E-Discovery Lifecycle

Developing procedures and systems for implementing litigation holds and conducting discovery. The firm's ESI Sentinel service is designed specifically for this purpose in order to make an organization's discovery processes routine for those that are routinely involved in litigation.

Responding to litigation holds by determining the relevant people, places and events and identifying the related sources of ESI. Proper identification can make subsequent preservation more effective and efficient, which can lower overall litigation costs.

Proper identification can reduce subsequent preservation efforts if better sources of ESI can be identified that also have lower preservation costs than other options. For example, a comprehensive backup history for a server can have greater evidentiary value with less cost (preservation and litgation lifecycle) than media based preservation of the server.

Protecting ESI from inappropriate alteration or destruction on an historical or on-going basis. Preservation is relatively inexpensive. It is usually better to preserve broadly and produce narrowly. Since unpreserved ESI only degrades with its continued usage by electronic systems, it is best to preserve ESI as soon as possible.

It is also difficult to assess how the case may turn as evidence is uncovered. Consequently, it is also best to focus on media preservation than trying to guess during preservation what data will likely be necessary. The marginal cost difference between media based preservation versus targeted data preservation will be dwarfed by needless motion practice or a disappointing outcome if the guess is wrong.

Identifying and gathering ESI from preserved sources for further use in the e-discovery process. Review is the most costly phase of e-discovery with processing is a close second. Together both processing and review can account for about 90 percent of e-discovery costs.

Intelligent collection and culling can help reduce the volume of data subject to subsequent processing and review thereby dramatically reducing overall discovery costs. Intelligent collection can also help validate documents selected for further consideration through methods like hash comparison, signature analysis and other forensic analyses.

Preparing ESI for further review including conversion to TIFF or PDF, if desired. Much of the useful data associated with ESI is derived from disparate sources like system metadata, internal application metadata and document content. Processing brings the relevant elements together and organizes them to faciliate subsequent review in a Litigation Support Database (LSD).

For increased efficiency, processing can be split into two phases--pre and post review. Prereview processing focuses on the needs of reviewers. Consequently, efficiency measures like de-duplication may be used to save both review and processing costs should some items be deemed unnecessary for production as a result of privilege or relevancy issues.

Post reveiw processing completes processing on any items previously omitted, such as duplicates, while applying final attributes to produced documents like bates numbers and restrictive markers like "Confidential" or "Attorney Eyes Only".

Evaluating ESI for relevance and privilege. Typically the review function is performed through the use of document management and data hosting technologies such as the firm's web enabled Case Management System (CMS). Actually, CMS is designed to faciliate the discovery process from collection through production.

Evaluating ESI for content and context in order to make decisions throughout the litigation lifecycle. Analytical methods may be employed throughout the litigation lifecycle to assess case preservation and production requirements, plan efficient review and processing, and develop case strategy.

Delivering ESI to others. There is no required format for production although it is often accomplished by load files for widely used systems like Summation or Concordance.