Back in 2006, when Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) was amended to create a new category of discoverable information – Electronically Stored Information or ESI – eDiscovery was legitimized, and eDiscovery software was created to move ESI through the litigation process.
Fast forward to 2020, and ESI has grown in both size and complexity – terabytes (or even petabytes) of data from multiple sources like social media, email, chat, the Internet of Things (IoT) – and the goal of collecting, processing, and analyzing data for litigation has proven even more challenging.
But focusing on this challenge creates tunnel vision and overshadows other ways this powerful eDiscovery technology can be used. Anytime an organization needs to quickly ingest, organize, analyze, and report on large datasets, eDiscovery software offers an immediate solution and can be applied in various ways. One example is how government agencies are finding eDiscovery software is the perfect tool for responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Another example of thinking outside the eDiscovery box comes from J.S. Held, a company providing services for commercial contractors, allowing them to better understand where issues arise in their construction projects. In a recent conversation with Tim Martin, Technical Project Manager at J.S. Held, he shared, “We use our eDiscovery software internally to handle the large volume of data created and generated during a construction project. When we receive hard drives of files from clients, it enables us to quickly search, tag, code, and sort those documents, allowing us to review them with a streamlined approach and within a quicker timeframe.”
Previously, the team at J.S. Held would load files from clients, which in some cases had over a million documents, onto a file server, then have to manually open each one of those files and move them into a folder to classify them by type. “But by using eDiscovery software analytics, we can do that on ingestion. As soon as the documents come in, we gain a clear picture of the data, and it can be quickly coded and classified, enabling us to cut sorting and coding times down to measurable hours, as opposed to the days it would have taken with our old process.”
In the end, that’s what eDiscovery software does: ingests a large volume of data, giving the user deep insight into what’s there with the ability to easily track and report those findings. It has so many applications across multiple industries, like commercial construction. It doesn’t matter if that data is a part of litigation or not. And as enterprise data continues to grow exponentially, this insight becomes more and more vital. As Tim from J.S. Held puts it, “By finding that needle in the haystack sooner, we can quickly and accurately communicate any issues to clients, which they greatly appreciate.”
[View source.]
