Electronic discovery services (or e-discovery, eDiscovery) refers to discovery in civil litigation which deals with the exchange of information in an electronic format. This is ofter referred to as "Electronically Stored Information" or ESI. Usually a digital forensics analysis is performed to recover evidence. A wider array of people are involvedlved in eDiscovery like forensic investigators, lawyers and IT managers which leads to problems with confusing terminology.
Electronic information is considered different from paper information because of its intangible form, volume, transience and persistence. Electronic information is usually accompanied by metadata that is not found in paper documents and that can play an important part as evidence (for example the date and time a document was written could be useful in a copyright case). The preservation of metadata from electronic documents creates special challenges to prevent spoliation.
Corporate and government investigators face numerous pressures when performing digital investigations. The number of investigations grows every day along with the amount of electronically stored information requiring analysis. Deadlines continue to be more aggressive, raising the urgency to find all of the evidence and accurately determine who knew what, and when. Controlling the costs remains a major concern, preventing teams from adding more people to cope with an ever-increasing workload.
In working to meet these demands, security and forensics teams have relied on tradition technologies and work-flows. These manual work-flows often employ investigators collecting data across the enterprise using multiple tools, applying simple keyword search techniques and reviewing gigabytes of data document by document. Because of this, today’s corporate investigation process is onerous and time-consuming, requiring a large number of manual steps and significant re-work which, in turn, costs millions of dollars and leaves the organization vulnerable to substantial risk and financial exposure.
There are quite a few electronic discovery software's that can aid in the digital investigation process, helping investigators handle more cases in less time while improving the accuracy of the results. Electronic discovery software forensically collects electronic files from across the organization, automatically analyzes the data, and enables investigators to rapidly identify all evidence and suspects involved in a corporate or government investigation.
Electronic Discovery Software
AccessData - AD Summation eDiscovery (http://accessdata.com/products/ediscovery-litigation-support)
Fios - Relativity - (http://www.fiosinc.com/e-discovery-software/default.aspx)
Clearwell <Symantec> - (http://www.clearwellsystems.com/electronic-discovery-solutions/electronic-discovery-litigation.php)
Lexisnexis - Concordence (http://law.lexisnexis.com/concordance)
SkyByte Consulting works with several Chicago law offices and companies to provide support and implementation of these software's and other forensic services.
Electronic Discovery Services - AD Summation iBlaze
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 by
Darren Sieck
SkyByte is highly experienced in Electronic Discovery Services. Recently SkyByte completed loading 2.4+ Terabytes of Electronic Discovery for a large Chicago law firm that was running AD Summation. (Formally CT Summation)
Prior to the loading of data for this case, SkyByte designed a high performance system that was capable of indexing 2.4+Terabytes of data for searches by the expert witnesses and associated attorneys for the case. SkyByte choose a SAN solution from NetApp and architected a fiber channel link via HBAs to high powered Dell R710 database servers. The hardware was paramount in handling data this size.
SkyByte also put it's extensive roots in Network Security to use for providing secure remote access to expert witnesses that worked all over the US. We devised a highly secure solution that met all guidelines set in the case.
The Electronic Discovery Service load process:
All data sent for the project was encrypted with 256bit AES encryption on USB drives. SkyByte devised strict quality control methods for decrypting the data and checking for data integrity carefully comparing files from the original disks to the Storage Area Network (SAN) where they were to be imported. This ensured we had an accounting of the millions of pages of Electronic Discovery that were handled for the project. We also devised methods of organization to handle case files that easily exceeded gigabytes.
Most of the data had been supplied by 7 different defendants which used 7 different eDiscovery companies during the data export process. This made the project highly difficult. Unfortunately the e-discovery companies supplied the data in several different formats, although usually concordance. SkyByte was able to adapt to the data challenges and custom modify DII load files and file import structures. The supplied files came in a variety of formats and we used a variety of tools to convert all load files into Summation's DII format. SkyByte was also able to import the supplied native and OCR files for all supplied Electronic Discovery. SkyByte provides eDiscovery data load services to law firms running Summation. SkyByte is well versed in loading difficult data.
Electronic Discovery Services:
Prior to the loading of data for this case, SkyByte designed a high performance system that was capable of indexing 2.4+Terabytes of data for searches by the expert witnesses and associated attorneys for the case. SkyByte choose a SAN solution from NetApp and architected a fiber channel link via HBAs to high powered Dell R710 database servers. The hardware was paramount in handling data this size.
SkyByte also put it's extensive roots in Network Security to use for providing secure remote access to expert witnesses that worked all over the US. We devised a highly secure solution that met all guidelines set in the case.
The Electronic Discovery Service load process:
All data sent for the project was encrypted with 256bit AES encryption on USB drives. SkyByte devised strict quality control methods for decrypting the data and checking for data integrity carefully comparing files from the original disks to the Storage Area Network (SAN) where they were to be imported. This ensured we had an accounting of the millions of pages of Electronic Discovery that were handled for the project. We also devised methods of organization to handle case files that easily exceeded gigabytes.
Most of the data had been supplied by 7 different defendants which used 7 different eDiscovery companies during the data export process. This made the project highly difficult. Unfortunately the e-discovery companies supplied the data in several different formats, although usually concordance. SkyByte was able to adapt to the data challenges and custom modify DII load files and file import structures. The supplied files came in a variety of formats and we used a variety of tools to convert all load files into Summation's DII format. SkyByte was also able to import the supplied native and OCR files for all supplied Electronic Discovery. SkyByte provides eDiscovery data load services to law firms running Summation. SkyByte is well versed in loading difficult data.
Electronic Discovery Services:
- Convert eDiscovery from common industry formats
- Customize DII Load files for Summation
- Import eDiscovery into Summation
- Architect systems capable of running demanding litigation software.
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