Your Search System Could Keep You Out of Jail
"The key point is the electronic nature of the information. ESI includes any information that can be stored and retrieved electronically. "Any" means office documents, HTML files, email, instant messages, metadata on podcasts, and all other electronic formats. Further, it doesn’t matter where the information is. It can be on your website, on your intranet, on computer hard drives, in email files backed up on tape reels stored in Iron Mountain vaults, and so on. Finally, you are allowed days, not weeks or months, to deliver this information. If it looks to a judge and jury that you are not producing incriminating evidence or that you do not have your ESI systems under control, then you can be found in contempt—or worse—even if your firm is innocent of the original charges.
Is text searching the only, or even the most important, element of an e-discovery plan? IT billing rates are high, but legal billing rates are even higher. Do you even have an e-discovery plan enabling IT to comply with FRCP expeditiously? To learn more, I asked a cross section of search system and e-discovery vendors: Attenex, ISYS, and Google. These vendors agree there are four key elements to successful e-discovery programs: broad file format (and language) support, text analytics, reach (finding information wherever it resides), and a well-defined and tested process for executing your plans. E-discovery is both a business problem and a technology problem."
