Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying and delivering electronically stored information (ESI) that can be used as evidence in legal cases.
eDiscovery is used in the legal sector for what others would call data discovery. As we’ve moved into the digital age and electronic communication has become the norm we've transitioned from discovery to eDiscovery. eDiscovery software tools allow legal professionals to process, review, tag and produce electronic documents as part of a lawsuit or investigation. A good eDiscovery tool can help attorneys discover valuable information regarding a matter while reducing costs, speeding up resolutions and mitigating risks.
It's all about data investigations
The majority of eDiscovery projects are in the context of a litigation, but a significant amount of it takes place instead in the context of an investigation. Let’s say an investigation into your organisation involves reviewing 10TB of data, this would take up a considerable amount of resource. eDiscovery tools use an online review platform to help quickly identify the key documents within large data sets, allowing you to focus on critical evidence prioritising the review.
How does eDiscovery work?
eDiscovery software tools allow legal professionals to handle electronic documents in discovery and investigations and automate the common discovery steps such as data ingestion, file indexing, virus scanning and more, preparing documents to be reviewed.
One data has been ingested into eDiscovery tools legal teams can begin reviewing the data, carrying searches to find specific documentation, sorting information by metadata fields such as creation data, author. By addressing data discovery organisations can drastically reduce the number of documents that require attention by allowing data administrators to remove redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data, to focus in on the important information.
How data discovery trumps eDiscovery
Imagine the business value you could unlock if you had an up-to-date and instantly searchable index of your data estate at your finger tips. This would allow your organisation to instantly search on any relevant or sensitive information as well as effectively locating any legal information needed in the event of a litigation or lawsuit.
eDiscovery tools are typically only used in the event of a legal investigation, meaning they're only plugged in when required and only search for specific documentation.
Exonar Reveal surpasses eDiscovery tools by providing organisations with an instantly searchable index of its data estate at scale. Enabling visibility of an organisations unstructured and structured data, giving the organisation confidence in what data they have, where it is and who has access to it.
Once an organisation has created an index of its data, it’s very easy for users to query that data in real-time such as searching for a specific piece of information, intellectual property, research or insight in a huge data estate.
For some sectors, like legal, pharmaceuticals and technology companies, data discovery can save valuable time and resources in eDiscovery.
