Monthly Archives: January 2024

My first article on corporate data collections focused on preserving the content, container and context of native files as found on network shares and desktop folders. Discovery requests are increasingly targeting email archives, content management systems and other semi-structured data sources. Most of these sources include search and retrieval features, so one could assume that this makes them a safer candidate for in-house collections. This is not automatically true and is definitely worth talking through some of the common problems that can lead to incomplete or altered retrievals. The first thing to realize is that these systems were not designed to comply with legal discovery requests as found in the United States. The search and retrieval functionality was added to support a business user seeking to find a few specific email or an IT administrator restoring a larger set of items that were either lost or need to be transferred to a new user. Both of these scenarios stress quick, simple search without needing to verify the accuracy or integrity of the search or restoration.

Enough has happened – FRCP Amendments, precedents, scandals – for organizations to understand that it’s time to act vis-a-vis eDiscovery. Tools are evolving to provide real, actual value (despite the fact they still have developmental challenges). And, with an economic recovery, there will be money to spend on addressing the challenges.

On the heels of my writing about the perfect storm brewing in eDiscovery comes good news for all in the market. Recent survey results from the Cowen Group indicate a rise in jobs, plans to purchase software, and plans to purchase outsourced services. The good news is that the data points to wins all around in the market. Organizations benefit by taking proactive steps to reduce the cost of eDiscovery. Software and service providers benefit from increased revenue. And eDiscovery professionals benefit from increased work options and better employment.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-04-21 05:00:17Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Here we sit at the eDiscovery Pavilion inside of the AIIM Expo.  Slowly, but surely, attendees are poking their heads into this area.  It sort of mirrors the real world – information management and IT professionals realize the need to take control of information and the risk it [...]

As AIIM Expo comes to an end, I’m left feeling like the eDiscovery market is on the precipice of becoming a critical part of the information management market, but is not quite there just yet. There is an excitement and buzz about eDiscovery at the conference, but it is not quite yet a crescendo. Yes, there was an eDiscovery pavilion and we got to meet some cool vendors exhibiting there – Catalyst Repository Systems, El Fresko Technologies, iConect Development, Kroll Ontrack, and Planet Data Solutions. But, many of the mainstream eDiscovery vendors were not at the show at all, either as exhibitors or attendees. And, of the large software vendors present – EMC, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, eDiscovery was not an overtly featured capability at their booths. There was even a partner pavilion for Microsoft and the only partners talking about eDiscovery were archiving partners. As we’ve pointed out in other entries, there is a big opportunity for creating eDiscovery solutions for SharePoint; it’s a shame no one is getting out ahead of the curve on that.

Hybrid is a popular term right about now, and not just because those kinds of cars are considered environmentally friendly. Rather, we are seeing an increase in the number of solutions that are a hybrid combination of on-premise software and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

The four key parts that both on-premise and cloud-based models share: consumption (how end-users interact with the appliation); creation (how developers build the application); orchestration (how parts of the application are pulled from the app server); and infrastructure (where key elements of the app like servers and storage live).

There is a definite sense of excitement in the eDiscovery market. Corporations are beginning to deploy tools for in-house collection and preservation and early case assessment. Vendors are seeing revenue increases and strong growth numbers. M & A activity is on the rise, witnessed by Iron Mountain’s acquisition of Mimosa and Doar’s acquisition of Inference Data. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and think we’re on the cusp of solving the eDiscovery problem. But, now is also a good time to make sure that due diligence is served when implementing processes and tools to address eDiscovery.

There were a number of cases in the last decade that most of us thought would be the impetus organizations needed to take eDiscovery and information governance seriously. Two of the high-profile cases were the Zubulake case and the Morgan Stanley case. In the Zubulake case, $20.2 million in punitive damages were awarded to employee of UBS Warburg partly because the jury was instructed to believe that non-preserved evidence likely contained incriminating information. In the Morgan Stanley case, $1.45 billion was awarded to Ronald Perelman after a judge issued a default judgment against Morgan Stanley due to eDiscovery failures. Again, the assumption was that non-preserved evidence was assumed to be incriminating. Since then, there have been many other cases involving sanctions, but with many of the cases, the actual sanctions don’t grab the attention of large organizations.

Conducting defensible eDiscovery collections can be challenging, but will pay off in both the near- and long-terms. What any organization does depends upon their specific maturity level and requirements. In general, though, organizations that want to take control of eDiscovery collection should: