Entries categorized under “Early Case Assessment”

Many businesses are allocating a portion of their IT budgets to Big Data analytics projects. At the same time, a certain amount of technology spending is necessarily tied to risk management and compliance because a failure to meet minimum eDiscovery and legal hold requirements can have disastrous consequences. While these twin priorities often compete for funding, it is now possible for an enterprise to adopt a single core technology to address both their data analytics and compliance requirements and double their bang for the buck in the process. (read more)

Faced with the accelerating increase in the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and the emergence of the concept of Big Data, enterprises worldwide need next generation IT systems to fulfill their corporate compliance, information governance and eDiscovery requirements to process and analyze all of this data. It is in response to this demand and the result of recent legal precendents that Technology Assisted Review (TAR), also known as Predictive Coding or Computer Assisted eDiscovery, is emerging as a legally viable and court-recognized option. (read more)

I spend the last 3 days walking the exhibit hall and meeting with technology vendors at the 2012 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Conference held August 26-30, 2012 at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Washington, D.C. ILTA is the premier peer networking organization, providing information to members to maximize the value of technology in support of the legal profession. As such, ITLA's annual conference is a great place to talk to most of the technology vendors targeting the legal market, see demos of their technology offerings, listen to presentations from industry experts and judge the current status of the evolution of technology adoption within the legal community. (read more)

Today DCIG and eDiscovery Solutions Group are pleased to jointly announce the availability of a new DCIG Buyer's Guide, the DCIG 2012 Early Case Assessment Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks 25 software tools that help law firms, litigators and organizations reduce their overall cost of eDiscovery. This Buyer's Guide gives these entities the resources they need to assist them to quickly complete what is typically a very arduous and time-consuming process: selecting the right ECA software that matches their specific requirements. (read more)

DCIG expects to unveil its DCIG 2012 Early Case Assessment (ECA) Buyer's Guide in Q2CY12. As prior Buyer's Guides have done, it puts at the fingertips of organizations a Buyer's Guide that provides them with a comprehensive list of ECA software that can assist them in this all-important buying decision while removing much of the mystery around how ECA are configured and which ones are suitable for which purposes. (read more)

Later this month DCIG will be unveiling a new product designed to aid end users, value added resellers and sales teams within our coverage community. The product is based on a successful line of analysis that DCIG has been producing since 2010 - the DCIG Buyer's Guides. (read more)

Companies who execute Information Governance plans are looking for eDiscovery products supporting Early Case Assessment (ECA). ECA is a combination of search, workflow management, information processing, and multilingual user interfaces. ECA requires a cohesive set of technology, business and data science stakeholders to select products. ECA is powerful business process, but identifying ECA products is a beleaguering task. ECA mashes together eDiscovery and technology requirements. The "mashing of requirements" creates a broad matrix of products and functionality. Without question, eDiscovery has significantly evolved within the last few years. (read more)

Regardless of how one approaches an eDiscovery project, having processes and tools in place to help guide you through the EDRM (electronic discovery reference model) are critical elements that influence how effective an eDiscovery project will be. Data retention policies, access to outside resources, and technology are all critical components to have in place in order to successfully complete an eDiscovery. Yet an equally important question that organizations need to answer is how reliable is the information they discovered in their eDiscovery? Or, better put, how do they move from a faith-based approach of eDiscovery where they assume they have all of the information that they need to a fact-based approach where they have confidence that all of is the information found during the eDiscovery is accurate and defensible in court? (read more)

There are many factors that guide a company's approach to eDiscovery. But knowing which ones matter - and which ones don't - continue to be a source of frustration as companies grapple with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and how best to respond to an eDiscovery request. Two areas of immediate importance that plague companies are how best to take responsibility for the results of an eDiscovery request and then control the costs associated with the eDiscovery. And without any easy answers and growing costs for outsourced eDiscovery, more companies are examining at the merits and cost-savings of an in-place eDiscovery (read more)

A just released March 2009 Nielsen Company report, Global Faces and Networked Places, makes some startling observations about the rapid adoption of social networking such as blogs, social media sites (Facebook), Twitter and wikis among Internet users. While many may intuitively suspect that the adoption rate of these forms of social networking is accelerating, this report removes all doubt. It highlights that two-thirds of the world's Internet population now utilize social media sites, traffic to these sites is growing at 3x the rate of other Internet traffic and people now spend 10% of all Internet time on social networking sites. (read more)

The recent announcement that CA acquired Orchestria to extend its identity and access management portfolio to include data loss prevention raises some key questions about exactly what problems CA hopes to solve. While DCIG sees the value in companies acquiring and merging with other companies to solve specific strategic problems, this one left us scratching our heads a bit. After all, wasn't it Bear Stearns who back in 2005 selected Orchestria to oversee its electronic communications? But now, in the light of day, really how much benefit did its implementation of Orchestria provide Bear Stearns in light of its recent public failure? (read more)

Responding to an eDiscovery request is definitely not a task that most enterprise organizations eagerly anticipate. But the pain of an eDiscovery is often a result of poorly written or non-existent internal policies and procedures. An organization that takes the time to put internal policies and procedures in place may not only avoid this scenario but also lower its overall cost of doing an eDiscovery. (read more)

eDiscovery is a focus in numerous DCIG blog entries. DCIG analysts have previously examined what laws are prompting the need for companies to perform eDiscoveries, keys to selecting the right eDiscovery solution and why recent Wall Street scandals foretell the need for companies to prepare for expanded eDiscovery requirements going forward as more government regulations seem almost certain to emerge. But an eDiscovery request is not a task that a company necessarily needs to dread. Rather, by establishing and putting in place best practices and procedures now, an organization can take much of the uncertainty out of an eDiscovery request and even use the looming threat of eDiscovery requests as motivation to lower an organization's cost of performing eDiscoveries. (read more)

Recently I had an opportunity to attend an interesting presentation by John Mallery of BKD, LLP that was given to a group of IT industry professionals regarding how to protect trade secrets and the use of forensics to identify wrongdoing. A large part of his speech focused on eDiscovery and FRCP and how companies must understand the importance of having an eDiscovery strategy. But, the part that really struck home with me was when the presenter asked the crowd of around 60 or so participants who knew what eDiscovery and FRCP was. Stunningly, only three people, including myself, raised their hands. Now this is by no means a scientific measurement of companies and their knowledge of eDiscovery, but it was surprising to me none the less and, unfortunately, it is probably closer to reality than most of us would like to admit. (read more)

It is sometimes argued that media such as optical and tape are better options for archiving data when compared to disk because they have a longer shelf life, up to 100 years in the case of some optical media. Further, optical and tape vendors also argue that they are "greener" than disk because they do not have the same heating, cooling and power requirements that disk may have when used for archive. (read more)

A SearchStorageChannel.com article that appeared in early 2008 estimated the cost of outsourced eDiscovery at about $1500 per gigabyte. While those costs may sound high, they are justifiable when a company factors in the need for qualified personnel to search, access and retrieve data securely and authoritatively as part a legal eDiscovery. However these same costs can quickly become untenable for enterprise companies that need to access and search terabytes if not petabytes of information. Therefore it is not surprising that more enterprise companies are exploring the option of performing eDiscoveries in-house to minimize these litigation costs. (read more)

If compliance and eDiscovery were not already on the radar screen of every business prior to this current financial crisis, they better show up there pretty quickly. History tells us that anytime there is a financial crisis, more government regulations emerge that call for more visibility into corporate data stores and shorter time frames in which to produce requested information. But as Congress starts to have hearings and draft new legislation in response to this crisis, a question that companies need to answer now is who will pay for the technologies that they need to comply and which line item on whose budget should pay for it? (read more)

It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy's solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI. (read more)

This blog entry is the first in a series of interviews with Autonomy's new Director of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin. Jack is well known in the eDiscovery world having held a lead role on the EDRM Metrics Project and for his work at Guidance Software. In this first interview, Jack gets to talk about what drew him to Autonomy and his first impressions coming on-board. Autonomy's breadth and diversity of offerings can be intimidating from a consumer's viewpoint, so we get an expert's inside view of what makes them different. (read more)

Overall, SMB's have a potential shortcut to 'Litigation Readiness' through SaaS outsourcing of the primary messaging and file storage systems. Legal definitely needs to be involved in the provider selection and RFP process, but IT should welcome another sponsor to the project. Legal should request documentation on system capabilities (search/culling for Rule 26 disclosures and Meet & Confer), Chain of Custody, exception reporting, deposition fees for authenticating evidence (Rule 30(b)(6)), SLA's for retrieval rates, physical/electronic security and the actual storage format of the ESI. The last is particularly important in case the requesting party makes arguments for using alternative search engines on the ESI. Governmental agencies are required to store records in an open format like MSG files for email, so any SaaS provider who has public sector clients should utilize an open format storage system. With a little research and diligence, SMB's can leverage SaaS to achieve litigation readiness in a cost effective manner. (read more)

Email and other electronic communications are defacto business records and public agencies must take steps to preserve and give access to government records or face the consequences. (read more)

The recent Quon v. Arch Wireless decision has raised many questions about a company's ability and right to monitor employee communications. Fortunately, a deeper read shows that the real issues centered around the employee's reasonable expectation of privacy, which a well documented and communicated policy solves handily. So an employee might ask, "I know that the company owns my email, but do they really read it?" (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

One of the hardest things in a HR investigation is to disprove false accusations of sexual harassment, inappropriate content, fixed bids and many other scenarios. It is very easy to fake printed out email and IM conversations that would not stand up to close scrutiny if still in electronic form. The only way to prove that someone did not send a message is to have all the messages within that time frame and the ability to retrieve them. Think about how hard it is to set the context for an off-color email without having the complete historical conversations between a supervisor and a former employee. (read more)

Enterprise and holistic investigation, as concepts and strategies, generate many questions, concerns and risks. Our investigator, legal and security community is made up of 50+ professionals. Our community helps develop working Investigation Playbooks to intersect pressing investigative issues. For example, our community collaborates with us to develop Investigation Playbooks to manage retention policy, business continuity and information security issues. Some of our community members includes KPMG, ARC Group NY and individuals, such as Steve Harper of Crucial Security and Randy Barr Chief Security Officer at WebEx. (read more)