J. David Morris, EMC

All corporations need to find and manage content for litigation, compliance, and internal or regulatory investigations. Responding in a quick and cost-effective manner is directly related to how effectively an organization can identify and act on potentially responsive information. Today, most business communications and activities take place electronically; subsequently, the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) is growing exponentially. This information exists in a wide and ever-expanding variety of disparate systems and locations across the enterprise. Many of these sources are unmanaged, unorganized, and continually changing. As a result, the eDiscovery process—the identification, collection, preservation, processing, analysis, and review of potentially responsive ESI, can be an extremely time-consuming and costly endeavor if not properly planned for and managed.

The adage “Look Before You Leap” is a well known and a much heeded piece of advice.  It also applies to eDiscovery.  Performing analytics and an early case assessment can deliver valuable information on document volume, document type, repositories, custodians, document ownership, key date and timelines. With the insight provide by initial analytics and early case assessment, corporate attorneys can better determine litigation risk, legal strategy and eDiscovery scope, as well as litigation related expenses.  Initial analytics and early case assessment should be a standard part of a corporation’s eDiscovery processes.

Why? Realistically, the work must be done anyway, as the courts expect companies to be ready for litigation.  This includes having fluent knowledge of the IT infrastructure, content repositories and network architecture, so that the pretrial conference leads to consensus on what ESI is discoverable (FRCP 16).  Despite the legal necessity and overwhelming value, most corporations don’t conduct initial analytics or early case assessment before collection begins.

Corporations, more often than not, find themselves in a reactive eDiscovery situation, i.e. “Leap before You Look.”  After litigation is initiated, the legal clock starts (FRCP 26(a)(1)(c) & 26(f)) driving the eDiscovery timeline.  Due to the tight timelines and often lack of eDiscovery capability, legal and IT are faced with deploying eDiscovery capability, constructing policies and collecting relevant documents for the litigation proceedings all at the same time. The aforementioned tasks are each projects in and of themselves.  Trying to solve them all at once forces corporations to sub-optimize and over collect, which wastes time and money, as well as forces the corporation to accept more litigation risk than necessary ((FRCP Rule 26(b)(5)(B)… we have a clawbacks provision, but they aren’t a given.).

How can corporations avoid the “Leap before you Look” challenge and deploy the necessary capability to heed the “Look before you Leap” advice?  The answer is to deploy eDiscovery capability that delivers the ability to conduct initial analytics and early case assessment and construct your IT policies prior to the initiation of a litigation event.  According to Fulbright & Jaworski’s 6^th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report, 89% of companies face litigation and 40% of the largest companies spend over $5M annually on litigation. So, it is not a question if you are going to have a lawsuit; it is only a question of when you are going to have a lawsuit and be forced to conform to FRCP16.

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon delivers a robust suite of capabilities across the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) from information management, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis and production, as well as an initial analytics, early case assessment and legal hold capabilities.  The ERDM model below highlights Kazeon’s capabilities across the eDiscovery model:

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon capability model (see interactive EDRM):

EMC SourceOne eDiscovery - Kazeon EDRM+

Furthermore, Kazeon’s application connectors allow corporations to perform eDiscovery on the most common enterprise applications to deliver electronically stored information (ESI) no matter where it is in the enterprise.  EMC SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon delivers your corporation the capability to “Look before You Leap.”   To Discover more visit www.kazeon.com/discover.