E-discovery: Importance and future trends for enterprises

In the digital age, the world of electronic documents is expanding rapidly. The popularity of mobile devices, web applications and cloud platforms has led to the continuous generation of data in our communication and business activities. This has also led to a large number of documents required for litigation, arbitration and investigations often existing in electronic format.

What is eDiscovery?

Electronic discovery (e-discovery) is the process of identifying, collecting, and generating electronically stored information (ESI) in order to develop evidence for legal, preventive, and preparatory legal actions. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) provides a visual representation of this workflow. While not all steps must be followed, it provides a framework for understanding the overall process of e-discovery.

When to use eDiscovery?

E-discovery is often conducted when legal action is initiated or when there is a need to protect oneself from legal action. However, its application is not limited to these situations. At the beginning of an investigation, the parties involved identify all sources of evidence, including ESI, to support the case. A legal hold is then placed on all relevant data to ensure it is not modified, deleted, or destroyed. Next, data is collected by extracting material from data sources, indexed, and stored in a data warehouse.

The data processing phase separates relevant data from non-relevant data. After screening, only relevant data is transferred to a secure environment for reviewers to code. At this stage, relevant documents may be converted to a static format (such as TIFF or PDF) to facilitate information editing.

Technology-assisted review (TAR), predictive coding, and other analytical software can help reduce the number of documents attorneys have to review, allowing legal teams to prioritize the most relevant content, saving time and avoiding wasted time on irrelevant material.

Attorneys will analyze ESI, looking for patterns, themes, and key clues. Ultimately, the evidence will be presented in depositions, hearings, and trials.

Importance of e-discovery to your company

Connecting employees through collaborative software has improved operational efficiency and organization. However, this cloud-based data collection also brings challenges, especially in reviewing platform formats.

As a result, eDiscovery has become critical to legal investigations around the world. EDiscovery is a time-consuming and costly endeavor for corporate legal departments and law firms. Getting it right is critical to comply with legal regulations, achieve cost-effectiveness, and meet deadlines. This includes optimizing workflows and technologies to manage and preserve the vast amounts of electronic data, primarily from:

• e-mail
• Electronic Documents
• Presentations
• database
• Audio and video files
• Social Media
• Website and its metadata (such as timestamp, recipient information, etc.)

The US courts and bar associations have recognized that attorneys involved in litigation must have sufficient legal technology knowledge to meet ethical standards of professional competence, oversight, and confidentiality. They need to be aware of common problems in e-discovery, which further emphasizes the importance of a team of forensic technology experts in e-discovery.

eDiscovery at Arrow Translation

At Arrow Translation, we believe in combining advanced technology with human expertise to achieve the best e-discovery practices. Our forensic experts analyze every source of data using our proprietary Early Case Assessment (ECA) engine, Digital Reef. Digital Reef is one of the most powerful tools on the market, capable of reducing data sets by more than 95%. Our e-tech platform is equipped with big data processing capabilities, processing up to 17TB of data per day, which speeds up processing.

By leveraging ECA technology, our experts are able to reduce costs, protect sensitive information, and ensure legal compliance .

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