Disney+ hit its five-year subscriber target in a few months of 2020. Netflix dominated the Golden Globes and puts out more movies than most of the Hollywood studios combined. A new Discovery+ streaming service is selling itself on the siren song of new episodes of Good Eats and random murder porn on what was once the Travel Channel. When lockdowns took hold across the country (or, more accurately, the parts of the country that realized there was no other plan), streaming became the best bet in entertainment.
The other solid bet was on SaaS. How could businesses keep running in a topsy-turvy environment? With constantly updating software backed by computing power that on premises systems could never reasonably afford, the software as a service business model — like streaming — may have found itself on the upswing before the pandemic but solidified its hold on the future as the country adapted.
During the recent “Legalweek(year)TechNY(carry the 2)” show or whatever they’re calling it these days, I chatted with Casepoint about how the company weathered the storm. As I’d expected, their business model thrived as companies found themselves more reliant upon solutions that could function remotely, securely, and maybe more importantly, flexibly. Casepoint ended up hiring across every single department through 2020 to keep up with the fast-paced shift toward relying exclusively on SaaS.
From a law firm-heavy client base, Casepoint has made tremendous in-roads into corporate clientele and court systems. It’s not exactly surprising — when the SEC announced a specially designed Casepoint product for its eDiscovery needs, it seemed only a matter of time before non-firm clients realized that there was a lot more to Casepoint than traditional firm eDiscovery.
Because at the end of the day, the process involved in discovery is easily adaptable. Responding to FOIA requests, conducting internal investigations, addressing corporate data breaches, and the data subjects access request process brought on by GDPR and the CCPA all involve the similar work that entities realized Casepoint could address with their underlying technology. A technology that secured three patents in the latter half of 2020.
But maybe the most surprising growth sector for Casepoint was the emergence of ALSPs. At one point, ALSPs would’ve considered themselves competitors with Casepoint, but with the realization that the software and the labor are better served under separate roofs, companies are moving toward adopting SaaS solutions to maximize efficiency. When I chatted with Chief Revenue Officer David Carns, he said that the ALSP market had “been growing this slowly but surely over the last few years, but the new release was redesigned to make it easy for them to adopt.” Frankly, with Casepoint being “cloud agnostic” it’s an easy sell to organizations that have their own preferred cloud provider, which describes a lot of ALSPs.
Whatever the business, the key to solutions like Casepoint is the ability to bring hundreds upon hundreds of servers to bear at all times. It’s making predictive analysis in the background all the time. “Our machines are running constant predictions — no on prem system can mimic what the cloud does. On premise is almost untenable these days,” Carns notes. And with legal issues crossing departments so often — starting in risk management, going to litigation, elevated to the GC, then sent to outside counsel — everything can stay in one basket with no duplication.
There might have been someone out there who still wants to buy a box of software to live on a server in the basement, but after what we’ve been through, I don’t know as though anyone hasn’t been convinced to make the leap.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.