Craig Carpenter has seen a few things in the e-discovery industry. Most recently, he was CEO of Fronteo. Before that, he was SVP of sales with Kroll Ontrack. Then it was CMO and COO of AccessData. Plus VP of marketing and general counsel at Recommind. Add in some consulting work for companies like Relativity, and there are few people more equipped to predict the future of e-discovery.

Now, Carpenter is bringing his industry expertise to a new company: X1. Today, the software company announced that Carpenter is becoming its newest CEO, taking over for interim Tom McGovern. In the role, Carpenter will be asked to guide the company in its next phase of growth, as it looks to expand the software's applications beyond e-discovery into corporate compliance, regulatory, and other purposes.

X1's focus is on unstructured data. Originally built as a desktop search tool, the technology now focuses on e-discovery and investigations, looking to find, analyze and act on unstructured data at the end point before it moves downstream to review. Speaking with Legaltech News last week, Carpenter said X1's position aligns well of with his vision of the e-discovery marketplace, where the goal is to “move the strategy formation phase up to the beginning, as opposed to later in the process.”

He added that the standardization within X1's software was also important, saying, “Most corporate clients that I've worked with over the years look at reactive e-discovery as a very different process, totally separate from reactive regulatory compliance or proactive corporate compliance or corporate governance. And frankly, there's no reason that it should be different. You're dealing with the same information, with the same employees. Maybe you have different people doing that work, but you should have completely separate technologies and processes and systems. It just doesn't make sense.”

Carpenter said X1 became a part of his orbit while he was doing consulting work with Relativity, with whom X1 announced a product integration earlier this year. Executive chairman John Patzakis offered him a board seat at the time, but as Carpenter tells it, “I said, 'John, I'm really interested in a board seat, but I think you guys have a really big opportunity here. I'd love a bigger role.'” Little did he know, a stealth CEO search had already been underway at the company.

“The timing here is perfect, as the challenge of finding, analyzing and acting on relevant information within skyrocketing volumes of unstructured data for regulatory, litigation and corporate compliance purposes has become acute for global corporations and their outside counsel,” Patzakis said in a statement announcing the appointment. “We are ecstatic to have such a widely respected leader in charge of X1 and are confident Craig will help accelerate the strong growth X1 is experiencing.”

Now, Carpenter finds himself back in the e-discovery software world, after a few recent stints at service providers. He explained this is where he'd rather be: “Software is a great place to be. Sales cycles are longer, but it's more enjoyable. I think you can solve bigger problems, and you can engage more closely with clients in a strategic fashion, which I love to do.”

And there are plenty of problems to navigate in today's e-discovery world, such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consolidation in the industry, and burgeoning data types. He said that these problems excite him, especially with lots of growth on the software side. “Investors are seeing globally a $700 billion [legal] market that is quite inefficient in most areas, and there's not that many markets of that size,” he explained.

In order to grow, Carpenter said that the first is convincing the market that X1's method of treating e-discovery as a standard business process is the way to go, something he said “should occupy us for the next two to three years, minimum.” But that's not the end goal: He sees a future where X1's unstructured data analysis can be “part of the plumbing of the bigger players in the space, whether that's Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or someone like that.”