Entries categorized under “Electronic Discovery”

I was always told that there are two inevitabilities in life: death and taxes. But in business, it's a little different. The two inevitabilities here are regulations and lawsuits. Federal laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Graham Leach Bliley, as well as state and local regulations, are making the need for eDiscovery a near certainty. (read more)

Back in the dark old days of purely paper productions, which is only 8-10 years ago, no one wanted to open the Pandora's box and talk about email and other ESI. Instead, they asked the custodians to simply print out everything relevant and deliver it with the rest of the 'records'. Imagine the inefficiency of a senior vice president staying late to print a year's worth of manually selected email. Then the vendor made three or more copies for internal, external and expert review. The story gets worse from there, but that is supposed to be old news. I remember a client telling me, "We don't ask about email and they don't ask about email. Get it?" (read more)

A conceptual engine essentially lets the ESI talk for itself. Rather than a person creating a search from their preconceptions of what criteria will retrieve all items related to a given request, the systems analyze and present the items back as folders, dot clusters and other visual diagrams to help the user make sense of the complex relationships. All of this sounds like just what the attorney asked for. "Give me everything relating to this deal." (read more)

Storage resource management (SRM) software is probably one of the more "on again, off again" storage technologies that I cover. In the many years I have been intimately involved with and covering storage, no one (standards boards, analyst firm, or vendor) has yet arrived at a definition of SRM that everyone agrees upon. If anything, this lack of an industry standard has done more to hurt the adoption of SRM software by end-users since it can leave users confused as what they are actually going to get from SRM; if and when they actually go to purchase it. (read more)

"CommVault® Systems has transformed from a backup company into an information management company." That statement by Marcus Muller, CommVault's Intellectual Property Counsel, encapsulates how CommVault Systems currently views itself as a company. Muller justifies his position by pointing to CommVault's innovative efforts around its Simpana® Software suite and how these have resulted in patents that helped CommVault transform itself into an information management company while giving it an edge up on its competition going forward. (read more)

If your company strategy toward Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) process amounts to nothing more than a corporate fire drill, you are not alone; but the potential costs and risks associated with this reactive approach are staggering. An eDiscovery process can touch many areas within your company, and meeting the obligations of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) regarding eDiscovery processes can be a daunting task. According to the National Law Journal over 90 percent of business documents today are created and stored electronically. When you factor in the many avenues in which corporate data is created and stored, whether it is e-mail, spreadsheets, or electronic documents, the need for adopting a proactive eDiscovery process becomes apparent. (read more)

Knowing that one can search digitized conversations, the next question is can users effectively search everything within the enterprise system from unified federated search? There is little doubt that the archiving systems are aggressively pursuing acquisitions, partnerships and development to enable ingestion and indexing of every conceivable data stream. All of them started with email back in the late 1990's. For example, Symantec doesn't have audio, but jumped ahead with early products to handle IM, file shares, Sharepoint through merger and acquisition. (read more)

In this age of rising eDiscovery costs, many small players seem to be getting left out in the cold. Implementation of a traditional full featured enterprise archive happens in response to combined IT and Legal pain that finally exceed the threshold and cut lose the capitol budget to reign in bloated Exchange environments and service provider profits. But selecting the right solution for a large public company or governmental agency is an entirely different process from the immediate needs of the SMB market and smaller state or county entities. Recent changes in the dominant archive platforms seem to acknowledge this reality as some of them raise the minimum target sale and focus their channel on large enterprise sales. (read more)

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

As corporate counsel becomes more savvy and comfortable with the 'reasonable' standards of due diligence, they have begun to take control of the spend. The first question that many a General Counsel asks is "Why don't we just do this ourselves?" Your vendors will have a polished set of answers sprinkled with names like Morgan Stanley, Qualcomm and Merrill Lynch, all designed to use the Sanction Scarecrow to keep their golden goose producing. The smoke and mirrors have lost their effectiveness in the face of new guidance from the Sedona Conference, EDRM, conference panels and waves of webinars. (read more)

This is delivered by marrying efficient resources, high-speed review applications and proactive project and process management. We also use higher level strategies, such as our Dynamic Data Analysis™ (a blending of statistical, conceptual and legal analysis), to both identify relevant documents as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and to simultaneously reduce the total amount of data required to be reviewed. (read more)

The evolving nature of today's corporate legal landscape is creating sets of problems that companies never envisioned when they put data protection software in place years ago. Electronic data discoveries, ad hoc searches, legal holds and establishing chains of custody are now all part of today's corporate requirements that are pushing the capabilities of their existing data protection software to the limit. Those companies using CommVault Systems' Simpana® Software Suite are better positioned than most to address these needs. (read more)

The legal (but somewhat impractical) issue is pretty straightforward here---what industry you're in will determine the regulatory and legal requirements for you. Since relatively few industries are subjected to substantial regulatory/legal requirements for preservation, the question of retention of most records is, often, a balance between the benefit of end user access, aka knowledge management, contrasted against the burdens of data retention expense and potential legal production obligations. (read more)

The greatest challenge we experience is the requirement to educate IT and legal teams on the downstream impact of their technology decisions (e.g., an application may be a dream to manage for the IT team but could be very poor for review and production purposes). Our challenge is getting both teams to factor in functionality for all stakeholders and the impact of downstream costs, such as review, legal risk, analysis, etc., to their overall Return On Investment (ROI) calculations. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

For example, a few years ago DiscoverReady had a conversation with a lawyer who needed high-level help understanding the basics of eDiscovery. Three months later, he was listed on his firm's website as the eDiscovery practice leader. DiscoverReady recommends legal counsel be aware of self-proclaimed experts and stay deeply involved in the eDiscovery process. (read more)

Unlike electronic data, physical case evidence exerted boundaries on the legal budget based on one's tolerance for going through the boxes of paper and other paper-based evidence. With today's electronically stored information (ESI), cost provisioning has become unpredictable. It has changed because a single, four-gigabyte thumb drive can have 240,000 document pages on it. Counsel doesn't really know how many of these documents will be relevant until the review cycle, unless there is an early case assessment done. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)

For IT professionals who see no reason to treat evidence any differently than any other data, I practice a simple chain of custody exercise. I have them simply "move" files from on physical disk to another. Many people interpret data movement like they would move a chair; however, when you move Electronically Stored Information (ESI) from one physical device to another, it moves a representation of the original item. Critical things like data ownership, group security, created date and many other pieces of metadata (data about data) are changed when the data is "moved." This minor issue can become a major legal risk when authenticating chain of custody in court. (read more)

When these two groups meet, the language and focus is decidedly different. Fios consultants use skills of communication and collaboration to bridge this gap. This has been the focus of Fios since our inception nearly a decade ago. We pioneered the concept of litigation readiness in 2003, well before the amendments to the Federal Rules were in place, and have built an entire portfolio of discovery planning services to help both IT and legal prepare for discovery challenges. For example, in the data mapping process, we help them focus on eDiscovery as a business process that incorporates: (read more)

As CEO I'm happy to say my sales, engineering and operations teams are executing against our shared vision. AXS-One latest functionality includes a very sought after Case Manager module. It is providing our customers with a true self-service discovery and review capability. If I may indulge a bit on my team's hard work; the Case Manager enables our customers to: * Conduct initial searches themselves * Review and modify the results of the searches * Add dispositions to the searched results * Package the search for additional review by outside counsel/other 3rd party (read more)

According to The Honorable Judge Peter Flynn of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Illinois, Meet-and-confer meeting's are supposed to be about putting your IT cards on the table, what one can and cannot do with respect to data, data types, collections, preservations, data transformations, etc. Judge Flynn responded to a question related to guarded sharing of IT capability during meet-and-confer meetings during last weeks live Panel Discussion on Document Review Acceleration, hosted by Epiq Systems. He responded saying it was "Flat dead wrong, sanctionable." According to Judge Flynn, guarding IT and ECA information during meet-and-confers is probably illegal. His response and the participant question make it clear that 'the guarding of information is a competitive advantage in the world of legal wrangling.' (read more)

Joshua Konkle: One of the most frequently asked questions by CIO's and others worried about the cost of data management is "how long do I have to keep my data, really?" What do you say when you get asked that question? -- Bill Lyons: We can help is the first thing I say. We have been providing record compliance solutions for many years. In all cases, we discuss the need to plan for secure destruction and work with customers on implementing appropriate technology to manage the retention, disposition, preservation and destruction of data. (read more)

Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence says "Unstructured information drives numerous business processes..." The logical option here would be to deploy a business process management suite (BPMS) of tools. Step one is to identify what departments, project groups and individuals are involved in the business processes. Step two; identify the information that results from those individuals, groups and departments. Step three, once the business process is mapped to the information you simply associate it with a retention management product and policies. (read more)

Prior to 2007 the drivers for archiving were two fold 1) operational efficiencies and 2) SEC 17a4. The latter required financial services companies to maintain a record of every email sent and received from the company. These two issues drove the systems to retain and manage data, largely email initial. The early success of products from KVS, Inc, now Symantec, are clear examples of people buying for specific applications. (read more)