What is eDiscovery, and what effects does it have on your business? These are questions that all companies in the current business environment should have a ready answer to. As companies continue to digitize further, generated amounts of information grow. It’s instructive for companies to spend some time reviewing E-Discovery and reflecting on their internal compliance.
Electronic Discovery, or eDiscovery, is the legal process that involves the identification, preservation, collection and delivery of electronically stored information. This electronically stored information, or ESI, can constitute anything from text, images, and social media logs – anything that could potentially be used as evidence in court. All this data is required by law to be preserved and made discoverable at legal request, presenting businesses a unique challenge.
Besides the sheer breadth of the electronic information that has to be retained, additional complications are added by the fact that the information has to be preserved. Metadata that can be used to identify the piece of information have to be kept intact.
Failure to retain ESI or to preserve it in a functional, original form can lead to a variety of negative consequences for the company in question; besides reducing the likelihood of success in any ongoing legal proceedings, failure to preserve and produce documents on request can be deemed spoilation. Companies that run afoul of this may be struck with fines and sanctions.
How can companies make sure they meet eDiscovery requirements?
There are several aspects to ensuring that your ESI is being handled correctly and meets the legal framework mandated by your local environment. In practice, there are several key components that have to be included:
Data preservation:
Data has to be preserved against changes, interference, or corruption – including any attached metadata. This means an archiving system that data is fed into to keep it isolated from the live system and from any changes that may result.
Data collection services:
A Data Collection Service is used to identify and collect relevant data for preservation. This can be performed in a variety of ways, the different cases depending on the amount of data, availability and skill of internal IT resources, and accessibility of data sources in question.
eDiscovery processing:
Once an eDiscovery case is initiated, eDiscovery processing software extracts relevant data along with its associated metadata, deduplicates it, and makes it available in a coherent format.
What does this mean in practice?
These requirements include some aspects that traditional data management systems don’t cover, though there is otherwise some overlap with archives. It is highly advisable to look at your current data archiving system and ask yourself the question: in the event of an E-Discovery case, how easy is it for us to comply with the data request, how long will it take and what will it cost my company in both finances and man-hours?
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
