Rule E-Discovery Within Your Company
Validate your system and its pieces (preferably independently). Prior to launching your system, develop a comprehensive test and validation plan that verifies each piece of data created by your system. If you have the time (and you should if you plan accordingly), have this validation done by an independent organization who doesn’t have skin in your success. Validate each step independently, as well as the system as a whole. This independent validation will give you confidence in your system, and may help if any of your data is ever questioned. Unfortunately, data processed in-house may be looked upon with less reliability by some parties without some independent backup. And of course, document, document, document.
Be controlling.You want centralized, automated control of the entire process. Unfortunately, in many organizations where the process isn’t properly controlled, a batch of email may be inventoried by one group, metadata extracted by someone else, images created by another and so on. All the while, the flow of data is communicated by email messages. Errors may or may not be properly accounted for. At some point, the data show up ready for review and everybody is happy until…
You want to be able to control your entire process from a central console, and be able to determine where in the process any piece of data is. Preferably, every step of the process is able to communicate with a central control, relating information about the current step, its associated status and any exceptions. Ideally, this central control will allow you to launch a set of jobs that move your ESI from start to finish with discrete, detailed auditable data.
Be prepared to go big. Your initial project may be of limited scope and with a very reasonable deadline. I’d give decent odds, however, that this comfortable set of circumstances won’t remain. Take time to design your system to know your exact throughput capabilities, and have a plan for expanding the capability quickly without losing the integrity of your process. The last thing you want is to be stuck having to resort to an outside vendor to process data beyond your capacity. This will complicate your tracking and auditing tasks, and cause a loss of your process control and cost advantage. So, design-in systematic growth capabilities from the beginning.
If you build your ESI processing infrastructure correctly, you will be in a position to take advantage of the emerging technology. If you’re a technologist, this is the sexy part of the exploding interest in e-discovery.
Make Good Decisions
The emphasis in e-discovery software includes developments in the area of advanced search technologies, and automated extraction of concepts and categorization of documents to aid in the document review process. Included in this arena is the detection of email threads, the grouping of related documents and automated/suggestive document coding. It’s fun to be at the leading (bleeding) edge of technology if you’re a software professional, but it may not be as much fun if your job is to worry about legal risks to your company. So how can you effectively make choices among the emerging technologies?
Don’t get tied down to any one technology. Look for technology that can be built into your processes, not ones that require you to ditch your processes. You never know when something better will come along, or if the technology you pick proves less than advertised. Make sure "changing your mind" or "upgrading" is designed into your approach. Nobody has the technology nailed completely at this point in time so don’t get nailed as a consequence.
Be able to evaluate quickly, and with your data. Demos are great, but they don’t mean anything unless you can test drive with your data. Build a process where you can insert a test of a new software program without disrupting your production flow of data. This allows you to evaluate technology in the proper context. The emerging technology holds a lot of promise, but you need to be able to move quickly to make sound evaluations.
Build your ESI processing infrastructure correctly, and you’ll be better positioned to control your existing e-discovery world and help it evolve in a controlled fashion to take advantage of all the new cost-saving technologies.
Discovery WorkFlow™ consists of a centralized workflow definition and control module which integrates a centralized database with the ability to launch programs which process the data. Discovery WorkFlow is able to launch and control processes across multiple hardware platforms and provides a common interface for the reporting and tracking of completion codes and exceptions. Discovery WorkFlow was developed to control the internal processing of ESI for all of our clients with minimal staff intervention. The devil is in the details, and you can read the technical description at
www.tcdi.com/