In a day where there is and a seemingly endless amount of email, files, folders, databases, and on and on and on where do you start in separating the meaningful documents from the masses of what you have?

Let’s look at how to leverage the reports and analysis available in earlyCASE to make sense of the ESI in the context of defining filtering and culling rules.    As many matters needs vary, the approach outlined here will be generic, adapt the reports you use as needed.

The major areas that ESI can quickly be eliminated or reduced (generally subject to the parties’ agreement) are:

1.      Restricting the Custodians and locations of data to be reviewed.

2.      Eliminating Folders / Paths that are system or temporary file locations.

3.      Restricting The Types of Files that are to be “Included” or to be “Excluded”

4.      Restricting The Date Range of Emails and Documents.

5.      Removing Duplicate emails and Files – Selection of the de-duplication method.

Let’s look at the earlyCASE reports that help with these 5 areas:

1.      Looking at the custodians report will show you the number of emails, attachments and files by custodian along with the date ranges of that custodians information.   For instance a custodian that has little to no email or files within the date range being looked at, may likely be an irrelevant to process and review.   Likewise looking at the email to and from reports will identify potential custodians which may be useful to look at based on the To / From reports as well as the Conversation summary.  In addition the Expanded sizes and Counts report will assist you indentifying what media the custodians information is on.   You will see as more pieces of media (drives, etc) are processed that later media will have a much higher percentage of duplicates.   You may even find that certain pieces of media can be skipped entirely.

2.      The locations (media, drives, and folders) should be reviewed to insure that temporary system location and file storage areas are not included in what is processed.    On most desktop computers Internet access as well as programs create thousands and at times tens of thousands of temporary files.   If your file type criteria include for instance HTML and Text files, you will likely be processing and reviewing a significant number of file fragments and temporary files which are in fact useless junk.   Looking at the Folders > 100 files report along with the Folder Inventory All report will assist you in isolating folders which can be skipped over (i.e. not processed and reviewed).    Also look at the Container Summary and Container File Details to see what containers you have as well as generally what is in them.     Identifying drives, network shares, media that is duplicative as well as irrelevant will save you a lot of time, money and effort.

3.      earlyCASE includes a number of reports to assist in understanding the types and counts of the loose files as well files attachments to email.   The File Type Summary will organize and show you all of the file types, counts and sizes.   Take a look at the Office File Types and the DeDup – File Type Summary to quickly identify the files types that should be “Included” or “Excluded” from processing and review.   Be careful to select EITHER an “Include” or “Exclude” strategy – Mixing methods is a bad idea.  Next look at the Generally Included File Types,  Generally Excluded file types and Unknown file types reports to make sure that your instructions on file types are clear. 

4.      Dates are generally pretty clear in terms of what should be in or out.   The File Date Summary and the Top 25 File Dates show the date ranges of the file in the collection.    The email to and from report show the date ranges of the emails and the container summary also assist in understanding the counts and sizes related to date ranges.

5.      Removing duplicates is done initially on a global basis or on a custodian basis.  The Duplicates (Custodian) and Duplicates (Global) reports will show you the overall duplicate email and file counts as well as the breakdown by custodian.   De-Duplicating globally will eliminate the most emails and files, but may meet with some resistance by those doing the document review.  These reports will let you see the difference in the counts and sizes from the two approaches.

 

Now that you have marked up reports, redlined dates and file types, figured out which media is relevant.   You has the basis of a clear set of filter cull rules as well as what should be outright skipped.   Having the earlyCASE reports as the basis of this process eliminates arbitrary and unfounded decisions which may be challenged later and could create problems later.

For more information on early case assessments and using earlyCASE visit:       www.earlyCASE.com