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Google has its Share of eDiscovery Woes.
Many corporations have been having public challenges with their litigation support and eDiscovery capabilities. Recently, it came to be known that Google had its own share of issues by being unable to produce all relevant material for an investigation.
Google makes a great search product, amongst the many things they make, for the Internet. However, the point to be made here is the fact that eDiscovery is much more than search. This extends to other applications too that may have built-in search mechanisms that masquerade as eDiscovery products but that’s a recipe for disaster for corporations if they were to rely on these simplistic search capabilities for their eDiscovery needs.
eDiscovery involves advanced analytics and review of enterprise-wide repositories which means discovering, analyzing, collecting and preserving a relevant set of data from TBs of data from multiple sources. Further, the capability to put content under Legal Hold in an integrated fashion is important. eDiscovery requires a powerful, scalable platform with integrated End-to-End functionality, and cannot be a simple application.
Posted By: EMC in eDiscovery on March 4th, 2009.
Tags: eDiscovery, electronic discovery, end-to-end ediscovery, legal ediscovery, litigation search
Comments
Comment from Muddu
Time April 21, 2009 at 11:35
Google has a fine search product. But eDiscovery is not just search. It starts with careful identification of all Electronically Stored Information (ESI), across the enterprise no matter what the source. Then, the data has to be analyzed and reviewed for Early Case Assessments – this is best done while leaving the data at their original source in order to avoid moving them around, thus saving network bandwidth and storage costs. Next, the data has to be processed/culled for relevance such that the resulting data set is crisp and small/medium sized. Finally, the data needs to be put under fine-grained analysis and review, including allowing for collaborative/distributed review for in-house as well as external counsel. In addition to the above, the right solution needs to have the ability to perform Legal Hold on key ESI such that it can be proven that the right steps were taken to contain spoliation of data as well as meta-data. On the whole, the eDiscovery process needs to follow an accurate, defensible, legal case workflow with the ability to allow multiple user roles, such as legal administrator/supervisor or reviewer. Once all of this is complete, corporations will want to export the relevant dataset for production and presentation. All of this constitutes eDiscovery, and unless a vendor offers all these capabilities in a modular fashion, I would strongly recommend looking around for options. Therefore software options need to be carefully chosen in order to implement in-house eDiscovery.
Comment from Russ
Time March 24, 2009 at 06:57
Muddu, could you expand on the Google legal problems a bit? I have been concerned with the lack of tools for some time, but continue to be presented with GoogleApps (By ill advised management) as a viable alternative to traditional in-house applications and eDiscovery methods. Notwithstanding the fact that they have recently had security problems with sharing, I have serious doubts about their ability to do litigation holds accross ALL of their application suites.
Thanks,
Russ