3 Reasons Enterprise Search is not eDiscovery

Enterprise Search is an amazing technology that enables a single person to find the single document most relevant to their specific goal. When deployed properly it helps companies greatly improve the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge workers. I spent years in that market and saw this first hand.

By the same token, Enterprise Search makes for a  terrible eDiscovery solution.

Here are three reasons why:

Lengthy Deployment
A typical enterprise search solution will take 3-6 months to deploy. That kind of timeline butts up against the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures requirements for disclosures within 90-120 days. Additionally, the legal team will make early strategic decisions about the case without being fully informed. In either case, the results can be disastrous.

Misses key data sources
Even if you have an Enterprise Search solution in house it isn’t likely to have indexed critical Electronically Stored Information (ESI) sources such as archives and cloud based storage. Adding these additional systems typically means additional costs from professional services and software licenses. However, failure to discover content in these systems can easily lead to an adverse inference, injunction or other court-rendered damage.

Not Actionable
Enterprise Search leads the single user to a single document. The user then clicks one of the top search results to view a document But legal teams deal with potentially millions of documents that need to be identified, moved to legal hold, organized into collections, processed and analyzed. Enterprise Search lacks even the most basic capabilities required to defensibly collect the documents, making it irrelevant at best and harmful at worst.

By contrast an eDiscovery soltution needs to be fast to deploy – allowing discovery to begin minutes after installation, or within seconds if proactively used. It must connect to data sources such as content management systems, live email servers, archives and cloud storage. Finally, it has to provide workflows and tools that empower legal teams to take direct action, such as forensically sound collections and defensible analysis on the collected data.

Whether you are developing a proactive application or looking for a rapid solution for reactive response, Digital Reef can help you become eDiscovery ready.  Want to learn more? Stop by the Digital Reef booth at next week’s Enterprise Search Summit or drop us a line.

Additional information can be found here:

Enterprise Search

eDiscovery

Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP)

Electronically Stored Information