A lot of law firms use Lotus Notes and need an e-discovery and electronic investigation application that works with the messaging software. To serve that market, Nuix on Thursday released the latest version of its program that integrates with IBM Lotus Notes email and applications.

Nuix version 3.2 builds upon the developer's history of Notes integration: The company's first customer was a government security agency with more than 100,000 Lotus Notes users, according to Nuix. In its latest iteration, Nuix' software allows users to extract all the data and metadata stored in Lotus Notes email and non-email applications, Nuix said.

"Many typical Notes organizations have complex architectures that leverages Notes encryption, making the whole e-discovery process expensive, slow, and prone to errors and problems," according to the developer.

The vast majority -- about 80% -- of e-discovery is conducted by the legal departments of large organizations, while the remaining 20% is done by law firms, said Charles Skamser, president and CEO eDiscovery Solutions Group, a provider of e-discovery services to enterprise clients, in a blog post.

Estimates on the size of the e-discovery software market range from $1.2 million to $2.8 billion. What ever the number, most analysts expect it to grow as the cost of litigation to corporate America keeps growing.

"However, under any circumstances, e-discovery is a big market and I believe from personal experience that it should continue to grow," wrote Skamser. "E-discovery solutions enable organizations to identify, collect, analyze, process, and present data stored in various corporate repositories. The data may be collected in response to lawsuits, internal investigations, or regulatory compliance requests. E-discovery solutions today range from custom-built for each individual customer, to pre-packaged solutions that work out-of-the box in less than an hour."

The Nuix software pulls data via Domino Extensible Language (DXL), IBM's preferred method of data-extraction for Lotus Notes, across both email and other Lotus Notes databases, and supports decryption of Notes via user ID and password pairs. The upgrade performs offers a 300% speed improvement over the prior version, Nuix said. When it benchmarked its Lotus Notes process, the software delivered 100 gigabytes of Notes Storage Facility (NSF) data types in 2 hours and 55 minutes on one midsize server, delivering full metadata and text extraction, the developer said.

"During 2010, Nuix came across numerous extensive multi-country Lotus Notes investigations and e-discovery cases. As we progressed through them, we decided to put significant additional resources into overcoming the various challenges that IBM's Lotus Notes platform created for its customers when they have litigation, regulatory, compliance or internal investigations," said Eddie Sheehy, CEO, Nuix.

Other new features include easier, faster, and more robust processing of NSF data types, and double-byte Unicode compliance for encoding. Nuix' software also maintains the rich text format of the original Lotus Notes email during export, according to the developer.