Tag Archives: #ESIdatacollection

April 23, 2024 · 10:04 AM

Index-In-Place eDiscovery Tech is in High Demand, but Beware of False Vendor Claims

By John Patzakis

Proportionality-based eDiscovery is a goal that all in-house corporate legal teams want to attain. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1), parties may discover any non-privileged material that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. However, most core eDiscovery costs (outside of attorney review) stem from over-collection of electronically stored information (ESI), and over-collection thwarts the ability to attain proportionality. Law firm Nelson Mullins notes that “over preservation tends to have its own costs relating to storage of large amounts of electronically stored information (ESI) and the resources needed to manage it; leads to increased downstream e-discovery costs associated with collection, processing, and review.”

This is why accurate pre-collection data insight is a game-changing capability that enables counsel to set reasonable discovery limits and ultimately process, host, review and produce much less ESI. Counsel can further use pre-collection proportionality analysis to gather key information, develop a litigation budget, and better manage litigation deadlines. Such insights can also foster cooperation by informing the parties early in the process about where relevant ESI is located, and what keywords and other search parameters can identify and pinpoint relevant ESI.

And the means to enable this capability is distributed index and search in-place technology. Indexing and search in-place in this context means that a software-based indexing technology is deployed directly onto fileservers, laptops, or in the cloud to address cloud-based data sources. This indexing occurs without a bulk transfer of the data to a central location. Once indexed, the searches are performed in a few seconds, with complex Boolean operators, metadata filters and regular expression searches. The searches can be iterated and repeated without limitation, which is critical for large data sets.

However, with this capability being highly valued, many vendors have parroted this messaging, but have offerings that do not qualify as true index-in-place. True distributed index-in-place means that the search indexes are forward-deployed, and are actually installed on the target laptop, Mac computer, fileserver or into the cloud near where the target cloud data sources exist. Transferring data in bulk to a central appliance or server farm via a collector agent or Robocopy function does not qualify. A true index-in-place capability uniquely enables scalability, targeted collection and also minimizes security and data governance risks in eDiscovery and information governance matters.

Conversely, a process requiring massive data copying, migration and centralization does not scale and creates significant data, governance and privacy issues by needlessly duplicating data. For instance, if a matter requires that 10 terabytes be scanned to determine if relevant ESI exists within that data corpus, and the eDiscovery collection platform being used has no index-in-place capability, then all 10 terabytes must be copied and transferred to the tool for indexing and analysis. These limitations stem from tool vendors simply utilizing open source indexing platforms like Lucene or Elastic Search that are not forward-deployable and must reside in centralized locations with a very large amount of computing resources to make them viable for the type of data and data volumes typically seen in discovery and information governance matters.

This is why X1 leverages proprietary and patented index and search technology that is readily forward deployable and thus can scale and allow true distributed indexing in-place. X1 Enterprise Collect significantly streamlines the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome ESI processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection without multiple hand offs, extensive project management and inefficient data processing.

The ability to directly and transparently collect data from custodian laptops, desktops, Microsoft 365 and other cloud sources into a RelativityOne/Relativity workspace is a game-changer that enables attorneys to begin review in hours rather than weeks.

For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, ECA, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, law firm, Preservation & Collection, proportionality

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September 20, 2022 · 10:46 AM

The Traditional Workplace is Not Coming Back, with Major Implications for eDiscovery

By John Patzakis

The world has in many ways returned to life as it was prior to the pandemic. Restaurants and hotels are packed again. Children are all back in their classrooms. Rock bands and philharmonics are playing in front of full audiences. But this is not so for the office.

Only about a third of knowledge workers are back in the office more than once a week, but, according to CNN, only 5 percent of employers are requiring in-office attendance five days a week. And it doesn’t look like these trends are going to change dramatically any time soon. In fact, the trend toward remote work should continue as office leases continue to expire. The vast majority of knowledge workers prefer some form of hybrid or remote work, and executives are increasingly coming to accept that reality. Remote and hybrid work is here to stay. And this has major repercussions for eDiscovery practices.

This is because the legacy manual collection workflow involving travel, physical access and one-time mass collection of custodian laptops, file servers and email accounts is a non-starter for the new era of remote and distributed workforces. Manual collection efforts are expensive, disruptive and time-consuming as many times an “overkill” method of forensic image collection process is employed, thus substantially driving up eDiscovery costs.

When it comes to technical approaches, endpoint forensic crawling methods are now a non-starter. Network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate all endpoint data back to the forensic crawling tool renders the approach ineffective, especially with remote workers needing to VPN into a corporate network. Corporate network bandwidth is at a premium, and the last thing a company needs is their network shut down by inefficient remote forensic tools.

For example, with a forensic crawling tool, to search a custodian’s laptop with 20 gigabytes of email and documents, all 20 gigabytes must be copied and transmitted over the network, where it is then searched, all of which takes at least a day or so per computer. So, most organizations choose to force collect all 20 gigabytes. But while this was merely inefficient and expensive pre-pandemic, it is now untenable with the global remote workforce.

Solving this collection challenge is X1 Enterprise Collect, which is specially designed to address the challenges presented by remote and distributed workforces. X1 enables enterprises to remotely, quickly and easily search across up to thousands of distributed endpoints and data servers from a central location. Legal and compliance teams can perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, and full results with completed collection in hours, instead of days or weeks. The key to X1’s scalability is its unique ability to index and search data in place, thereby enabling a highly detailed and iterative search and analysis, and then only collecting data responsive to those steps.

X1 operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or the cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. After indexing of systems has completed (typically a few hours to a day depending on data volumes), clients and their outside counsel or service provider may then:

  • Conduct Boolean and keyword searches of relevant custodial data sources for ESI, returning search results within minutes by custodian, file type and location.
  • Preview any document in-place, before collection, including any or all documents with search hits.
  • Remotely collect and export responsive ESI from each system directly into a Relativity or RelativityOne® workspace for processing, analysis and review or any other processing or review platform via standard load file. Export text and metadata only or full native files.
  • Export responsive ESI directly into other analytics engines, e.g. Brainspace®, H5® or any other platform that accepts a standard load file.
  • Conduct iterative “search/analyze/export-into-Relativity” processes as frequently and as many times as desired.

To learn more about this capability purpose-built for remote eDiscovery collection and data audits, please contact us.

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