Historical Essays

According to the eDiscoveryJournal analytics, many of you are corporate IT administrators trying to understand these new eDiscovery requirements that your legal department keeps talking about. You provide technology and infrastructure while balancing business requirements against the total cost of ownership. Legal is bound by a different balancing act, cost against risk. This is a fundamental difference between a business unit asking for a document management system and collecting the ESI from twenty laptops for litigation. Many IT administrators tasked with executing collections from their systems have not been given a basic, plain language explanation of the legal requirements for collecting identified ESI when it may be presented as evidence at a later date.

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.

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:

I spent the better part of this past week at the EDRM kickoff meeting in St. Paul, MN. For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, EDRM stands for electronic discovery reference model. The goal of EDRM is to “develop guidelines and standards for e-discovery consumers and providers…helping e-discovery consumers and providers reduce the cost, time and manual work associated with e-discovery.” A lot of great thought leadership has emerged from EDRM, including the well-accepted reference model that provides insight into all the activities that need to happen during eDiscovery.

Everyone may be familiar with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), but many of you may not know much about the organization that created this iconic representation of the eDiscovery lifecycle. EDRM turned six this year and has grown to over 300 participants that span providers, firm, corporate and independent discovery practitioners. The record attendance this year (104 participants) reflected the uptick in business and company’s willingness to commit budget to eDiscovery initiatives. The initial EDRM diagram project has grown to nine active projects developing non-commerical eDiscovery resources and guides. George Socha and Tom Gelbmann (of the Socha-Gelbmann Survey) coordinate the twice yearly meetings and tirelessly support all of the group conference calls and web resources throughout the year. The May gathering is a chance to report on project progress and set new goals for the next year. Each project has two to three leaders and 10-90 individual and organizational participants. All public materials are freely available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license as long as you properly attribute them to the EDRM project. The projects follow a consensus based approach and participants of all backgrounds and experience levels are welcome.

AIIM's recent report on content analytics and the use cases for it points out good news for the eDiscovery market - more adoption of eDiscovery tools and higher spending in the next 12 months.