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e-Discovery leaders, experts and innovators

Today – who we are

SFL Data is the first e-discovery service provider to deliver a fixed-price managed service that enables Fortune 500 corporate legal departments and law firms to gain a world-class e-discovery function without building it. The outcome – dramatically reduced litigation costs (over 50%), better control and visibility, and defensible results. SFL Data’s clients include Oracle, multiple other leading corporations, and more than 100 AmLaw 250 law firms.

Proprietary processes, domain experts who’ve led IT and discovery at 7 law firms, testifying collections experts, best-in-class software, attorney-driven project management and an infrastructure for Fortune 50 corporations lead to clients sleeping at night and returning to us repeatedly.  Our company has been growing over 35% year over year since 2008.  We are a privately held company based in San Francisco, and our investors include business leaders such as the former CEO of McKesson, the former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway’s re-insurance business, and the former CFO of Siebel Systems.

How it all began

Christian and Ciaran, SFL Data’s CEO and President, met in 2000.  From the UK and Ireland respectively, we came to Stanford Business School to immerse in entrepreneurism and build something great.  Among many trends that we uncovered was that the growth and proliferation of data, combined with increasingly powerful legal rulings, would create significant cost and risk challenges for U.S. corporations.  We built a company to address these challenges.

Our vision – the fixed-fee, managed service

There is now a $1 billion (and growing) software market focused on addressing the e-discovery challenge.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that neither corporations nor law firms have the time, the resources, or the core competency to effectively leverage this software.  Nor are they excited about paying unit rates on a case by case basis for processes they do not understand or control.  So we created the industry’s first fixed-fee, managed e-discovery service – delivering a repeatable, custom, documented and transparent playbook of e-discovery services.  Our clients get all the benefits without having to invest in headcount, training, process development, infrastructure and R&D.  This model is our vision – and we believe that it will be the wave of the future in our industry, just as it was when, for example, Accenture, EDS, Perot Systems and others built managed services around ERP systems.

How are we different?

Beyond our unique model and vision, there are 7 primary ways in which we stand out from our competition.

  1. Cost Containment. We are better than competitors at controlling and predicting cost, driven by our 5 “bridge step” approach.
  2. Process Definition. We are rare in our industry. We document every step of every process that we carry out.
  3. Risk Mitigation. Core to our risk mitigation strategy is to have our own, heavy hitting collections team that goes on site to collect data at clients. The reality is that in our space, most companies outsource this role.
  4. Team. We have a uniquely experienced and talented team that blends legal and technical expertise. Beyond MIS professionals, computer scientists, business consultants and former military personnel we have assembled a team that includes over 20 attorneys and 7 former heads of litigation technology departments – some at a U.S. national level.
  5. Leading technology, sourced and tested. We work with best of breed, not proprietary technologies. On average, we assess a new technology a week using our unique software evaluation process.
  6. Expertise in software. We have built deep expertise and process around these core technologies. For example, we have more trained Clearwell experts than any other company in North America.
  7. Infrastructure. Unlike many of our competitors, our infrastructure is built out for Fortune 50 corporate clients. We have SaaS 72 certified data centers, real-time data center to data center backup, a penetration-tested network and we are U.S. Safe Harbor certified.