Early data Assessment
A searchable repository of data for collections and investigations,
The Problem
eDiscovery professionals follow a framework for recovery and discovery of digital data. It's called the EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) and by following it legal teams can more accurately guarantee they are finding the right information in an ethical, repeatable fashion.
IPRO has set it's sights on expanding the EDRM, to include prediscovery as digital investigation climbs to prominence. This has become especially relevant now that more people worldwide are WFH / Hybrid.
What this means
Typically a legal team begins its casework by ingesting large quantities of documents into their review software (Think, upwards of 10s of thousands). It can take hours or even days, for the documents to process. They must be imaged, OCR'd, and finally indexed before becoming available to review. Now factor in multi page documents, excel files, handwritten documents etc.
Depending on a clients resources, it can take up to a week for a team to get started.
Just under 75% (73.8%) of IPRO clients expected to wait longer than 48 hours to have access to documents after ingesting them into our Enterprise solution.
IPRO was quite aware of this issue even though most legal organizations had accepted that it was just an industry reality.
We spent time with internal service providers and clients who worked with large cases to understand what they did when they were waiting for case documents to process.
We learned that they often had cases that overlapped and while they were waiting for one case, they worked on others. However, it was easy to forget the details of a case in the time it took to ingest and process it's documents.
We also learned that larger law firms, and internal corporate legal teams used some of the same documents time and time again, especially in a long running investigation.
Document repository
There had been talk of "Moving the EDRM to the left" at legal convention in North America. Meaning, industry heavyweights like Relativity, Summation, and Microsoft were all planning a tool that would allow legal service providers and corporations to take advantage of the fact that they already had access to many of the documents they planned to ingest.
To give a better idea, most corporations store employee and client documents in a cloud that requires user based permissions to access. Often times this cloud of documents is fed from connections to Microsoft, Google etc.
What if their legal software also connected to this cloud, and every document could be accessed via their eDiscovery tool? This was an extremely lofty concept considering the rise in concern over privacy among other things.
My team worked together to write questions that would help us understand our clients concerns and requirements. We needed a deep knowledge of what it would take for our clients to trust our repository and prove to their own clients that our solution was secure.