Category Archives: Best Practices

December 9, 2020 · 10:44 AM

Traditional eDiscovery Processing is Now Obsolete

By John Patzakis

eDiscovery can be a very expensive process and time consuming when traditional methods are employed. With legacy processes, from the time ESI collection starts, it often takes weeks for the data to finally end up in review. Time is money, and this dramatically increases costs as well as risk.

ESI processing is a dedicated and often expensive step in the EDRM workflow. The majority of ESI processing consists of data culling and filtering, deduplication, text extraction, metadata preservation, and then staging the data for upload into a review platform, often in the form of a load (DAT) file.  Using ESI processing methods that involve on-premise hardware appliances that are not integrated with the collection process and do not integrate with review platforms like Relativity significantly increase cost and time delays. This means practitioners have to spend the often several weeks that are required by other cumbersome solutions through manual collections and multiple hand-offs.

However, the latest in collection technologies will now combine targeted collection with these processing steps that are performed “on the fly” and in the background so that the data is automatically collected, processed and uploaded into a review platform such as Relativity in one fell swoop.

The graphic below is an illustration contrasting the challenges associated with traditional eDiscovery processes, with the far more efficient new paradigm. When you engage in manual collection, and then manual on-premise hardware-based processing, and finally manual upload to review, you are extending the process by often weeks, you are dramatically increasing cost and risk with many manual data handoffs.

Providing a contrast to traditional methods, a recent Relativity webinar featured the integration of the X1 Distributed Discovery platform with its RelativityOne Collect solution. A live demonstration performed by Relativity Product Manager Greg Evans highlighted in real time how the integration dramatically improves the enterprise eDiscovery process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with full and integrated ESI processing. Within minutes, data collected from endpoints with X1 is populated straight into a Relativity workspace, fully processed and ready for review, without any human interaction once the collection is started.

So in terms of the big picture, this X1/Relativity integration not only streamlines enterprise ESI collection, but it relegates ESI processing to a completely automated background function as an afterthought. That’s what disruption looks like.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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December 1, 2020 · 9:53 AM

Relativity Highlights Its X1 Integration for ESI Collection

By John Patzakis

Recently, Relativity hosted a live webinar featuring the integration of the X1 Distributed Discovery platform with its RelativityOne Collect solution. This X1/Relativity integration enables game-changing efficiencies in the eDiscovery process by accelerating speed to review, and providing an end-to-end process from identification through production. As stated by Relativity Chief Product Officer Chris Brown: “Our exciting new partnership with X1 highlights our continued commitment to providing a streamlined user experience from collection to production…RelativityOne users will be able to combine X1’s innovative endpoint technology with the performance of our SaaS platform, eliminating the cumbersome process of manual data hand-offs and allowing them to get to the pertinent data in their case – faster.”

The webinar featured a live demonstration showing X1 quickly collecting data across multiple custodians and seamlessly importing that data into RelativityOne in minutes. Relativity Collect currently supports Office 365 and Slack sources, and Relativity Product Manager Greg Evans noted that “this X1 integration will now enable Relativity Collect to also reach emails and files on laptops, servers,” and other network sources. The webinar outlined how the Relativity/X1 integration streamlines eDiscovery processes by collapsing the many hand-offs built into current EDRM workflows to provide greater speed and defensibility. Evans also said that new normal of web-enabled collections of remote custodians and data sources was a major driver for the Relativity/X1 alliance, as “remote collections now represent 90 percent of all eDiscovery collections happening right now.”

Adam Rogers, of Complete Discovery Source, a customer of both X1 and RelativityOne, highlighted a recent major multi-national litigation where the X1 and Relativity integration was critical to the success of the project. Adam noted that the effort would have taken about 30 days utilizing traditional methods, “but with this X1 and Relativity integration, we cut it down to 3 days, because with X1, we were able to index everything in-place, search, analyze and categorize that data right away, and then release that data to Relativity for review.”

The live demonstration performed by Greg Evans highlighted in real time how the integration improves the enterprise eDiscovery collection and ECA process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with immediate pre-collection visibility into custodial data. X1 Distributed Discovery enhances the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome electronically stored information (ESI) processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection.

The X1 and Relativity integration addresses several pain points in the existing eDiscovery process. For one, there is currently an inability to quickly and remotely search across and access distributed unstructured data in-place, meaning eDiscovery teams have to spend weeks or even months to collect data as required by other cumbersome solutions. Additionally, using ESI processing methods that involve appliances that are not integrated with the collection will significantly increase cost and time delays.

So in terms of the big picture, with this integration providing a complete platform for efficient data search, eDiscovery and review across the enterprise, organizations will save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and be able to make faster and better decisions. When you accelerate the speed to review and eliminate over-collection, you are going to have much better early insight into your data and increase efficiencies on many levels.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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September 15, 2020 · 12:20 PM

Windows Can’t Find My OneDrive Files

By Bruce Berls
(originally published August 20, 2020)

Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from Bruce Berls, an independent IT Consultant and Office 365 expert. He is the CEO of Bruceb Consulting. www.bruceb.com

Windows Search has a problem with my OneDrive files. It can’t find them. I’ve gone back to using X1 Search, which indexes and searches everything, including OneDrive files, with grace and dignity.

Microsoft doesn’t think it’s enough to just search your files. Microsoft has a vision of grand unified searches that return results from your own files and email, plus results from a wide variety of other places – the web, company documents, other people’s calendars, the contents of books you intend to read but haven’t gotten to yet, your senior thesis, decoded World War II messages, maybe more. Basically when you do a search, Microsoft will check the entire output of Western civilization and use smart AI to show you search results that are exactly what you want, whether you want them or not.

There have been lots of steps backwards in Windows Search in 2020. The search window that comes up from the taskbar is cluttered and hard to use. The search bar in Outlook has been moved to a less convenient place and produces a freakishly huge box with too many options. Searches are no longer done as you type. There are bugs a-plenty.

Microsoft has never acknowledged it – which is strange – but it appears that Microsoft’s quest for bigger and better searches caused it to completely rewrite Windows Search for Windows 10 version 1909, released in November 2019. An important change: Microsoft announced that Windows Search would integrate search results from OneDrive right in File Explorer.

It’s not going well. I can’t find any OneDrive files when I do a search in Windows.

I’ve done searches starting in different places in File Explorer – starting in Quick Access, starting in the root OneDrive for Business folder, starting in OneDrive subfolders. I’ve done searches for file names and for words known to be in the text of Office documents. The search results are wildly inconsistent.

If I’m missing something, I’d really like to find out what it is. But if this is just broken, it’s inexcusable. Businesses large and small should be howling for a functional OneDrive search capability. Have we become so used to Windows failures that everyone just shrugs and accepts them?

If you’re serious about search, look at X1 Search. X1 Search indexes files on your computer, files on the network, and everything in Outlook, and does lightning-fast searches for words in them. Two years ago I wrote an article explaining why you might want to spend $96.00 on X1 Search because of its many advantages over Windows Search – lightning-fast searches, unified search across all sources, easy ways to filter search results, file viewers to preview search results, flexible ways to work with items once they’re found, and more.

Today there’s another reason, and it’s the best one yet. X1 Search connects to OneDrive and does the same instantaneous full-text searches on files stored online. As near as I can tell, X1 Search obtains a full-text index from OneDrive when it’s first connected and stores it locally on your hard drive. I can use X1 Search to locate files when I’m offline. When you’re online, X1 Search gets file previews on the fly when you highlight a search result.

That’s exactly what Microsoft promised but failed to deliver in Windows Search.

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Filed under Best Practices, Desktop Search, OneDrive, productivity, Uncategorized, X1 Search 8

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August 26, 2020 · 11:39 AM

Intelligent ESI Collection Integrated with Relativity Can Cut eDiscovery Costs by 90 Percent

By John Patzakis

One of the biggest drivers of excessive eDiscovery costs is ESI over-collection. This in turn leads to a larger amount of data entering the processing and initial review funnel. These traditional inefficient efforts are manual with numerous hand offs and a high degree of project management and consulting hours to oversee the disjointed workflow. A recent analysis by Compliance CEO Marc Zamsky, illustrated in the chart below, established that cost for collection, processing and first month hosting under a traditional preservation process can cost upwards of $12,000 per custodian:

Properly targeted preservation initiatives are permitted by the courts and can be enabled by next generation software that is able to quickly and effectively access and search these data sources in place and throughout the enterprise. The value of targeted preservation is recognized in the Committee Notes to the recent FRCP amendments, which urge the parties to reach agreement on the preservation of data and the key words, date ranges and other metadata to identify responsive materials. (Citing the Manual for Complex Litigation (MCL) (4th) §40.25(2)). And In re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, the court noted that “[p]reservation efforts can become unduly burdensome and unreasonably costly unless those efforts are targeted to those documents reasonably likely to be relevant or lead to the discovery of relevant evidence.”

Recently we hosted a webinar with Compliance highlighting the very compelling integration of our X1 Distributed Discovery platform with Relativity. This X1/Relativity integration enables game-changing efficiencies in the eDiscovery process by accelerating speed to review, and providing an end-to-end process from identification through production. As recently stated by Relativity Chief Product Officer Chris Brown: “Our exciting new partnership with X1 highlights our continued commitment to providing a streamlined user experience from collection to production…RelativityOne users will be able to combine X1’s innovative endpoint technology with the performance of our SaaS platform, eliminating the cumbersome process of manual data hand-offs and allowing them to get to the pertinent data in their case – faster.”

The live demonstration highlighted in real time how the integration improves the enterprise eDiscovery collection and ECA process by enabling a targeted and efficient search and collection process, with immediate pre-collection visibility into custodian data. X1 Distributed Discovery significantly streamlines the eDiscovery workflow with integrated culling and deduplication, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome electronically stored information (ESI) processing tools. That way, the ESI can be populated straight into Relativity from an X1 collection without multiple hand offs, extensive project management and inefficient data processing.

Zamsky commented that the “ability to collect directly from custodian laptops and desktops into a RelativityOne workspace without impacting custodians is a game-changer,” which will “reduce collection times from weeks to hours so that attorneys can quickly begin reviewing and analyzing ESI in RelativityOne.” In fact, Zamsky demonstrated just that by presenting a second chart showing how this streamlined approach, based upon a detailed ROI analysis, reduces eDiscovery costs by over 90 percent:

So in terms of the big picture, with this integration providing a complete platform for efficient data search, eDiscovery, and review across the enterprise, organizations will save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and be able to make faster and better decisions. When you accelerate the speed to review and eliminate over-collection and inefficient processing, you are going to have much better early insight into your data and increase efficiencies on many levels.

A recording of the X1/Relativity integration webinar can be accessed here.

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July 29, 2020 · 9:54 AM

Federal Judge: Custodian Self-Collection of ESI is Unethical and Violates Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

By John Patzakis

In E.E.O.C. v. M1 5100 Corp., (S.D. Fla. July 2, 2020), Federal District Judge Matthewman excoriated defense counsel for allowing the practice of unsupervised custodian ESI self-collection, declaring that the practice “greatly troubles and concerns the court.” In this EEOC age discrimination case, two employees of the defendant corporation were permitted to identify and collect their own ESI in an unsupervised manner. Despite no knowledge of the process the client undertook to gather information (which resulted in only 22 pages of documents produced), counsel signed the responses to the RFP’s in violation of FRCP Rule 26(g), which requires that the attorney have knowledge and supervision of the process utilized to collect data from their client in response to discovery requirements.Gavel and books

This notable quote from the opinion provides a very strong legal statement against the practice of ESI custodian self-collection:

“The relevant rules and case law establish that an attorney has a duty and obligation to have knowledge of, supervise, or counsel the client’s discovery search, collection, and production. It is clear to the Court that an attorney cannot abandon his professional and ethical duties imposed by the applicable rules and case law and permit an interested party or person to ‘self-collect’ discovery without any attorney advice, supervision, or knowledge of the process utilized. There is simply no responsible way that an attorney can effectively make the representations required under Rule 26(g)(1) and yet have no involvement in, or close knowledge of, the party’s search, collection and production of discovery…Abdicating completely the discovery search, collection and production to a layperson or interested client without the client’s attorney having sufficient knowledge of the process, or without the attorney providing necessary advice and assistance, does not meet an attorney’s obligation under our discovery rules and case law. Such conduct is improper and contrary to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”

In his ruling, Judge Matthewman stated that he “will not permit an inadequate discovery search, collection and production of discovery, especially ESI, by any party in this case.” He gave the defendant “one last chance to comply with its discovery search, collection and production obligations.”  He then also ordered “the parties to further confer on or before July 9, 2020, to try to agree on relevant ESI sources, custodians, and search terms, as well as on a proposed ESI protocol.” The Court reserved ruling on monetary and evidentiary sanctions pending the results of Defendants second chance efforts.

A Defensible Yet Streamlined Process Is Optimal

EEOC v. M1 5100, is yet another court decision disallowing custodian self-collection of ESI and underscoring the importance of a well-designed and defensible eDiscovery collection process. At the other end of the spectrum, full disk image collection is another preservation option that, while being defensible, is very costly, burdensome and disruptive to operations. Previously in this blog, I discussed at length the numerous challenges associated with full disk imaging.

The ideal solution is a systemized, uniform and defensible process for ESI collection, which also enables targeted and intelligent data collection in support of proportionality principles. Such a capability is only attainable with the right enterprise technology. With X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD), parties can perform targeted search and collection of the ESI of hundreds of endpoints over the internal network without disrupting operations. The search results are returned in minutes, not weeks, and thus can be highly granular and iterative, based upon multiple keywords, date ranges, file types, or other parameters. This approach typically reduces the eDiscovery collection and processing costs by at least one order of magnitude (90%), thereby bringing much needed feasibility to enterprise-wide eDiscovery collection that can save organizations millions while improving compliance by maintaining metadata, generating audit logs and establishing chain of custody.

And in line with the Judge’s guidance outlined in EEOC v. M1 5100, X1DD provides a repeatable, verifiable and documented process for the requisite defensibility. For a demonstration or briefing on X1 Distributed Discovery, please contact us.

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