E-discovery has become the buzzword on everyone's lips this year,
thanks largely to the new US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
(FRCP), which revised guidelines for producing electronic evidence
last December. The revision means that companies that fail to
produce electronic evidence in court may be granted leniency if
they show a good faith effort to both preserve and produce the
electronic data.
Until precedents are established by actual court cases, it
remains unclear just what exactly good faith means, but in the
meantime, most enterprises are trying to ensure they have
documented practices in place for e-discovery purposes.
Meanwhile, there's no shortage of suppliers out there that are
more than happy to sell companies a product to help with some
aspect of e-discovery. According to George Socha, founder of Socha
Consulting, there are more than 600 products already on the market
targeted at some phase of the e-discovery process.
One roundup article can't possibly address all these products,
but Socha and other experts, including Enterprise Strategy Group
(ESG) analyst Brian Babineau, have established guidelines for
categorising and evaluating the companies and products that have
already become well-known in this space.
The Electronics Discovery Reference Model
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) project was
launched in May 2005 in an attempt to bring some order to the chaos
around e-discovery products. Most experts agree that this model of
the e-discovery process remains the most complete one and can come
in handy when it comes to identifying and evaluating products. The
model has six main phases: records management, identification,
preservation/collection, processing/review/analysis, production and
preservation.
As in the data storage industry, there are few tools that do
only one categorised action. Most tools fit into at least two
categories, and generally, tools fit the identification and
preservation/collection categories or the review and production
categories, according to Babineau.
Identification, preservation and collection tools
Most of the products storage professionals will already be
familiar with fall into this segment of the market, including data
classification tools, archiving products and enterprise search
interfaces. Identification tools find data in the general storage
environment for e-discovery, collection tools pull that data
together and preservation tools keep it in a repository, often with
special features, such as content-addressed storage (CAS)
algorithms in place to keep data from being lost, altered, deleted
or corrupted.
Below is a sampling of some of the products in these
categories.
Identification
Preservation -- e-mail archiving systems
Preservation -- general archiving systems
Collection
Review and production tools
Review and production tools are fairly self-explanatory. These
are the products, generally software, that further cull the
preserved store of data to determine relevance to the case, and
often offer assistance for producing that data in court-mandated
formats, whether as a hard copy or .tif file.
The best known review and production tools among legal
professionals are not likely to be familiar to storage
administrators, or managed by them. According to Babineau, most
firms that are heavily invested in day-to-day e-discovery
management engage with legal service providers, some of whom also
provide identification, preservation and collection services,. Some
of the best known legal service providersand their products are
listed below.
While legal service providers are popular, sticker shock is
common among newcomers to their services. Hosted review processes
can cost as much as £1,000 per gigabyte of data, and "every month
that data's there, there's a hosting fee, and cases in civil courts
can be very long," Babineau said. Thus, even if an legal service
provider is to be used for the final review and production process,
it can behoove users to reduce the amount of data they send over in
the first place for processing.
If you decide to go it alone, or engage a legal professional who
is not a legal service provider, there are a few review and
production products you should be familiar with:
Review/production
