to use open source software. Open source software is created and maintained by a community of software developers, allowing software makers to use and adapt the source code to their products for free or for a minimal cost.

Adopting open source software allows programmers to enhance products to their specifications, but that route offers little in the way of service and support. Licensing proprietary software offers advantages, but vendors are reliant on the software owner to make major changes and updates. There are many free and licensed products e-discovery vendors use including open source tools like database PostgreSQL and indexing tool Lucene, — although in talking to e-discovery vendors and consultants, document review software tends to rely on a handful of licensed technologies. These tools allows vendors to quickly build software platforms that can take a large collection of documents and extract files, index the data and text inside, and search those files.

via Law.com – Stop and Take a Look Under the EDD Hood.