When it comes to issues like compliance and eDiscovery, a lot of businesses tend to adopt the “It will never happen to me“ approach. However, all companies have the potential to be involved in lawsuits. When that happens, eDiscovery soon becomes a big issue.
The legal process of eDiscovery, i.e. the sharing of documents between both sides of a legal dispute, can be a long and expensive process. Some Fortune 1000 companies pay as much as $30 million for eDiscovery annually, with the average cost during a case amounting to almost $2 million.
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eDiscovery is all about finding evidence
Imagine your company was accused of wrongdoing and had to respond to an eDiscovery request. The purpose of investigation is to find an email or a social media post that may or may not prove your company’s guilt. This process would involve going through every single email inbox and searching through individual social media accounts involved in the case. This would involve your lawyers, probably the claimant’s lawyers, and would mean lots of billable hours for both parties. As a matter of fact, 70% of eDiscovery costs is paid to lawyers who review data.
There are two possible outcomes of an eDiscovery case. In the first scenario, an email is found that proves your guilt or innocence. In the second one, no evidence is found that relates to the case. No matter the outcome, the process will take time and cost money.
Readiness is all
Even if the company’s guilt is proved, knowing about it early would allow you to keep costs to a minimum and give you plenty of time to prepare. Alternatively, if you can prove your company’s innocence early, the claimant might drop the lawsuit before the eDiscovery process starts and bills rack up. Even if there is no evidence to be found, your company will have the much-needed peace of mind knowing that the eDiscovery process won’t hold any nasty surprises.
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Information archiving and eDiscovery response
Before we move on, it’s vitally important to know that backing up your enterprise information can’t really be considered archiving. If your email archiving system is a series of tape backups or hard drives sitting on a shelf, information retrieval will require restoring the files onto a machine. From there, a further manual search has to take place, and searching through millions of emails to find the one can take days, if not months. Things complicate when you need to find more than one document, which is often the case in eDiscovery procedures.
Having a proper email archiving system in place is an important safety net in case of legal action, audits and queries. Knowing that you have a reliable, searchable and tamper-proof copy of all email and social media communications can prevent issues and give you confidence and control of all your enterprise data.
An effective archiving system (both on-premise and cloud) will first capture everything that comes through your email server. It will then store and index every email and social media content in your archive. Indexing is an essential component of the archiving process, as it makes it easier and faster to conduct searches, no matter how complicated they are. A well-designed and powerful system could process your request in a matter of seconds rather than the days it could take if it were to be performed manually. There is also the reduced risk of files becoming corrupted or lost during the manual search and retrieval process.
In conclusion, rapid and effective eDiscovery makes all the difference in cases of litigation, audits or damage control. Additional software functionalities such as message integrity verification will help you prove that documents have not been tampered with or damaged in the process.
All Jatheon’s archiving solutions possess advanced eDiscovery capabilities. To learn about eDiscovery trends for 2018, check out this infographic. For more information on how Jatheon can help you improve your legal preparedness, schedule your personal demo today.
