eDiscovery Best Practices: Challenges and Solutions

Traditionally, eDiscovery needs have been met by legal service providers and law firms supplying consulting services to corporate customers. In this process, companies engaged in litigation send data and information to law firms and legal service providers for processing, analysis and review in order to find relevant data and provide required evidence. With the exponential growth in ESI and the rapid growth of litigation cost, companies are now facing staggering eDiscovery bills for even their minor cases. Companies also face defensibility challenges within the eDiscovery process, which if handled improperly can result in court imposed fines, as well as loss of reputation.  To compound the challenge, corporations are creating massive amounts of data in the 10’s to 100’s of terabytes range (10 terabytes = the total Library of Congress).  This creates eDiscovery challenges as these large data volumes become time consuming to process, analyze and index in a reasonable time period.

eDiscovery projects are driven by service providers, law firms and consultants.  However to combat rising costs, a growing number of companies are using technology to control the eDisocvery process and bring it in-house to reduce costs and to provide a defensible, transparent and accurate process.  eDiscovery has long been neglected in corporations; but, with new advances in automation, control and cost-savings, eDiscovery technology adoption is skyrocketing.

In litigation, the key informational sources in eDiscovery are email, email archives, Enterprise Content Management repositories (ECM) and network file shares.  An eDiscovery solution needs to address all content repositories, as well as deliver an integrated legal hold management capability to comply with FRCP. The eDiscovery integration benefit is an in-house Early Case Assessment (ECA) capability which offers a full view of the exposure and risk involved in litigation procedures and provides valuable information to determine legal approach.  

1. Data Growth: ESI repositories found in enterprises contain a large data volumes that are continuously increasing due to (i) technological advancements in storage and (ii) regulation/compliance needs regulations
2. Case Load: Cases volume has grown steadily over the last decade according to the ABA and the typical company can expect fifteen cases per year.
3. In-House Cost: The associated case cost includes the resources required in-house for the collection (and some minimal processing) and the resources at a service provider to process and cull-down the information. The cost of the service provider is the dominant expense.
4. Over-Collection: Over-collection of data is always the problem due to the need to minimize the risk of omitting responsive data given often the simplistic methodology used to performing collections.
5. Data Relevance: There is an intersection of specific custodians that are involved in the majority of cases which suggests some benefit might be possible when sharing data across cases. This benefit is lost when sending the data to an external service
6. Prevent Spoliation: Data preservation throughout the eDiscovery process is critical to preserve the chain of evidence and present an air tight case. Without integrated legal hold management and system-wide auditing, opposing counsel will attack the data’s validity.
7. No Free Refills: The cost at service providers is typically priced on a per-GB. This pricing structure applies to not only the data given to be processed but often to all of the derivative data that processing generates (2x-3x).
8. Scalability Challenges: The in-house part of eDiscovery is currently performed by more manual than automated methodology. This involves strict processes and scaling that is analogous to the number of people in the organization involved in eDiscovery.
9. Technology Adoption: The internal legal department at corporations is often the least automated department.
10. Cross-Functional Teams: The steps of eDiscovery are handled by different people, processes, and tools at each stage making very hard to have end-to-end defensibility and chain-of-custody.

1. Integrated Solution: All major steps of eDiscovery can be moved in-house with a single integrated eDiscovery solution.
2. User Friendly Interface: In-house eDiscovery is very reasonable and feasible due to the tremendous cost reduction while increasing the quality of the eDiscovery process.
3. Automated Collections: Kazeon’s integrated solution is the only automated and complete in-house eDiscovery solution for ESI collection and culling.
4. Cost Effectiveness: The cost is minimized by using Kazeon’s integrated eDiscovery solution because of (i) its unique homogeneous architecture, (ii) scalability, (iii) automation, and (iv) opportunity for data sharing across cases.
5. eDiscovery Use Cases: Kazeon supports all t major use cases that are integral part of eDiscovery: Kazeon offers modular solutions for eDiscovery:
1. Collection & Culling
2. Analysis & Review
3. Legal Hold Management
6. A&R and Legal Hold Management: Kazeon offers a dual approach for analysis & review and legal hold management. The first is “in-place” where the data is view at the source (the only choice for cases with huge data volumes) and the second is at-target where the data is moved into a secure repository for processing. Kazeon’s solution covers both active and archive data.
7. Federated View: Full automation of the eDiscovery process across all corporate locations, remote offices, home offices and geographies possible with Kazeon’s software.
8. Audit Trails: The comprehensive support for legal hold management including notification and enforcement completes the automation of eDiscovery while maintaining a full audit trail.
9. Tracking Chain of Custody: Kazeon’s integrated system can handle a case from its onset to production while guaranteeing defensibility and chain-of-custody across the time span of the case.
10. Collaborative Workflow: Kazeon’s approach to analysis and review offers significant capabilities for collaborative workflow to handle legal matters and also presents an intuitive user interface and legal workflow even for the most complex cases.

The ideal in-house eDiscovery solution must be able to provide defensible, accurate and responsiveness throughout the collection & culling and analysis & review eDiscovery processes while maintain data integrity with integrated legal hold management.  For viability, the solution must also deliver an enterprise-wide scalability and cost-effectiveness for a positive in-house business case.