It is surprising to see vendors in the search and eDiscovery space struggle with their own litigations! Guidance, in particular, has been having a rather unfortunate recent past, the latest blow coming from a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by an ex-employee. Guidance lost the case as a result of being unable to produce the required data for the lawsuit – relevant emails.

Without going into the details of the case, let’s objectively discuss what went wrong – it really boils down to one thing: the inability of Guidance to discover and produce ALL relevant data pertaining to the case. The takeaway for corporations and law firms must be the fact that simple searches and lack of enterprise-wide reach into all data can be disastrous to defensibility. End-to-End eDiscovery capabilities are needed for all corporations to achieve defensible, accurate and transparent eDiscovery.

Guidance is a collection tool if one wants to collect an image of a laptop. Period. It is NOT an eDiscovery product nor a Legal Hold product. A corporation that wants an in-house solution for their eDiscovery challenges should be looking at an End-to-End eDiscovery solution with the ability to perform all aspects of eDiscovery such as identification, collection, processing, preservation, analysis, review and legal hold. Buying point products that solve one or two aspects of eDiscovery will lead a corporation down an expensive and unsatisfactory path to solving their litigation support needs.