Electronically-stored information (ESI) is central to any legal case or audit. Although it makes up the vast majority of today's discoverable information assets, most corporate legal and IT organizations lack the means and resources to collect and review ESI in a timely and efficient manner. IT staff are overwhelmed by terabytes of content scattered throughout the enterprise across diverse systems and locations, in assorted formats. To address eDiscovery requests, they rely on multiple tools to collect data under strict timeframes. The result is a frustrating, costly, and risk-laden eDiscovery process.
Early Case Assessment (ECA) solutions allow businesses to efficiently gather, pare down, and review electronically-stored information so they can make better-informed decisions, control outsourced processing expenses, reduce outside review fees, and improve litigation outcomes.
Digital Reef Enables Fast, Cost Effective ECA
Digital Reef provides a smarter, more efficient way to execute ECA. First generation appliance-based ECA solutions have typically been deployed in response to a particular matter or case. However, first generation solutions are limited by:
- Inability to handle popular file types - Scanned images - TIFF, JPEG, GIF and other file types have to be processed using ancillary methods requiring manual intervention.
- Restricted scale - ECA appliances top out at 250-500 GB - they cannot easily or efficiently manage large volumes of data or be expanded or grouped together in a unified fashion.
- Inefficient design - Early solutions cannot process data in-place; rather, they unnecessarily copy and move large amounts of data, which are then processed in blocks - an inefficient, risk-inherent, and time-consuming approach.
- Narrow scope - it is overly complex and difficult to partition ECA appliances to accommodate multiple users, projects, and review teams.
In contrast, Digital Reef—based on a multi-tiered, grid computing architecture—provides the scalability and performance needed to achieve comprehensive data discovery including intelligent culling and prioritization of responsive data quickly, accurately, and automatically—no matter how large the corpus of data.
Using Digital Reef, IT can cost effectively gather and process enterprise-wide ESI in support of eDiscovery, compliance, and audit activities. Corporate counsel is armed with better information allowing them to effectively assess the economic impact of potential lawsuits (settle vs. fight costs) and qualify cases (evaluate merit, identify smoking guns, assess likely outcome), plus take a proactive role in eDiscovery matters (compliance monitoring).
Digital Reef is unique in that it:
- Delivers industry-leading scale and performance. Digital Reef's dynamic, multi-tiered architecture scales to address huge volumes of information—meeting the requirements of the largest matters and the largest organizations. Capable of discovering, indexing, and classifying multiple terabytes of data per day, Digital Reef delivers the performance needed for true early case assessment in one easy to deploy and use solution.
- Processes data in place for rapid, efficient analysis. Unlike first generation ECA solutions that copy and move data prior to processing, Digital Reef indexes and processes data in place. It organizes more content in less time than alternative solutions and reduces risk and complexity by moving only relevant data when necessary.
- Utilizes advanced analytics to eliminate extraneous data and streamline the review process. Digital Reef employs sophisticated analytics to remove duplicate and irrelevant content—significantly reducing the amount of information that has to be processed and reviewed. Paring datasets into manageable volumes makes better use of internal resources for legal reviews, plus reduce outside processing and review costs. Using Digital Reef, businesses can reduce outside review volumes by 70% or more.
- Accommodates multiple review teams with its multi-tenant design. Digital Reef's unique multi-tenant architecture is ideal for diverse multi-user, multi-team environments. The flexible design allows legal teams to collaborate (share tags and comments) or work autonomously System administrators create fine-grained security policies to protect data, control access, and maintain confidentiality.
- Supports a wide range of file formats. Digital Reef supports a wide range of file formats— including scanned images (JPEG, TIFF, PDF, etc)—allowing businesses to process more data in-house—for substantial cost and time savings. With Digital Reef's OCR processing capabilities, previously "invisible" files become visible to data management tools and can be managed as easily as Word files.
Digital Reef - The Clear Choice for Enterprise-scale ECA
With a unique multi-tiered, grid computing architecture, Digital Reef is the only ECA platform that delivers the scale and performance to examine all of an enterprise's data. It discovers, indexes and classifies multiple-terabytes of data per day—meeting the needs of even the largest organizations. And Digital Reef's advanced analytics not only reduce ESI content into manageable volumes, but help prioritize data for expert review—allowing in-house counsel to carry out legal reviews more cost effectively. With Digital Reef, IT managers gather enterprise-wide ESI more quickly and efficiently; corporate counsel gets the insight needed to make faster, better-informed decisions; and organizations realize substantial cost savings.
