What exactly can early case assessment of your eDiscovery data do for you?

There is an old quote, funny and true all at the same time “In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king”.  In the realm of eDiscovery, the more you know about your data, the better the decisions are that you make.    When you look at ESI / eDiscovery that you have in a matter, there are 2 ways to proceed:  1) Guess or rely on minimal facts that are provided or outwardly visible or 2) Analyze the ESI and let it tell you what you need to know.   Some of the low hanging fruit so to speak in reducing the size and cost of eDiscovery follow,  as you ask yourself these questions also think about the impact on your case, plans, budget if you absolutely knew the answer at the beginning of a matter:

 

Are we looking at the right people (Custodians) ?

o   Are there custodians who don’t have much in the date range we are interested in?

o   Are there Custodians that communicate with people we haven’t looked at yet (additional custodians)?

o   Are there people (custodians) that can be eliminated based on communication patterns / dates

Are we specific enough on our date ranges?

o   Are there emails and documents that PRE-Date the date range that can be excluded?

o   Are there emails and documents that are AFTER the date range of interest and can be excluded?

o   Are Documents attached to emails with dates out of range excluded?

o   Are contents of Zip (containers) that are outside the date range excluded?

o   Are embedded objects excluded if the host document is excluded?

Are we looking at the right types of stuff?

o   Are there file types which are irrelevant to this matter?

o   Are these system files which can be excluded?

o   Are there Temporary files / folders which can be excluded?

o   Are there container types which can be excluded?

o   Are there irrelevant paths and locations based on content analysis which can be excluded?

Are we looking at the same stuff to many times?

o   Are there a large number of duplicate documents and emails in the data as a whole?

o   Does custodian level deduplication increase the number of emails and documents substantially?

o   Do certain drives, media or locations contain a higher percentage of duplicate content?

o   What is the source of the majority of the duplicates?

o   Can we de-duplicate across the entire collection to reduce the work and cost?

o   Can we de-duplicate attachments and loose files globally?

Are we able to communicate effectively what we have and how we should proceed?

o   Do we have working documents to use in making filtering & culling decisions?

o   Do we have reports, facts to back up our plan?

o   Do we have summaries and documents that we can use in the meet and confer which do not risk privilege?

o   Do we have reports and documentation that we can use to argue our case / motion for : Burden, inaccessible data, cost shifting, overly broad discovery demand…

 

These questions and many more are answered when you user earlyCASE to analyze your eDiscovery / ESI.   For more information on earlyCASE visit:   http://www.earlyCASE.com