RenewData defuses legal liabilities buried in corporate electronic archives

New technology reduces companies exposure to damaging lawsuits by proactively identifying critical information in e-mail, user files and archives

AUSTIN, Texas, April 7, 2003 -- Renew Data Corp. today entered the billion dollar electronic evidence market, helping corporations assess their legal risk and defend against expensive lawsuits by quickly retrieving electronic information buried in terabytes of archived data.

RenewData offers high-speed electronic evidence retrieval and repository services to companies facing legal action or trying to minimize their liability by assessing the risks buried in e-mail and other electronic records. RenewData's patent-pending technology retrieves crucial pieces of information -- evidence -- buried in hundreds of millions of pages on backup tapes and computer hard drives.

RenewData is already proving itself at companies such as Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. where it helped produce electronic records that would have otherwise taken the company months to do on its own.

"RenewData produced in just a few weeks electronic records that were up to three years old and existed only on backup tapes with a great deal of information on them," said Bruce McMillan, manager, emerging technologies at Solvay Pharmaceuticals. "RenewData allowed us to respond to legal discovery requests in a more expeditious and resource-efficient manner, all while offering us flexible delivery options and ready access to high-level resources within their company."

Electronic evidence can include e-mail messages, attachments, text documents and spreadsheets. It has played a role in some of the recent high-profile corporate scandals, including WorldCom, Qwest, Global Crossing and Tyco. Five Wall Street brokerages were recently fined $8.25 million for failing to preserve electronic documents as mandated by securities regulations.

RenewData's solution can reduce the time it takes to locate specific documents from weeks and months to days and hours by eliminating the costly and time-consuming step of re-creating the information¡¦s original format, or "native environment." Companies facing court or regulatory action can save significant amounts of money, often millions of dollars, in search and legal costs when they quickly retrieve information demanded by a court or a regulatory agency. The market for technology for electronic and imaging archiving used to vault and retrieve electronic evidence is expected to reach $41.5 billion by 2004, according to the Association for Information and Image Management.

The electronic evidence market is driven largely by e-mail's growth as a corporate communications medium, as well as by stiffer government and legal regulations. The Gartner Group estimates that 75 percent of the total knowledge exchange occurring via e-mail contains proprietary intellectual property and must be protected as a valuable corporate asset. Despite the growing dependence on electronic communication, nearly 83 percent of trial lawyers say their clients lack systems for responding to requests for electronic evidence, according to an American Bar Association survey.

"Electronic evidence plays a larger role in litigation at a time when corporations' information databases have quadrupled in size, making retrieval more difficult," said Audrey Rasmussen, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. "The market needs the combination of legal and technical expertise RenewData offers to effectively meet this challenge. RenewData's specialized approach to electronic evidence retrieval ensures that the legal issues are dealt with appropriately. Companies can't afford to treat electronic evidence retrieval as an afterthought -- the stakes are too high."

RenewData combines technical, legal savvy
RenewData grew out of the December 2001 merger of data recovery companies DSTX Ltd. of Austin, Texas, and Progressive Data Recovery of Minneapolis, Minn. Privately held and financed, RenewData is based in Austin, with development operations in Minneapolis. In addition to its electronic evidence retrieval services, it also offers recovery services for salvaging data from erased or physically damaged media.

RenewData personnel have deep backgrounds in both the legal and technical issues of electronic evidence recovery and management. Information technology professionals without forensic and legal training often unintentionally damage or spoil evidence as they try to retrieve it. Litigation support professionals typically know how to preserve evidence's integrity, but lack the technical knowledge to search millions of pages of electronic information.
RenewData combines both disciplines.    

RenewData's executive and management teams have experience from some of the top names in hardware, software, services and electronic security, including Dell Computer Corporation, Vignette Corporation, Accenture, Infraworks Corporation and Ontrack International. Co-founder Jason Velasco is a certified electronic evidence expert who often testifies in court cases. General Counsel Bob Robinson speaks on electronic evidence issues to groups such as law firms, attorney generals' offices and legal conferences. This combination of legal and technical experience gives RenewData the unique ability to find data quickly and preserve it with legally acceptable processes.

"Fast evidence retrieval is both prevention and cure for costly legal action. When companies produce information quickly, they have a better chance of halting a legal action before it picks up momentum," said RenewData President Bob Gomes. "Not being able to retrieve important documents quickly can be terribly damaging to a company trying to ward off a lawsuit or convince a jury of its innocence. Judges can instruct juries to hold it against a company when they can't produce certain pieces of evidence, even if they want to produce it but can¡¦t find it in time. Our technology eliminates that problem."

About RenewData
RenewData is a leader in the electronic evidence market providing services and software to aid corporations in assessing their legal position and liability risk to lawsuits or investigations. RenewData specializes in quick, cost-effective production, consolidation, storage and retrieval of active and archived e-mail, attachments and user files or "enterprise user information" (EUI).

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FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
The statements contained in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements including statements regarding the Company's expectations, beliefs, hopes, intentions or strategies regarding the future. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding RenewData's products, future sales, market growth and competition. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based upon information available to the Company as of the date hereof, and the Company assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statement. Actual results could differ materially from the Company's current expectations. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, Future Losses, Limited Operating History, Fluctuation of Quarterly Revenues and Operating Results, Competition, Dependence on a Small Number of Large Orders, Lengthy Sales Cycle and Product Implementation, Market Awareness of Our Product, Rapid Changes in Technology and New Products, and other factors and risks.
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