Study Finds that E-Discovery Using Enterprise-Wide Search Improves Results and Reduces Costs
"ZL Technologies (http://www.zlti.com), the leader in archiving and e-discovery software for the large enterprise, has published a scientific paper in the Proceedings of the 18th NIST/Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which details a significant gap in efficiency between traditional custodian-search and enterprise-wide search in e-discovery settings. The results demonstrate that organizations relying solely upon custodian-search are basing important legal decisions on incomplete information, which can lead to potential cost overruns and court sanctions.
ZL conducted this research using two separate evaluation teams working with the TREC Enron corpus of documents -- a volume of approximately 3,000,000 emails from more than 100 Enron employee mailboxes. The team using the custodian approach for searching the TREC documents failed to identify 84 percent of the responsive documents, and only identified four relevant custodians. In contrast, the enterprise-wide search team identified all responsive documents across 77 relevant custodians. The scope of enterprise-wide search enhances the ability of legal teams to find critical evidence that may influence legal strategy, particularly when counsel is determining whether to fight or settle a matter."
