First time poster, long time reader….
Does anyone have experience with tools outside of EnCase and FTK (Enterprise) in performing eDiscovery related collections?
I've never read a post regarding indexing based tools such as Kazeon, StoredIQ or Zantaz. I understand these may fall short in the area of full disk imaging, but those vendors claim that file level collections are forensically sound.
I am potentially looking to introduce such a tool/product and would like to hear experiences from the audience at large.
Thanks
Greetings,
You might try posting your question to this group - litsupport@yahoogroups.com
There is a lot of traffic about ediscovery tools over there.
-David
Hello everybody.
The truth is I have lately been very attracted by the idea of giving our clients eDiscovery support. However, it seems quite difficult to find a good software solution which can help us. Any of the tools Dilbert has mentioned in his first post seem to be more suitable for developing into the client's premises rather than to be installed in equipment of our own. What I mean is that I wouldn't like to deploy a complete hardware and software solution from scratch for every different client, but to have "something" installed in our laptops to help in a situation like that.
I know my message is a little bit confusing, but my ideas about this matter are quite in a similar state D Any thought would be appreciated.
I have worked in litigation support for over ten years and in forensics for the last two years. These used to be completely separate disciplines but more and more I see them merging. I don't mean that lit. support departments are going to start doing hardcore forensic investigations but they are capable of imaging drives and handling imaged data.
As for what is the correct eDiscovery tool. What I do when I consider a tool is to sit down and spec the job with an eye on what the client wants, what type of data I am handling and the available options. You also need to consider where you are in the litigation support process. Are you performing the data evaluation, culling, reviewing, producing for trial, etc. One application may never be able to do all the tasks required. The lit. support industry changes almost daily so the application you chose six months ago might not be the best option today. You need to re-evaluate your requirements every time you spec a job.
The problem is compounded these days because the Big Boys have discovered that litigation support is a multi-billion dollar a year industry and they are throwing their weight around. Ten years ago we had Concordance and Summation, Access and Excel. Now you have everything from Concordance and Summation to AccessData, Guidance, EMC, IBM, Oracle and more.
Not the least of your problems will be how to determine the application you chose will work under pressure. Sure the apps work in the demo with 5gb of data but how do they work when you have millions of records and 2.5tb of data being accessed from 15 different firms in four different countries.
It is a tough job.
I'll second that. In one of the cases that I worked on, recently, a production request to a Fortune 50 company resulted in the production of over 10 million pages of documents which had been identified by the eDiscovery software (I won't say which one).
The vendors will argue that the problem lies in having too broad search criteria, but when you are dealing with something like a product liability case and the product took a decade to develop and test, 10 million pages might be considered small. In addition, the Courts are often loathe to narrow the scope of production for fear of having the decisions reversed on appeal.
Some of the big law firms are handling this by hiring pools of locum tenens lawyers at $50/hr to pour through the documents looking for candidates to withhold from production. So whether these products actually save money or simply shift the cost seems to depend upon the potential liability of the organization using them.
Hi,
It was mentioned a while back about the migration to different programmes due to the nature of the discovery process changing. (for example to Oracle, Summation etc). I was wondering if anyone knows of any comparisons made of each of the products and how many concurrent users each of the products can support??
Joe
Collecting (discovering) information is the easy part… In my experience its the redacting that's a real pain. Depending on how you're handling the collection, metadata can also be a curse. Given those two hurdles, you could scratch Encase and FTK as all-in-one e-discovery tools. Truth is our legal team uses a combination of 4 or 5 tools during the process.