What Should I Know About Electronic Discovery Services? Electronic discovery services or e-discovery services are the method of choice today to deal with electrically stored information. Electronically stored information is the data that is available about you on the internet or the web. People around the world have more and more access to the internet or the World Wide Web (www). This in turn is increasing their online footprint. You will be amazed to know that your online footprint includes everything you do online, right from your emails to blogs to social media updates. Electronically stored data is made up of all this information among several other things. To put it a little more in context, electronically stored information is also the data that the company has about you, that is, • • • • • •
Your name, Address, Your current designation in your company, Performance appraisal and ratings, Current designation, Job description,
Information on hobbies, like and dislikes etc. The user group of Electronic discovery consists of litigation firms, attorneys and lawyers. Are there any sub-parts to electronic discovery services? There is quite a lot to electronic discovery services. Read on to know more about them and have a better understanding: 1)Data processing •
Online data is in the form of videos, audios, emails, text, websites, blogs etc. Electronic discovery services have to be technologically competent enough to process this data at optimum speed.
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Data processing will also entail scanning of relevant documents to later sort through them.
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A sound electronic delivery system should be able to manage all these tasks efficiently.
2)Data collection and data preservation •
Access to electronically stored data becomes important when you are about to start a litigation. Data preservation is efficient storage and use of this data.
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Data identification is also a part of data collection. The staff at the electronic discovery service provider is expert in scrutinizing the relevant data from a vast data pool.
3)Data analysis and filtering •
Identification of data is followed by its careful analysis. If such an analysis reveals some interesting facts, you should not get surprised.
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After the preliminary analysis of the data is completed, a further and in depth analysis is required to extract maximum information from the available data keeping in mind the purpose of the litigation.
Why should I use electronic discovery services, when my staff can do the same work? There is a simple reply to this; it saves cost to the company! All the steps involved in the whole process right from the collection, identification, preservation and analysis are more or less done online. This is cheaper than having your staff physically visit a place, request access to information, go through middle-men etc. Even though electronic discovery services are not very popular, they are fast catching the trend. More and more people are getting to know of the advantages of taking electronic discovery services. It is not hacking in to any system or database. This is not so, as it is almost like making a request and court intervention can be made to collect this data if such request is denied. How do I find the best vendor for electronic discovery services? You can go through any of the following suggested ways to find the best electronic discovery provider: 1)Google electronic discovery services. You will come up with a million hits, then proceed to the choice of your vendor, as most companies offering these services have a user-friendly website and customer care numbers available. 2)The second best way is to ask around. If you are a regular around litigation firm, ask your contacts for references to an electronic discovery service provider. Weigh all your options before zeroing on the final service provider and don’t just believe on the spoken words. 3)Once you have come down to a few service providers that you think might fit the bill, do the following: •
Check for the credentials of the electronic discovery service provider and look for some previous clients and references. Electronic discovery services are of a confidential nature. Ascertain for a fact that the data maintenance will be secure and confidential.
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Evaluate the service providers based on the amount of time that they spend with you. Check out their technological staff and machinery.
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Once you have finalized a service provider, you can insist on a written contract regarding the confidentiality and the ownership of the collected data. Towards the end of the litigation, all data used for the case and also that considered irrelevant should reside with you.
The popularity of electronic discovery as a profession is really picking-up fast as more and more litigation experts are understanding that electronic discovery services helps them develop the argument proportionally.