Intelligent eDiscovery Solutions
In today’s litigation-happy society, organizations have no way of knowing when they will need access to certain documents for litigation or audit purposes. When they find themselves in the middle of an investigation or court case, they must delve into the thousands of digital files they have in store in order to find the legally relevant ones to present to the investigators or attorneys. It’s a problem that applies to a relatively small portion of the populous, nevertheless, a solution has come to the aid of businesses and its name is eDiscovery.
Understanding the Process
The foundation of the electronic discovery process is intelligent information management. Electronic discovery takes electronically stored information, analyzes it, then classifies and stores it as appropriate. Without this process, these steps must be performed by employees, and thus are at risk for human error. StoredIQ, a company founded in 2001 to help manage digital data, has grown to offer eDiscovery solutions to companies with sprawling databases.
While storing the data, eDiscovery tools create topology maps that outline the analytics used in categorizing the data. This makes it simple to search for relevant data when the need arises. It also allows you to create customized reports using stored data.
Once electronically stored data that could be relevant in a future litigation is identified, the system stores it in a legal hold repository that cannot be changed. If it is ever needed for litigation purposes, the unaltered data is readily retrieved and presented in an organized way. The system also creates an audit log when performing each of these actions. The log can then be used to prove why a particular action was taken, should a question come up.
Sometimes when handling the storage of important data manually, your business ends up storing unnecessary files in an attempt to have everything you could need for future litigation. This can hamper productivity. With StoredIQ, this is not necessary. The process analyzes the data so thoroughly that any duplicate or irrelevant data is defensibly removed from the system. Again, the audit trails help prove why the data was removed. Potentially responsive data is carefully and efficiently stored and can be reviewed using keyword search when needed.
How This Helps Businesses
When you decide to invest in intelligent eDiscovery solutions for your business, you receive many benefits. First, the process takes much less time when handled automatically rather than by hand, and electronically stored information is collected, preserved and processed much more efficiently. When you face litigation and the deadlines that come with the legal process, your business will be able to meet those deadlines and avoid sanctions, because the data is simple to retrieve.
With this particular solution, you can easily repeat any process you perform. Should you need to pull the same set of data, you can do so time and time again. This provides transparency, and also helps you to create a defensible position as you face litigation. Also, all actions performed during litigation have a legally defensible audit trail. If there is ever any question about the data you provided, you can use these audit trails to defend your actions.
In the end, you have a streamlined, automatic process for storing and retrieving data that is legally defensible, repeatable and manageable. If you ever have to face litigation, the discovery process will be much simpler and more cost effective.
Tags: ediscovery, litigation