What is e-Discovery? How Can FileCloud Help Fulfill Your e-Discovery Requirements?

July 14, 2020

93%of all documents in the world are created electronically, of which 70% never even go through a hard copy conversion. Organizations need better tools and software to get a better insight into their information. With e-Discovery, you can meet your e-discovery obligations quickly, cost-effectively, and defensibly. In addition to its e-discovery and legal functionality, it […]

93%of all documents in the world are created electronically, of which 70% never even go through a hard copy conversion. Organizations need better tools and software to get a better insight into their information. With e-Discovery, you can meet your e-discovery obligations quickly, cost-effectively, and defensibly. In addition to its e-discovery and legal functionality, it provides you with advanced e-Discovery machine learning and analytics capabilities

What is e-Discovery?

Electronic discovery, also known as e-Discovery, refers to any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. More often than not, companies are simply not prepared to find electronically stored information (ESI), especially email and associated attachments.

How Governments Can Benefit From e-Discovery

For one thing, no one would ever choose a tower of paperwork stuffed over a laptop. The manual scrutiny and resources involved in managing paperwork are simply ludicrous when compared to digital data. Furthermore, digital files can also be recovered and un-deleted once they have made their way into a network and appeared on multiple hard drives. E-discovery tools allow you to parse through all kinds of data for examination in civil or criminal litigation, including:

You may have heard the term ‘cyberforensics’ being thrown around casually on a CSI episode at some point. What most people are unaware of that it is merely a specialized version of e-discovery used to create a digital copy of the suspect’s computer hard drive for extraction of evidence while preserving the original hardware at a secure location.

The EDRM Framework

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) provides a common, flexible, and extensible framework for the development, selection, evaluation, and use of electronic discovery products and services. It guides organizations through all the stages required to meet federal rules that govern the use of ESI in litigation. The model helps companies effectively respond to discovery requests from initial information management to the presentation stage

It is also important for IT to help gather large datasets prior to the handoff, which can save organizations considerable legal expenses down the road.

Information Management

This is more of a goal than a step. As organizations mature, they are putting structured content management and archiving systems in place. This allows them to enforce company-wide retention policies and more easily respond to discovery requests for a minimum cost and with little or no disruption to the business.

Identification

Once a discovery request is initiated the organization has to determine what data is required, where it’s stored, and who the custodians are, etc. Pertinent data may reside in a variety of locations, including personal computers, file servers, and storage systems. Search and index technologies are required for identification, so a good content archive indexes the metadata and content including attachments. The index makes discovery searches more efficient by returning a high percentage of relevant information.

Preservation

Once reviewers identify the information they want, IT has to preserve the data and ensure it is not altered or deleted. Simply opening a document can change critical metadata, such as the access date, which can then affect the validity of the document.

Collection

In the Collection phase, information is compiled in one place for processing. The Collection process should preserve the original metadata associated with the content. The opposing party may request the information gathered during discovery in its native format. IT can save headaches later in the process by collecting information in its native format from the outset, which helps demonstrate its authenticity.

Processing, Review, and Analysis

The Processing phase aims to reduce the initial size of the dataset. A first-round search is likely to produce reams of irrelevant documents and files, including duplicates and content unrelated to the legal discovery request. In the Review phase, legal counsel examines the material that remains after culling to ensure that the resulting dataset is relevant.  The main goal of the Review stage is to extract relevant messages from archives and export them into a legal review tool. Finally, in the Analysis phase, counsel further hones its legal strategy

Production and Presentation

These final phases are typically managed by outside counsel when preparing for trial with the opposing party.

 

How FileCloud Can Help Fulfill Your e-Discovery Needs

FileCloud simplifies record management by setting policies for automatic document life cycle management from creation to archival and final disposition. FileCloud offers many flexible policy types, including retention, archival, legal hold, and admin hold.

As an administrator, you can create Retention policies to automate some of the processing related to protecting files and their folder groupings. This policy-based automation is designed to help secure digital content for compliance, but it can also enhance the management of digital content for other business reasons. Retention policies are created and attached to files and folders. These special policies allow you to define the conditions that enforce a set of restrictions on how each file or folder can be manipulated.

You can create a Retention Policy that disables a user’s ability to delete any of the files and folders named in the policy. The retention policy is a name that can apply to any of these types of policies: Admin Hold, Legal Hold, Archival, Retention, and Trash Retention. Retention policy types allow you to: block specific actions on files and folders and specify what happens when the policy expires

Create Retention Policy

By Team FileCloud