Next Generation Desktop Search for Law Firms and the Enterprise

We are taking a break from eDiscovery and investigations to discuss some big news in the world of X1 search. Today I am excited to announce that we launched a major upgrade to our popular desktop search software, X1 Search 8. In addition to a new, very sleek interface (see screen shot below), and a faster and more scalable index, X1 Search 8 (X1S8) features two distinct game-changers.

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Click to enlarge

First, X1S8 comes with a built-in SharePoint connector. SharePoint is proliferating throughout the enterprise, and X1S8 provides an outstanding search experience of SharePoint, which we believe is a vast improvement over native SharePoint Search. All search results are displayed in a single sortable view with a full-fidelity preview pane, in the same view as your local files an emails. The feedback from many enterprises is that X1 now has the best search of SharePoint in the business.

The second game-changer is that X1 Search 8 is fully compatible with desktop virtualization. Finding content is difficult enough on a traditional desktop, but the issue is compounded with the virtualized variety. There are many compelling benefits to desktop virtualization, but the architecture does not facilitate or even enable traditional desktop search solutions. X1 Search 8 provides search capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments with results returned in a single pane. X1 was specifically architected to uniquely and seamlessly operate in virtual desktop environments, including popular Citrix solutions XenApp and XenDesktop.

Here is a 2 minute video demo overview and another demo video specific to our integrated SharePoint search support.

At just $49.95 per seat, X1 Search 8 is a time-saving, intuitive tool that saves enterprises time and money. For more information, visit www.x1.com.

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Filed under Cloud Data, Enterprise eDiscovery, Virtualized Environment

SharePoint eDiscovery: Ten Times the Cost

Sharepoint no colorOur recent webinar on SharePoint eDiscovery challenges with eDiscovery Journals’ Greg Buckles featured a substantive and detailed discussion on the nuances, pitfalls and opportunities associated with eDiscovery of data from SharePoint sites. This topic is very timely as the majority of enterprises are deploying the Microsoft platform at an accelerated rate, with the solution reaching $1 billion in sales faster than any other Microsoft product in history. As SharePoint enables enterprises to consolidate file shares, Intranet sites, internal message boards and wikis, project management, collaboration and more into a single platform, it provides significant operational efficiencies as well as eDiscovery challenges. The vast majority of current SharePoint deployments are versions 2007 or 2010, and neither have meaningful internal eDiscovery or even export features.

Greg Buckles is a well-known eDiscovery expert with a strong command of technical issues concerning data collection from SharePoint sites. In his presentation, he addressed the particular challenge of preserving data from SharePoint in a targeted matter and in context. According to Buckles, current eDiscovery practices involve mass raw data exports from the platform, instead of a preferable practice of review and early case assessment in place to enable a far more efficient and targeted collection of only potentially relevant information. Bulk exports from SharePoint contain a mass of unstructured data that is out of context with no easy way to associate files, document lists, metadata fields and the many other native data types and fields. As a result, the data must be sorted out on the back-end in time-consuming and highly manual eDiscovery processing and review efforts.  Buckles reports that he routinely sees tenfold increases eDiscovery processing and review costs because of these challenges.

A full video recording of the webinar can be accessed here.

Another key SharePoint eDiscovery challenge involves its deployment architecture. By their nature, typical SharePoint deployments are de-centralized as the solution is geared toward supporting individual departments and “teams” as opposed to forcing data centralization to a single and large data center. Appliance-based eDiscovery solutions or remote collections do not work as it may take weeks if not months to copy a multi-terabyte SharePoint site over a network connection and a large corporation may have several dozens of SharePoint silos to collect from.  Manual collection efforts, which are geared toward mass “data dumps,” are as mentioned very costly and inefficient.

Instead, what is needed is a solution such as X1 Rapid Discovery can quickly and remotely install and operate within the same local network domain to enable localized search, review and early case assessment in place. X1 Rapid Discovery’s full content indexing and preview of native SharePoint document libraries and lists, as well as it robust search, document filters, intuitive review interface, uniquely enables targeted and contextual search, preservation and export of SharePoint evidence in its native format. In fact we believe it is the only solution available that enables true in-place early case assessment and eDiscovery review of SharePoint sites, including iterative search, tagging and full fidelity preview in place, without the requirement to first export all of the data out of the Platform.

To learn more, sign on to the recorded webinar or please contact us at info@x1discovery.com for a further briefing to learn how to save your organization or your clients tens of thousands of dollars on litigation costs associated with SharePoint.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Management

Case Study: Social Media eDiscovery Services Delivered as SaaS

QuoteEditors Note: Today we have guest blogger, Brett Webber from Australia’s Sententia Discovery. Sententia has been breaking new ground in social media discovery by providing hosted instances of X1’s Social Discovery for its clients, including a major insurance company.  

At Sententia, we have demonstrated both the power of X1 Social Discovery (“X1SD”) coupled with an innovative SaaS delivery mechanism to maximize substantial return on investment for our clients. The hosted solution allows users to access X1SD using a standard web browser and reduces the time required for users to set-up and run cases. “It allows me and my team to focus on the investigation not on the technology” says Sententia customer Gary Coulthart from MCAA, one of Australia’s leading investigators. “With Sententia’s expertise in setting up the technology and configuring the social media data sources, I am getting more material faster.”

To date, our results have been impressive. Social media evidence collected by clients such as Gary have been used to resolve a number of cases related to insurance claims. The matters have included insurance relating to personal injury, income protection, workers compensation and medical insurance. “The actuarial reserves on many of these cases are six figure amounts, so any evidence we can collect to reduce fraud is very valuable. The ROI associated with this effort has been outstanding”.

The Sententia Group has been providing data centre services since 1989. Its clients include telecos, financial services institutions and government agencies. It has combined this data centre experience with a decade of electronic discovery expertise to create a straightforward user experience for social media discovery.

This offering requires infrastructure and expertise in application setup and hosting; by configuring and hosting X1SD at an enterprise standard, much of the complexity has been absorbed by Sententia. This enables law firms, enforcement agencies and corporate investigators to implement a global process in their social media discovery efforts. Sententia also provides ancillary but important s services such as case management, security and backup, which clients both need and expect. A number of clients have restrictive IT environments and need to host X1SD outside of their firewalls. Our SaaS solution meets those needs. But this offering would not be possible without  X1SD’s unique speed, scalability and ability to extract and preserve the material to an evidentiary standard.  Based upon our research, no other providers have the technology appropriate for social media discovery. We usually have new users up and running and effectively collecting material for new matters within an hour at a modest price per matter.

Table 1: Summarises a number of our client’s recent SaaS matters delivering strong return on investment:

Insurance Matters2Click image to enlarge

 

For more information visit SententiaDiscovery.com or contact us at +612 9994 2700 and mcaa.com.au +612 8003 3295

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Social Media Investigations

Live Social Media Evidence Capture from Today’s Vegas Strip Shooting

Unfortunately, a tragic event transpired this morning in Las Vegas leaving three people dead and at least three others injured after a shooting and fiery six-vehicle crash along the Strip. According to reports, at about 4:20 a.m. someone in an SUV opened fire into a Maserati that had stopped at a light. The Maserati moved into the intersection at Flamingo Road and collided with a taxi, starting a chain of crashes that involved four other vehicles. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

Given the criminal investigation and civil liability implications of this event, we wanted to demonstrate the new important capabilities of X1 Social Discovery to immediately identify, preserve and display geolocated Tweets (and often Instagram posts) at or near the scene immediately before, during and after the incident. X1 Social Discovery is now able to map a given location, such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geolocated tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. As illustrated below, this capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.

When we learned of the Vegas incident, we mapped the general area of the strip  and within seconds, all the recent Tweets from the past several hours were populated within the grid and collected within X1 Social Discovery.

Accident 4

From there, we were able to sort those tweets within the interface and identify some key Tweets made immediately after the incident, such as this post:

Accident 5

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We are able to sort and identity the exact time (in GMT) of the posts in question as well as associated metadata.

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Here is another post below. Both this example and the one above contain notable intel in the comments, suggesting the possible identity of one of the victims, as well as a reference to another posted picture on Instagram. This reflects the utility of X1 Social Discovery’s ability to collect not just the social media post, but the comments thereto in real-time.

Accident 1

This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geolocated tweets in real time. But of course in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence such as the evidence, posted above, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.

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Filed under Social Media Investigations

Social Media Discovery Hotter Than Predictive Coding?

fire isolated over black backgroundIt was a great show last week at LegalTech New York. Definitely an increase in the number and quality of attendees and it was nice to see many friends and colleagues both old and new.

Also very noticeable were the many, many vendors sporting predictive coding (aka technology assisted review) messaging in their respective booths and various forms of marketing material. In fact, one industry colleague pointed me to a recent bold prediction offered by Recommind lawyer Howard Sklar, essentially proclaiming that predictive coding will have really hit the big time when a state bar organization issues an ethics opinion stating “that failure to use predictive coding is ethically questionable, if not unethical.” Sklar goes on to predict that such an opinion will come within the next 18 months.

I don’t disagree that such a development would be a big deal. But my question is, why stop at an advisory ethics opinion? What about an actual published court opinion where a sitting appellate judge decrees, without mincing words, that legal ethics obligations require lawyers to employ predictive coding? Now that would be huge. Something, in fact, like Griffin v. State, 192 Md. App. 518, 535 (2010), which addresses another hot topic in eDiscovery:

“[I]t should now be a matter of professional competence for attorneys to take the time to investigate social networking sites.”

Now to be fair, I must point out that Griffin v. State was reversed and remanded on other grounds (419 Md. 343 (2011)), but I would argue the overall impact from an ethics and best practices standpoint is still there.

Sklar also points out three appellate level cases with written opinions that discuss the concept of predictive coding, without any definitive rulings compelling its use, but nonetheless discussing the concept. Two of the three are even retrievable on Westlaw. I think such appellate-level published decisions are important, which is why we highlight the several thousands of published court decisions in the past three years (see here and here) that have compelled the production of, admitted into evidence, or otherwise recognized the importance of social media evidence to the case at hand. New cases are being published every day, to the point where we candidly have stopped counting due to the deluge. So by the standard set by of my esteemed fellow eDiscovery lawyer Mr. Sklar, social media discovery is a very hot field indeed.

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Filed under Case Law, eDiscovery & Compliance, Social Media Investigations