Essays

During a recent software testing engagement, I ran into an interesting issue with date based searches that could impact your discovery search results. The root of the issue is based in the different ways of representing communication attachments or other multipart items such as Sharepoint/wiki page attachments. In the dark ages of eDiscovery, our software was designed to simulate the myriad physical attachment levels of scanned paper documents. I am not ashamed to recall coding levels of staple, clip and binder groupings back in IPRO ver. 1.5. The system enabled an attorney to determine the exact hierarchical relationship of that individual document to all the others scanned from that box retrieved from Iron Mountain. Newcomers to our field cannot imagine the labor required to manually code in Author, Recipients, Subject and other fields that are now extracted from ESI during processing.

Old school eDiscovery professionals are used to hitting the big three conferences; Legal Tech, ARMA and ILTA. So I came to the AIIM Info 360 Expo without preconceptions to this conference focusing on ECM technologies, providers and adjacent services. The last several years have reinforced the message to the market that the money and investment is ‘going left’ on the EDRM lifecycle. Review costs still dominate the actual litigation spend, but we all know that discovery starts where the ESI lives, which makes information management initiatives and technologies the best long term bet. The conference is attended by IT admins, records managers and the providers offering anything needed to get records into a system. Every other booth seemed to offer some kind of Sharepoint based workflow application. Microsoft dropped a full training center into the middle of the conference floor and surrounded it with partners. It definitely took the ‘app d’jour’ prize.

Although the AIIM Expo Discovery Pavilion had a modest start with six booths, that did give me plenty of time to visit with my neighbors and dig into their new features and offerings. The sheer size and diversity of Legal Tech tends to make it difficult to get real information at the booth. Everyone is trying to schedule you for an offsite demo and jump to the next person in line. I got to talk shop with the good folks at Catalyst and Planet Data in a way that would not have happened at one of the major eDiscovery shows. The Catalyst team has been busy integrating new conceptual and organizational technology into the user workflow of their CatalystCR platform.

The management and review of native files (ESI) generally requires the extraction of internal/external metadata and the readable text to be indexed for search. Most types of container or multipart files such as ZIP or PST containers must be broken out into individual files for this step and subsequent productions. This is the foundation of what our industry calls Processing. Most counsel, corporate IT and judiciary seem to operate under a presumption of magical perfection in these software and services of specialized eDiscovery providers. Most of these ‘built for purpose’ applications manage to avoid the basic MS Windows issues that drop or alter date fields, but the infinite variables associated with ESI formats and contents make it nearly impossible for any system to automatically get everything right, even if we could agree on what ‘right’ is. Although I had heard about Planet Data’s acquisition of the Cerulean Engine™, the time at the AIIM 360 Expo gave me an opportunity to understand the deep processing experience that accompanied the software.

The eDiscoveryJournal (eDJ) search and syndication engine kick started to life just three months ago at Legal Tech New York 2010. Your feedback and the increasing traffic tell us that the eDiscovery market is indeed hungry for relevant news and perspective. The eDJ engine collects 100-200 new items per weekday that we manually review and categorize. In just three months, eDJ has accumulated over 3,300 web posts covering news stories, blogs, press releases and new sites. We have published over 60 original Journal articles, keeping to our goal of a new Journal piece every day of the working week. All of this is a lot of content and so we have just added some new tools to your user profile that will enable you to what you want to hear about and how you want to receive it. Everything we create or find on the web is manually coded with 43 eDiscovery concepts.

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.

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 [...]