E-discovery Product Purchase Considerations

As data volumes grow, it's increasingly difficult to locate relevant data. Data must be retained longer, and storage users cannot be counted upon to intuitively locate documents, spreadsheets or other data. This is a problem when dealing with electronic discovery (e-discovery) requests that impose a legal obligation to locate relevant data in a timely manner or face fines and possibly adverse judgments. Today, e-discovery tools provide powerful search capabilities that can quickly process and index billions of files based on keywords and other common metadata. The tools can also present search results in forms that are easy to understand and often deliver results in a form that is directly compatible with litigation management tools.

Group Creates Standard to Ease E-discovery Data Transfer

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model standards group today unveiled an XML-based standard that it says will allow documents transfer through the systems of multiple vendors during the various stages of e-discovery.

The new standard defines metadata of e-mail and files for simplified transfer to and from applications that are used as part of an e-discovery process by businesses, service providers and outside legal firms, said Kurt Leafstrand, a spokesman for the two-year-old standards group.