E Discovery

Jotwani Associates- Electronic Discovery Support

At a high level, electronic discovery can be described as collection, preparation, review and distribution of electronic documents associated with govt or legal proceedings. The documents here refer to all the relevant electronically stored information (ESI) such as emails, files, memos, documents, spreadsheets, images, presentations etc.

Jotwani Associates has a unique combination of technology and legal expertise to help its clients achieve cost effective and accurate electronic discovery. A streamlined approach to electronic discovery involves following steps and Jotwani Associates provides support in each of them.

Strategize

A triggering event that leads to a need to do electronic discovery could be a court order or an anticipation of a court order based on a past event. Once triggering event occurs, it is important to understand the scope of the discovery which involves understanding context, timeframes and compliance that need to be adhered to. This involves determining the criteria for relevancy and privilege. One must identify all key personnel, custodians involved and make them aware of the legal aspects (e.g. litigation hold) involved. All audit trails must be maintained. One also must identify all key sources of ESI that may be relevant to this case. The sources include (but not limited to) email, archive, backup, file servers, desktops, laptops. Once the sources are identified, one needs to isolate the ESI and come up with strategies to collect the data. It is also important to document all this information and the workflows involved. One important aspect is to understand what tools are required to complete the electronic discovery, and whether it is important to consider partners or outsourcing.

Collect

Once ESI is identified, it must be carefully collected. The collection involves crawling all the data sources to collect documents in a way that is legally defensible, forensically sound and auditable. It is also important to collect all the metadata corresponding to the ESI in a way such that the original metadata is not altered. When collecting data, one must also note the custodians of the data and any chain of custody involved. Some cases may demand usage of forensics to collect certain information.

It often helps to form and document a strategy for collection of data so that the collection can be tracked efficiently.

Following are important considerations in data collection -

• Understanding data sources, document types, quantity and costs involved in collection
• Find appropriate expertise in data collection in order to mitigate risks associated

Process

This involves processing the collected data so that it can be reviewed efficiently. Since costs involved in the review process are substantial, effective processing of data can save costs. The processing involves the following -

• Conversion of non-electronic documents into electronic format
• Creation of inventory of all files or documents involved
• Identifying passwords and extracting metadata for each files
• Uncompressing compressed files
• Data culling
  • De-duplicating documents
  • Removing irrelevant files like operating system files
• Converting all document types into specific types (say PDF) that are easy to review

Review

Review is the most tedious step of electronic discovery process. Most of the costs and time involved in electronic discovery can be attributed to review.

The review involves both tool based and manual process. Good tools are essential to reduce cost and effort involved. Following factors are involved in review -

• Use sophisticated search methods on documents
  • Keyword based search
  • Concept based search
• Index the documents according to metadata fields
• Multi-pass review techniques to discover relevant and privilege documents
• Manual review

Produce

The aim of this step is to produce the reviewed documents in a format that is agreed up and usable. This involves making sure that the reviewed documents are readable. Techniques like Bates numbering need to be used for efficient tracking.