PEERspectives
Special Advertising Section
July/August 2005 Issue
Discover PreDiscovery™ and Save Time,
Effort and Money
by Jon Rowe
Executive Vice President
Image Capture Engineering, Inc.
Jon, a 15-year veteran of litigation support, is the cofounder of ICE
(Image Capture Engineering, Inc.) and heads up the imaging and
electronic discovery services for Pro Copy, ICE’s sister company.
Image Capture Engineering, Inc.
8710 F St
Ste. 128
Omaha, NE 68127
(402)-970-0060
www.imagecap.com
www.procopy.com
Is there a bigger buzz in the legal
world than electronic discovery? It’s referred to as ED (electronic
discovery), EED (electronic evidence discovery), and EDD (electronic
data discovery) and there are others. Many legal professionals have come
to realize that the most simplistic explanation for this phenomenon is
that computer files have become an integral part of litigation and they
must be dealt with to effectively serve the clients and consider all the
evidence.
The reason that electronic discovery is
so important and must be considered in almost any litigation is because
the majority of the documents and information that is created today is
done so on our computers and servers and never gets printed.
Correspondence is often considered key to many cases yet most of our
correspondence is done via email, instant messaging, text pagers and
many other devices and never ends up in a file cabinet or warehouse. If
attorneys aren’t actively creating production requests for electronic
based information they are missing vital information in a case.
What are some drawbacks to the
typical ED process?
While encouraging attorneys and legal assistants to take charge and
go after the electronic information as well as other forms of evidence,
there are some drawbacks to the discovery process that must be kept in
careful consideration. The first mistake that often occurs is very broad
discovery requests that are too general and that produce more
information than they could feasibly review in their lifetime.
Most often only about 5-10% of the data
on a computer could be considered relevant to litigation. This is why so
many law firms who have embarked on the process of requesting electronic
data end up with more data then they want and frequently want to decline
paying for all the processing done, the costs can spiral out of control
in a matter of hours. Automatically requesting to print or convert
everything on a computer is not only a costly mistake but is inefficient
and will most definitely make it impossible to meet deadlines.
The answer is to effectively cull down
and eliminate the unwanted files by focusing on file types and content.
This part is very similar to taking trips to the warehouses and storage
facilities to narrow down the paper document collection by general
categories. As you know, many times several passes are made and it’s an
ongoing ‘investigation’ to find the ‘boxes’ or files you need.
A similar process is required when
dealing with mountains of electronic data. It doesn’t make any more
sense to make multiple sets of copies of every document a company ever
produced than it does to try and print or convert every file on
someone’s computer.
PreDiscovery™ is a Vital Part of the
Electronic Discovery Process
PreDiscovery™ is the operation that occurs after a proper forensics
extraction and copy process, where we inventory, cull down and extract
the content so that the review process can begin. PreDiscovery™ is a
more efficient and cost effective way to approach the first phase of the
electronic discovery review process. By culling down files based on type
and doing initial searches through the documents in their native format
we can dramatically reduce the number of files that are eventually
processed or even printed and get much closer to that 5-10% relevancy
target at a fraction of the cost.
The way this is accomplished is through
specialized software tools that allow us to create inventories and
catalogs of all the files that reside on the computers and servers which
are in question. After the inventories are completed, we begin to
isolate the general file types that are relevant such as emails, office
documents, project files and other relevant file types, then the data
can be rapidly searched electronically so key documents are quickly
located. By incorporating these additional steps prior to any type of
production process, we eliminate a large portion of those files on
systems which have nothing to do with the data relevant to the case. The
PreDiscovery™ phase is the solution to automate this process.
Here is a typical scenario of how we
implement the PreDiscovery™ process and how it can dramatically reduce
the cost and amount of data that needs to be reviewed. Imagine getting a
stack of CD’s, DVD’s or a hard drive containing 20 gigabytes of
information which you need to have online for attorney review
‘yesterday’. With potentially hundreds of thousands of emails and
attachments how can you possibly begin to make the data available in a
matter of hours?
Using PreDiscovery™ you can extract
emails (including multiple attachments) and recognize most file types
without the native application installed. This process removes
duplicates, leaving you with a fraction of the files to convert to tiff,
PDF or paper. This saves time, effort and most importantly—money.
PreDiscovery™ Bundle from Image
Capture Engineering, Inc.
For the past 5 years ICE (Image Capture Engineering, Inc.) has
developed electronic discovery and PreDiscovery™ software tools. Z-Print
and LAW are responsible for processing hundreds of millions of pages
each month for legal departments and service bureaus all over the world.
As the pioneers in electronic discovery
and PreDiscovery™ software, ICE products are used in some of the largest
electronic discovery projects. Z-Print is the ideal front-end extraction
and conversion tool for popular litigation applications. From file
inventory through conversion of subsets, Z-Print has the tools needed to
give legal professionals the edge.
When speed tested on a recent project,
Z-Print extracted the content and metadata from all emails and
attachments in a 1 Gig PST mailstore containing over 9,000 messages and
attachments in just fewer than 13 minutes. On completion the appropriate
load files were already created and documents we ready to be loaded and
indexed. Once files are loaded, flagged and ready for conversion Z-Print
can convert files to TIFF three to four times faster than other
competing applications. Z-Print also has the ability to use several high
speed printers for printing blowbacks.
If you need to quickly provide an
inventory report and extract data from large volumes of files and
mailstores for review then it’s worth taking a quick look at Z-Print
from ICE. Time and time again in side by side comparisons Z-Print
outperforms and is a fraction of the cost of competing applications.
When large volumes of data come in the
form of hard drives, tape backups, DVD’s and CD’s it’s important to
remember the following. Quickly identify what is on the media, dedupe
files, cull down based on file type and content and review indexed
native files. This process has provided quicker access to relevant
documents at a fraction of the cost of recent practices. |
