Relying on AWS Lambda, we were able to build a modern software platform from the ground up. We are creating disruptive, transformational technology for the legal industry using AWS Lambda and the rest of the AWS platform.
Lee Harding CTO

Zapproved, founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2008, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider and creator of the Z-Discovery platform, a suite of cloud-based applications that help customers in the legal industry manage their litigation response processes. An Advanced APN Technology Partner, Zapproved helps customers streamline electronic discovery (e-discovery) while maintaining defensible e-discovery practices. 

  • Zapproved wanted an easier, faster way to process millions of legal documents each hour on its Digital Discovery Pro application, transforming vast amounts of unstructured data into a searchable and understandable form.
  • Although it was growing quickly, the organization struggled to maintain reliability, scalability, and strong application performance. “We were generating 190 gigabytes of data logs per hour, and there was no effective way to manage that with our previous hosting provider,” says Lee Harding, CTO for Zapproved.
  • The organization wanted to help its customers deploy Zapproved eDiscovery applications quicker and meet capacity needs more easily without having to make substantial upfront hardware investments.
  • Zapproved is running its full Z-Discovery suite on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The suite includes Digital Discovery Pro, which provides scalable data processing to quickly reduce legal documents to more manageable sizes, as well as Legal Hold Pro and Data Collect Pro.
  • The company uses AWS Lambda to perform optical character recognition (OCR) image processing in its Digital Discovery Pro application.
  • Using AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Zapproved processes tens of millions of log entries per hour.
  • Zapproved automates its continuous monitoring security solution on AWS, using AWS Lambda to manage firewall rules and AWS CloudTrail for managing other processes.
  • Zapproved manages its APIs with Amazon API Gateway, which it uses in front of its load balancers, redirecting them through AWS Lambda.
  • The company is also using other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) running Linux and Windows, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM).
  • Efficiency: Using AWS Lambda, Zapproved can process millions of documents every hour. For example, the company performs OCR on tens of thousands of page images containing Congressional Record data. Using its previous solution, processing a 454-page PDF used to take hours, but now Zapproved is able to complete that task in 20 seconds.
  • Faster Growth: Zapproved easily supports its rapid growth by running its Z-Discovery platform on the AWS Cloud because AWS Lambda and other services absorb traffic spikes and provide scalability and flexibility.
  • Quicker time to market: The organization’s customers can deploy Zapproved applications in less than one week, instead of several months, because of the speed and flexibility of the AWS Cloud. In addition, customers can meet their capacity needs without having to make large, upfront hardware expenditures.
  • Lower costs: In traditional on-premises environments, it typically costs 10 cents a page to process PDFs, but Zapproved spends a fraction of a penny per page. “Relying on AWS Lambda, we were able to build a modern software platform from the ground up,” says Harding. “We are creating disruptive, transformational technology for the legal industry using AWS Lambda and the rest of the AWS platform.”

To learn more about how AWS Lambda can help you run serverless applications, visit our Serverless Computing details page.