Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

WindTalker CEO Chris Combs has an analogy. Think of a glass of water. The glass itself is simply a container—like a law firm's IT network, or its hard drives. But it's the water—the firm's content—that truly needs to be protected. “If we're protecting the container, protecting the glass, and we take the water and pour it into another glass, the container is no longer around the water and it's no longer protected.”

It's that focus on protecting content itself that has led Combs and his team to develop WindTalker, a cloud-based content security software that looks to allow for more secure, yet collaborative, document redaction and sharing. The tool was initially developed for the U.S. Department of Defense and is now seeing its release into the wider legal market this week.

What It Does: WindTalker encrypts, redacts and labels sensitive content within documents on a micro-level, focusing on individual words, sentences and paragraphs rather than documents as a whole. That encryption moves with the document when it's sent out, and the original creator of the document can control access permissions to sensitive information remotely.

Furthermore, WindTalker allows for differential sharing, where various parties receiving a document can see differently redacted information depending on need. Combs gave Legaltech News the example of an M&A deal: In a single document, WindTalker can display sensitive information differently for various parties like attorneys, finance and the C-suite.

What It Works With: Upon launch, WindTalker can encrypt and redact content from Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe Acrobat Reader. In the next six months, the company expects to include Microsoft Excel and Outlook in its toolkit, as well as build feature sets like active directory integration.

From there, Combs said the company is looking to introduce new features like automated privilege logs in the second half of next year, and is also speaking with document management and e-discovery providers about integration opportunities. The goal, he said, is to have WindTalker be “almost essential” within a few years.

Why It's Different: Encryption technologies are widespread in the current legal marketplace, common in many document management, Word plug-in, and even e-discovery tools. But Combs says that most of these tools are a “smoking hole: It removes the data forevermore.”

With WindTalker, the redacted information is still part of the document, just encrypted, and the original document creator has the key to turn that encryption on or off. WindTalker believes that the plus side is time saved—in e-discovery, for example, if a judge says certain information should be non-privileged, the producing party can simply turn off the encryption for redacted information rather than creating an entirely new document.

Many redaction technologies can also seem like an inhibitor to collaboration, hiding certain information and creating bottlenecks. But WindTalker is also hoping to promote collaboration through this easier sensitive document sharing—admittedly a tough line to straddle.

“The documents are flying all over the place, and you need them to be read and shared, but you also need to make sure that you're controlling your information that's going out there,” Combs said.

Who It's for: WindTalker is starting out focused on the small and midsized law firm community, which Combs said “are really being underserved by the products out there” in terms of security. He did note, though, that the company has proof of concept in larger firms, and has also been in discussions with corporate counsel (WindTalker was at the ACC Annual Meeting last week) and local governments and police departments.

WindTalker does not feature pricing information on its website, but does offer free trial accounts.