E-Discovery Connectors for Enterprise Vault

Electronic data discovery services can be quite taxing and expensive. Culling data effectively for litigation cases requires a high amount of expertise and experience. It can involve a lot of manual exporting and uploading which can be quite a frustrating task for the legal and IT departments. The need to eliminate manual processes to save valuable time, along with the need for a simple process that creates no errors, has paved the way for e-discovery connectors.
   
Legal and IT professionals have the vital responsibility of collecting and reviewing ESI without increasing the costs or risks of the e-discovery process. Symantec’s Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator facilitates e-disclosure search and recovery of archived items. It provides integrating solutions for electronic disclosure purposes so that EV customers can use a variety of third party e-discovery software solutions in conjunction with their Enterprise Vault archive. The connectors provide integration with third-party case management, reviewing, analytics, forensics and desktop collection tools.

Key Benefits

1. Defense process – The e-discovery connectors help to automatically move archived data from the Enterprise Vault into third-party tools. It discards all manual procedures and sets automatic preservation into action, which handles all processes from collection to     production.
2. Workflow integration – The solutions provided to legal investigators     are integrated, which allows easy extraction of files from the Enterprise Vault archive system onto third-party tools.
3. A cost-effective production Tool – The user interfaces are easy and do not require manual labor to transfer the data, thus lowering the total cost of ownership and legal review.
4. Reviewing – The items that are bookmarked during the reviewing process in the third-party tools can be restored to the Enterprise Vault Accelerator database to be used in the future. This helps to reduce the cost of new reviews.
5. Monitoring and managing internal and external productions – The connectors provide a huge advantage by maintaining a centralized     view of internal productions and where they have been sent. It also reports on the progress of both external and internal investigators.
6. Desktop collection – The active desktop data that is collected and imported into the Enterprise Vault is possible with the integration of forensic and desktop collection tools that promote cohesive e-discovery services.
7. Helps     to focus on immediate needs – With automated processes, the time normally spent on manual processes can be used instead for focusing on designing strategies and meeting goals.

The focus of e-discovery tools should be a transparent and quick view into the case so that legal teams can develop effective case strategies. Providing a single application to handle the entire life cycle of the e discovery process, without adding unecessary costs, is what the e-discovery solution is all about. In order to collect, preserve, review and present credible evidence, enterprises have to collaborate with several law firms, internal departments and service providers. Labor, cost and risks are factors that can hinder legal proceedings.

The Enterprise Vault e-discovery connectors help to simplify the process for legal disclosure teams using an integrated method so that EV customers can use a variety of third party e-discovery software solutions in conjunction with their Enterprise Vault archive.

Who Should Bear The Cost of E-Discovery?

The excessive amount of digital information that is being created and transmitted everyday within organizations has made handling and storage of data for e-discovery purposes a  grave challenge . Due to its expensive nature, ediscovery tools has now become a cause of concern for both the affected parties and the federal courts as there is a constant tug-of-war as to which party should bear the electronic disclosure costs.

Per FRCP rules, preservation of ESI for civil litigation is mandatory as it is crucial evidence that can be requested by lawyers to substantiate claims attached to cases. The moment a company is issued a lawsuit notification, it becomes their legal obligation to preserve any kind of data until the outcome of the lawsuit is declared. Any company that is found to be negligent in preserving data or of intentional spoliation of evidence can be subject to legal sanctions that could cause immense damages to their case.

The burden of storing and maintaining massive ESI adds to costs. Thus the parties that perform the electronic evidence discovery  are appealing to courts to apply the costs to the requesting parties. However, the courts consider several factors, such as the case requirements, the resources available to the parties, the level of controversy, the questionable issues and the significance of e-discovery proceedings before deciding whom to hold responsible for bearing the costs.

Court Provisions on Cost Issues

The courts have identified some drawbacks that add to e discovery costs:

· Access to Stored Documents - When data is stored in inaccessible formats, it raises costs due to the time invested in culling relevant information from a huge mass. An organization with widespread branches has a complex network of data that is transmitted across various regions, and the core challenge is to find the data’s exact location. Accessibility of documents is significantly diverse in an organization. From a business point of view, the possibility of acquiring valid documents decreases with the age of the record. From a legal prospective, the accessibility period depends upon the period in which the document is expected to be available. Thus the expected period and retention period can vary from two or three years to seven years. Organizations need to develop internal guidelines for the retention and destruction of documents.

· Governing Policies for Document Retention – As document retention policies are reliant on the needs of the business, organizations need to have knowledge of the retention period of each document type so that it is consistent with federal, state and local regulations. The document policies should be developed to down-size the time and effort spent in locating relevant information. They should also provide a framework for storing confidential data.

To avoid being overburdened with the cost of electronic discovery, attorneys can help their clients develop a document retention policy that can help identify document types and their legal retention periods. In case of any potential litigation, attorneys and their clients should know where the documents are and the methods used to store them. Attorneys can actively find out what documents are required from the opposition and keep their clients updated to avoid any accidental destruction of intellectual property. Organizations should employ an effective document retention policy that stores documents in accessible mediums for retrieval in case of any anticipatory litigation software. This can reduce organizational costs by maintaining and destroying documents at the right time.
                                   

Review & Production Module for Law Firms

The review and production module provides legal professionals in corporations, government agencies, and law firms with a wide range of new features which are needed to conduct privileged and responsive reviews. Since the review and production module is integrated within the ediscovery platform, users benefit from one seamless application which supports the entire legal ediscovery lifecycle.

This application supports over 100 concurrent reviewers and even helps in managing the largest cases. It eliminates the need to create load files, and enables users to have a truly iterative ediscovery work flow.

Features of Ediscovery Case Management

The electronic discovery platform provides various case management capabilities to deliver a complete, high visibility solution for all ongoing cases. As a result, customers can easily monitor the progress of each case, ensuring that discovery related deadlines are met and resources are optimized effectively.

 


Some important features of case management include case analytics, multi-case architecture, case configuration, user management, audit trial and activity reporting. The multi-case architecture feature helps management manage hundreds of cases and thousands of users through a centralized interface. Case configuration allows case administrators to create cases and manage groups and topics using an intuitive, web-based interface which helps carry on legal electronic discovery process effectively and efficiently.

A Brief Intro on Electronic Discovery Services (EDS)

Electronic discovery services (EDS) are the services that enable customers to employ an ediscovery platform in order to reduce the cost and risk of ediscovery process. They are designed to optimize and streamline all critical phases of ediscovery from identification, preservation, and collection, to processing, analysis, review and production. EDS are developed and delivered by highly trained and experienced consultants who enable optimal ediscovery processes within large enterprises and law firms. These services are performed both on-site and remotely in order to accommodate the specific needs of each enterprise so as to make the process easier.

Transparent Search Feature for eDiscovery Process

Since there is lot of data collection in various processes of enterprises, electronic data discovery can be a daunting task due to its duration and high cost. This is why enterprises require a transparent search solution that helps to meet eDiscovery needs such as testing, sampling, iterative refinement, and leverage the ability to run multiple queries at once. This provides defensibility and reduces costs.

An ediscovery platform’s transparent search feature enables a more defensible electronic data discovery search process and enhances the ability to cull irrelevant information. Transparent search technology also reduces the over and under-inclusiveness of keyword search during litigation, improving search effectiveness and saving cost and time.

Ediscovery Platform Helps in Corporate Investigations

The ediscovery platform is the enterprise ediscovery management solution designed to manage all corporate investigations in a single application. This solution rapidly processes, analyzes, searches and culls collected data to find all evidence and suspects involved in an investigation.

The ediscovery platform is also a self-contained appliance solution that is up and running in less than 25 minutes. It processes over 400 multilingual document types including files, various email formats, attachments, contacts, calendar items and compressed files which allow investigators to gain insight into case facts immediately.

Importance of Litigation Software

Litigation software for keyword search has become important in the electronic data discovery process. It helps uncover relevant information and cull down large amounts of ESI prior to review. Without keyword search, electronic data discovery would be virtually impossible due to its duration and high cost.

Litigation software tends to produce results that are both over- and under-inclusive, finding non-relevant documents and missing potentially relevant documents. Many technologies used today to perform keyword searches in electronic data discovery works as a “black box," but good e-discovery technologies provide full transparency into how searches were constructed and how results were produce