How can eDiscovery software help legal professionals? The traditional method of discovery is when the parties involved manually disclose information they have about the case. The innovative eDiscovery system mimics this traditional method in an electronic version.
Most litigation, investigations, and legal proceedings request information from participants under protection from laws like the Freedom of Information Act. eDiscovery takes the act of collecting and identifying information onto electronic storage platforms, especially for information from audio or video files, databases, and emails that parties will exchange.
Standard eDiscovery Process Steps
The critical issue with any lawsuit is preserving the data that will prove or defend the case. The eDiscovery process works in multiple steps, supporting, maintaining, and organizing the data as follows:
- First, identifying relevant individuals, flagging custodians, and gathering applicable information.
- Then, the system collects data to preserve it and instills a legal hold on it to keep other parties from destroying the details.
- Next, it applies data preservation techniques, including transferring the information to the client’s counsel for use or disposal.
- The data goes through a careful extraction process to streamline it for privilege or discovery requests.
- Once the parties agree on specifications, the documents can move to the opposing counsel for review.
Lawyers from both sides will be able to determine the scope of the eDiscovery when it moves to identify the relevant electronically stored information. They can also challenge the queries or make requests for data from the opposition.
Who Should Use Electronic Discovery?
Companies benefit enormously from litigation safeguards like eDiscovery. It sets up a system that stores, manages, and secures their information and data sources and is still accessible at a moment’s notice.
On the legal side, any lawyer or law firm can quickly gather information for litigation with electronic discovery systems like this because it presents a streamlined way to categorize evidence, facts, and witnesses. It also encourages judges and law enforcement officials to stay up to date with electronic information storage and provides a better quality of information for more efficient proceedings.
Why Outsourcing eDiscovery Works
The world generates information much quicker now, and the technical details can be overwhelming. The benefit of outside project management through eDiscovery is that a dedicated professional can handle those details on your behalf. It also saves time and money on finding staff that can analyze, support, collect, ingest, and produce various forms of data.
Even if you developed a special department for this purpose, there might not be enough of a caseload to keep them busy. Outsourcing eDiscovery keeps the costs of training and hiring down and minimizes the need for expensive hardware additions. It also takes the guesswork out of the process.
Attorneys and their law firms are also frequently the target of intentional data breaches, and even small mistakes present room for doubt and a target for legal opponents. Secure eDiscovery protocols prevent these issues, and client data will have highly protected backup and support in place around the clock.
How Legal Hold Works
A legal hold is a mechanism that preserves all the pertinent information in a case. It promotes the safeguarding of the data in the electronic discovery process through a notification system. The team lead receives the notification, with templates informing parties of any changes surrounding retention or storage of collected data.
With eDiscovery, legal professionals can customize notification templates to eliminate risks for each case. They can also easily run reports that track and retrieve information that the legal hold has in storage.
The demand for personalized electronic discovery systems in law firms is growing, thanks to the merits of this innovative data review method. At Datamine Discovery, we offer support and outsourcing for eDiscovery services in the greater Boston area, Providence, Hartford, and New Haven regions of New England. Call us at 617-329-9530 today to request a free eDiscovery consultation.
