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.

Madison Chooses StoredIQ to Manage eDiscovery In-House

Madison Capital Management, LLC (“Madison”), an alternative investment management firm with offices in the US and Europe has deployed StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Platform to gain actionable intelligence from its rapidly expanding electronic data – allowing legal and IT teams to work in tandem to enhance eDiscovery strategies, meet compliance mandates and reduce risk and cost.

We wanted to better understand what data we have, where it resides and determine how we can better manage our information across the enterprise and do so in a proactive manner. With StoredIQ we are able to make intelligent decisions about the state of our data based on corporate policies and legal discovery requirements. – Tony Balding, vice president, software solutions at Madison

From a GC’s perspective, we needed a solution that allowed me to work closely with the IT department, analyze the data to determine the merits of a dispute quickly, understand related review cost and provide a defensible audit trail. StoredIQ exceeded that expectation with their unique capabilities, such as analyzing data where it natively resides, the user-friendly legal and IT workflow, and the scoreboard that keeps track of review costs as data is identified, preserved and collected. – Judy Michael, assistant vice president, legal, asset and risk management at Madison

Market-leading companies use StoredIQ to respond rapidly and efficiently to legal matters, litigation, and investigations. Utilizing StoredIQ, corporate legal teams can locate, analyze and act upon unstructured electronically stored information much more comprehensively and efficiently. As a result, companies can better manage their legal risk and reduce expenses, while formulating superior legal strategies. With StoredIQ, companies:

• Quickly locate matter-relevant electronic documents with advanced search technology
• Analyze electronic documents in-place with detailed data topology maps, advanced analytics, and precise data explorers
• Preserve and collect data to a secure legal hold repository, preserving all metadata and business context
• Perform first-pass reviews on documents before exporting data downstream
• Act on and manage potentially relevant data in a legally defensible manner with audit trails and a robust chain of custody

StoredIQ’s award-winning solution streamlines eDiscovery processes for legal and IT, allows for early case analysis “in the Wild,” and provides complete cost predictability.

Making the Case for “Earliest Case Analysis”

Analyze Anywhere Moves ECA Into 'The Wild'

In a recent eDiscovery Journal article, Barry Murphy wrote about the trend of Early Case Assessment (ECA) moving even earlier in the eDiscovery process to be more in line with the identification and collection phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). Murphy explains how, by adopting an integrated ECA solution, organizations can simplify the eDiscovery process, and are able to achieve the following results:

• Quickly begin analyzing content without having to move or copy data
• Eliminate over-collection by enabling precise data culling prior to preservation
• Review file contents with keywords and entities of interest highlighted
• Use tagging to mark files of interest or group objects together relating to a common task

We agree with Barry’s assessment, as we see the same trend amongst our customers.  In fact we’ve been talking about this trend ourselves for a while now.  Our Early Case Analysis solution 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 early case analysis on data “in the wild” gives legal counsel the ability to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter significantly faster than traditional ECA.

What about you? If you’ve seen the same trend, tell us about it. If you’ve experienced something different, we’d like to hear about that too. For more information visit Early Case Analysis with StoredIQ’s Analyze Anywhere.