Early Case Assessment Finds Its Proper Place in the EDRM

For the past year we at StoredIQ, like everyone else in the eDiscovery space, spent quite a bit of time talking about our early case assessment (ECA) capabilities. Which is why our ears perked up last week when George Rudoy contributed an article to Law.com reflecting on ECA, its definition, and its evolution from a novel feature to finding its proper place in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). In his post, Rudoy states:

“While the debate on the usefulness and effectiveness of ECA continues, it should be noted that how the term is defined continues to evolve. Some of the service providers adapted quickly enough to have ECA as part of their “arsenal” a few years ago. Many of these tools were designed to filter metadata after collection and help the company decide how much a case will cost. This is a noble objective, but not completely in line with the original intent of ECA — which was to help an organization determine its risk exposure and make strategic decisions about a case based on that analysis.”

We couldn’t agree more. In fact, we’ve been talking about the importance of performing ECA at an earlier phase of the EDRM for a while now. We believe that for ECA to have its greatest potential impact it needs to be performed during the identification phase of EDRM, prior to collections. StoredIQ’s ECA technology, Analyze Anywhere, indexes unstructured electronic data and makes it available for searching and analysis without affecting metadata or content, prior to any movement or collection of data.  This ability to do ECA on data “in the wild” allows legal counsel to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter significantly faster than post-collection ECA. Additionally, it makes the data set that is ultimately produced for downstream, formal review not only qualitatively enriched and context aware, but also considerably smaller, thereby significantly reducing legal costs and risks. According to Rudoy:

“The premise of early case assessment is to give legal teams the ability to conduct up-front, fast, intelligent data gathering, with probative queries on the dataset to reduce it to a relevant universe that can be assessed.  Legal teams have a need to see “what they got” faster than what traditional EDD services typically can provide. “

StoredIQ can form threads, comparisons, relationships and statistics much faster than human reviewers can. Our user interface includes dynamic visuals, detailed reports and an intuitive dashboard to accomplish in-depth analysis of once unwieldy amounts of discovered data.  As the data set is culled —by custodian, file type, email domain, date range, key terminology, etc. — the StoredIQ Scoreboard presents a running count of the files retained (and eliminated from consideration) and automatically calculates the potential savings from the downstream review cycle.

By accomplishing ECA near the beginning of the eDiscovery workflow, ECA finally achieves the goals it originally set out to accomplish for improved legal strategy decisions and cost reduction.

StoredIQ Helps Companies ‘AIIM’ for Information Intelligence at Info360 Conference

StoredIQ will be a conference presenter as part of the eDiscovery track during next week’s AIIM Info360 conference. The AIIM Info360 conference focuses on helping companies find new ways to capture, store, analyze, access, and deliver enterprise information.  AIIM Info360, will be held March 21 – 24, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC.

As part of the AIIM Info360 eDiscovery conference track, StoredIQ will be discussing the risks and costs of inefficient information management. Our goal is to help attendees understand the value of information intelligence across all their data sources, so information can be organized and managed according to specific policies and leveraged as an asset for eDiscovery, records management, governance and compliance.

WHERE: Walter E. Washington Convention Center —Washington, DC

WHEN: Wednesday, March 23 from 1:00 PM – 1:40 PM ET

TOPIC: Synchronize Your Approach to Information Management

DESCRIPTION: Organizations are forced to deal with vast and increasing amounts of unstructured information. IT departments have to operate on tighter budgets, and managing data is overwhelming. Organizations take a siloed approach to information management, dealing with eDiscovery, compliance and data storage separately; resulting in higher cost and increased business risk. Join StoredIQ vice president of field operations, Ellis Ishaya, as he discusses:

• How a synchronized approach to records and information management enables organizations to cut costs and gain more insight and control over their critical data needs, especially in today’s highly-regulated business world.
• How to properly find, classify and manage all information according to business value and risk.
• How to ensure a comprehensive, secure and efficient approach to meeting their governance and compliance needs.
• How to automate retention rules according to existing records retention schedules.

In addition to presenting, StoredIQ will exhibit our information intelligence solution at booth 1633 during the three-day event. Booth visitors can register to win a free data assessment service. Attendees that would like to schedule a meeting in advance should contact Jacqui Galow at info@storediq.com or +1 512-334-3156. For more information about AIIM Info360 or to register, visit www.aiimexpo.com.

Managing Remote Workers: Don’t Get Caught Out in the Cold!

As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, this winter has broken records for snowfall across the country—we even had a few inches of snow here in Austin!  But what a difference a week makes. As of this post, the high temperature in Austin should be near 80 today!  As most of the country begins to thaw and come out of hibernation, it really is incredible to think about how this winter’s inclement weather forced many of us to work virtually from home…more often than usual. However, remote workers can create major information management concerns—opening organizations up to data breaches and complicating eDiscovery requests. According to the Financial Times:

Whether the corporate IT team is ready or not, a growing number of employees now exercise choice when it comes to the tools and services they use to get their jobs done. They are bringing their own mobile phones, tablet computers and laptops to work and using them to send and receive potentially sensitive business data.

In case of an eDiscovery request, organizations can be caught out in the cold dealing with remote desktops, laptops and tablet computers if they don’t have the right information management technology in place.

Typical desktop collections that rely on file-copying software can be cumbersome—Organizations often over-collect data, as up to 90 percent of desktop data is non-responsive to a legal matter.  They also face significant difficulties properly preserving all metadata, taking enormous amounts of time to complete data collection activities, and having no automated method to restart the collection process after a network interruption or if a remote user disconnects while a collection is in progress.  The result is that either a member of the IT staff or a consultant is dispatched to a remote location to perform custodian collection, or remote users are forced to ship their laptops into a main office for a few days.

Although we’re more than halfway through this winter, now would be a good time to define an information management policy for your remote workers so you’ll be prepared for that next big storm.  Some things for you to consider should include:

1. Define, document and publish an official company policy on working remotely, including security, network and information access;
2. Ensure that you have sufficient access points and bandwidth to support your remote staff;
3. Implement a desktop collection capability as part of your information management strategy to meet any regulatory compliance, eDiscovery and security obligations.

Let’s hope that Punxsutawney Phil is right and we’re in for an early spring, at least here in Austin it looks that way!