Use case: Litigation discovery

1. Implementing a legal hold.
When the specter of litigation looms, counsel has a common law obligation to prevent spoliation. Legal hold implementation has been notoriously taxing on IT department operations and disruptive to custodian workflow. Effective litigation holds are predicated on the ability to identify responsive information and the ability to sequester the information in a defensible manner.

The implications and benefits of this functionality for in-house counsel and IT are:
a. Centralized and consistent collection methodology;

b. Uniformity of collection criteria;

c. Scalability – to collect from 10 or a thousand employees; from 10GB to 100TB;

d. Collection transparency; removal of the onus of collection from organizational custodians;

e. Centralized auditing of the collection steps, criteria and the data collected;

f. The ability to “tag” data based at the point of collection by collector, mater, privilege, responsive term, issue or any other relevant criteria;

g. The ability to de-duplicate data prior to providing access to outside counsel;

h. The ability to use a single interface to search, “logically tag” and sequester email, loose electronic files and database records across multiple geographic locations; and

i. The ability to implement multiple “lights-out litigation holds”’ a process whereby multiple automated rules (policy) engines can scan locations, identify, copy or move responsive information to litigation hold locations.

2. Addressing the disclosure requirements of FRCP 26(a) – Identifying data storage points, quantifying data volumes and types to facilitate initial disclosures.
Simplify the entire litigation data mapping process by automatically creating a “data profile” of:

a. Network file servers;
b. User desktops and laptops;
c. Email (MS-Exchange); and
d. Databases (Oracle).

Products should automatically identify all data storage devices on a network and begin indexing the contents of the devices to which it has access, then automatically extract all metadata and file ownership information from files it scans, including email and PST files. Depending upon the speed of the network, the configuration of the related target data source and the mix of data types, the indexing and classification should proceed at a pace of approximately one terabyte of data per day. Lastly, the solution should have built-in-reporting to provide counsel with summary or detailed reports on the data to help with providing outside counsel with the requisite information for disclosures.

3. Facilitating counsel effectiveness in FRCP rule 26(b)(2)(B) and 26(b)(5)(B) meet and confer-Provide a substantive data landscape that facilitates keyword and form of production negotiations.

Now that counsel has unfettered access to data, s/he can gauge the responsiveness of electronically stored information (ESI) to various terms. This can greatly assist coming up with and finalizing the production criteria as well as help with the form of production.

4. Reducing the likelihood of motions to compel from accessible sources.
The solution functionality and audit trail will substantiate the thoroughness of any discovery initiative to the extent the relevant data sources were accessible.

5. Saving upwards of 40% on litigation support services disbursements.
Today, corporations will pay up to $2,000 per gigabyte to “process” electronic files so they can be reviewed by outside counsel. The bulk of the processing fee is associated with: data de-duplication (getting rid of duplicate files during review), keyword searching and metadata extraction.

Newer products using information access technology perform all of these services in house at a cost of approximately $4 per gigabyte, representing a major evolution. They also generate output that can be used by common litigation support and document review applications like Concordance and Summation.