Clearwell Systems

Clearwell Systems, established in 2005, carved a niche in the electronic discovery (e-discovery) market by providing an integrated platform for enterprises, government bodies, and legal firms. The company was founded by Ameet Petkar, Vipin Sama, and Rahul Sharma, who leveraged their technical backgrounds to address the growing complexities of managing electronically stored information (ESI) for legal and regulatory purposes.

The firm's core offering was the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform, an appliance-based solution designed to streamline the entire e-discovery workflow. This single, integrated product managed identification, collection, preservation, processing, analysis, review, and production of data. A key selling point was its rapid deployment, becoming operational in under 25 minutes, which allowed legal and forensics teams to quickly gain visibility into case facts and accelerate early case assessments. The platform incorporated features like advanced filtering, visual analytics, discussion threading, and relevance ranking to intelligently reduce data volumes, thereby lowering review costs and increasing efficiency. Its business model centered on selling this appliance-based platform, offering a fixed-capacity pricing structure as an alternative to the per-unit pricing common among service providers.

Clearwell catered to a high-profile clientele, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, and various government departments. The company's trajectory culminated in a significant milestone on May 19, 2011, when Symantec announced its acquisition of Clearwell for approximately $390 million. The acquisition was completed on June 24, 2011, integrating Clearwell's platform into Symantec's Information Management Group. This move was driven by the goal of combining Clearwell's e-discovery capabilities with Symantec's existing archiving and data protection products like Enterprise Vault and NetBackup to offer a comprehensive information governance solution. Keywords: e-discovery, electronic discovery, litigation support, regulatory inquiries, legal technology, information governance, data culling, early case assessment, EDRM, Symantec acquisition, Ameet Petkar, Vipin Sama, Rahul Sharma, ESI management, Clearwell E-Discovery Platform, legal hold, data processing, document review, compliance, corporate investigations