An Understanding of eDiscovery
Picture this, after a long and tedious custodian interview and collection process you have obtained around 20 or so boxes full of documents in connection to a legal case. You need to find a single document that your team believes is key to the case. You only have a vague understanding of what the document is about. Where do you start? Oh, that’s right, you start with the first box and search through the documents until you find it. At least, that’s what you used to do.
Legal discovery has changed significantly over the last 10-20 years. Gone are the days of collecting from physical files and running filings over to the court house. Technology connects to everything we do these days. Discovery has changed so much we rarely refer to it as discovery anymore without placing the “e” in front of it. The formal definition of eDiscovery is something like, “identifying, preserving, collecting, and delivery of ESI or electronically stored information.” What this means is they gather all relevant data in its original form and ensure that the data is able to be used as evidence in a legal proceeding.
That’s it.
Now we know what eDiscovery is, but how can we leverage it to find relevant documents out of large amount of data?
Technology for eDiscovery
There are a few different applications that allow for electronically stored information (“ESI”) to be processed so data can then be uploaded and searched. Most platforms use digital renderings of documents in a viewer so all documents are viewable in one place. With all of the data in an application, versus the boxes, the time spent searching for the “hot” document(s) decreases significantly. In this industry, time is money. Loading ESI into a review platform is only one small piece of the entire electronic discovery reference model (“EDRM”). Follow along with us for more information on the entire eDiscovery process. This includes information governance, forensics, processing data, document review, and more.
