What is eDiscovery and How to Use Email Archiving for Legal Processing
Last Updated on 27 December 2023 by Olga Lapshinova
December, 27 2023 | Posted by Michael Dango
The term eDiscovery refers to the initial phase of resolving a legal dispute between two companies or entities. The process requires either or both parties to provide proof of electronic data, information, and any record that the court of law may deem as evidence that can be helpful.
The purpose behind carrying out this process is to find out facts via electronic documents in a legal dispute between two parties. The information in question is also known as Electronically Stored Information or ESI.
If you are a business, the only proactive way to be prepared for eDiscovery is to start managing your electronic data and record, such as emails, in an efficient manner.
Some types of ESI are:
- Documents
- Accounting records and databases
- Instant messaging or chats
- Websites
- CAD/CAM files
- Metadata
- Raw data
It may further include other forms of electronic data and records if the court of law deems them relevant evidence.
The eDiscovery Process
The court may start this process the moment a lawsuit or dispute initiates. This entire activity may continue until the final outcome of the legal proceedings.
The attorney/s first identifies the relevant data that may be relevant to the case and places it on hold for analysis as evidence. This means you cannot delete or alter that data anymore. However, this is a mutual process, and both parties’ attorneys determine the scope to classify the data as ESI.
Moreover, either party’s attorney can request or challenge certain information to be a part of the eDiscovery process.
Once the ESI is determined, it goes for a thorough examination by the data forensic teams. For thing purpose, you need to convert all your email, documents, information and record them in a PDF or TIFF format. The makes the data presentable in court in an organized manner and also makes searching for the relevant record easier via pattern identification.
Doing so not only saves you time and energy but money on the additional workforce.
Benefits of Using eDiscovery and Legal Hold for litigation
According to studies, as a company, you can benefit from digital backups of data to perform legal discovery and save exponentially per retrieval. Backup emails do not count valid in the court for the eDiscovery process. Thus, you have to archive them like old school filing mechanism.
That said, here are some other benefits of the entire exercise.
- It improves the accuracy of the eDiscovery process
- It makes your email archiving more flexible and automated
- This further enhances the capability of finding the emails efficiently
- The legal attorneys can search through millions of emails to weed-out a single email within no time
- The use of tools such a tagging and legal hold allows your email archiving processes to be more intuitive
- You can imagine the manual workflow of the entire workflow can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming. Therefore, by automation and the right tools, your legal team will go through a huge number of emails in no time. Not only does it save you time but also those extra working hours you pay to the legal teams and human resources.
Let the Experts Help You
You can prevent any legal penalties by the court as it decides how much time you have to produce the required information and data. Moreover, typically as an involved party, you have to incur the entire cost. Therefore, to meet the tight deadlines, you must employ specialized eDiscovery experts in Email Detail Litigation to help you with the eDiscovery process.
