eDiscovery Success Starts at the Beginning

As technology has transformed the litigation process, the legal profession has developed ediscovery standards. Often, ediscovery solutions concern themselves only with the review and production stages of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). Certainly, the majority of ediscovery cost is at the review stage, and often the focus of technologies is on making that process as efficient as possible. However, if you also focus on information governance and collections, then you will save more money than would be possible with the most efficient review technology and processes. When it comes to relevant data, the less you collect, the less you must review and spend.

The traditional processes around ediscovery and archiving can be onerous. Organizations without optimized ediscovery and archiving programs typically make copies of hard drives, label the copies, and put the copies in a room until they are needed. When a nonoptimized organization is sued, legal department employees must physically go to a room where the data is stored and incur the time and expense to load all the hard drives they can find that may have relevant information on them and port that data into a review platform. This approach is inefficient and increases risk because the company may lose important evidence that could release the organization from liability. As a result, this collection process is time consuming and expensive. However, archiving providers are solving this inefficient process by moving into the ediscovery space. Archiving providers can now automatically back up, in real time, data generated and stored by employees that is subject to ediscovery. This real-time repository is also searchable and optimized with analytics. This IDC Technology Spotlight explores the benefits and challenges of this new technology.