Intelligent eDiscovery Solutions

The eDiscovery Challenge

Since Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect in December 2006, eDiscovery has been top-of-mind for organizations of all sizes and across all industries. These Amendments placed a heavy burden on organizations to find, analyze, and produce electronically stored information (ESI) in very short timeframes. Organizations have been struggling to meet the requirements ever since.

The average multi-national corporation has more than 150 simultaneous legal matters¹ and most expect litigation levels to stay the same or increase. The average cost of eDiscovery is > $1.5 million per matter.² That means that a typical large organization spends greater than $225 million on eDiscovery per year. With litigation and costs on the rise, organizations are getting serious about eDiscovery solutions

While some organizations have tried to address the challenge, only 23% of organizations have end-to-end solution to gather & filter data.³ In light of that, it's not surprising that less than 20% are confident about accuracy, accessibility, and trustworthiness of data.⁴

What frustrates organizations is the inability to make fast, informed decisions based on ESI content because:

• Multiple tools for collection, processing, and Early Case Assessment (ECA) decreases efficiency
• Search and collection tools are cumbersome
  • Often requiring 4 FTEs to administer
• ECA tools require pre-processing and staging due to lack of support for common content types, e.g. images
• Huge volumes of data are moved from system to system, increasing risk of spoliation
• Inability to analyze data quickly leads to high processing and review costs

Digital Reef for eDiscovery

Digital Reef offers a smarter way to conduct eDiscovery. It easily addresses FRCP challenges by allowing organizations to identify, collect, process, analyze, and review data in place. This is significant because the movement of data is minimized—organizations only move or export relevant information. Digital Reef can also write data to WORM storage other repository (e.g. SharePoint) for legal hold.

With Digital Reef, organizations get:

• One tool for collection, processing, and ECA
• Reduced processing costs - by focusing on relevant data
• Lower downstream review costs - less data sent for review
• Massive manpower savings - fewer FTEs to manage collection, processing, and ECA
• A streamlined eDiscovery process - greater throughput at lower cost
• Minimized movement of data - to decrease risk of spoliation
• Immediate benefits—because of rapid deployment, the Digital Reef solution can be up and running within hours, unlike enterprise search tools that can take months or even years to deploy

Enterprise-Class eDiscovery

Digital Reef scales to address huge volumes of data and supports multi-tenancy in a way that first-generation eDiscovery solutions cannot.

Putting things into perspective

In today's organization, one terabyte (TB) of data is the desktop and email content of approximately ten data custodians. An effective eDiscovery solution needs to collect, process, analyze and review huge amounts of data and do this quickly and cost effectively. The most efficient way of analyzing data is to leave it in place and "scan" it to determine if it is relevant to a case before moving it. With first-generation Early Case Assessment tools, movement of data that is likely relevant to a case is mandatory before it can be evaluated. These first-generation tools are very limited in terms of the amount of data they can handle at one time—creating manual work for organizations as well as eating up valuable time.

Why Digital Reef?

Digital Reef is an enterprise software solution that extends easily over commodity hardware (to provide processing and analytic scale). It provides the ability to scan and identify relevant data without having to move it to an appliance.

Digital Reef also provides multi-tenancy and project portability—both are required to manage eDiscovery across an organization. Multi-tenancy is critically important in allowing different groups to view data from differing vantage points. For example, plaintiffs and defending lawyers need to manage and view data in very different ways. Another aspect of multi-tenancy is having the ability to manage multiple matters from the same software system. These scenarios are only possible with a solution like Digital Reef that supports multi-tenant security options for viewing and managing the data. With project portability, Digital Reef—unlike appliance-based solutions—allows an organization to better manage dynamic, ongoing litigation or compliance matters by comparing content over time for relevance to a matter.

To learn more about Digital Reef for eDiscovery, contact us at info@digitalreefinc.com.