Category Archives: eDiscovery & Compliance

May 16, 2023 · 10:54 AM

X1 Delivers Cutting-Edge MS Teams Support

By John Patzakis

The prominence of Microsoft 365 data sources continue to grow in eDiscovery matters exponentially. However, most non-MS eDiscovery tools collect from MS 365 by simply making bulk copies of data associated with individual accounts, and then attempt to transfer that data en masse to their own proprietary processing and/or review platform. Such an effort is very costly, time-consuming, and inefficient for many reasons. For one, this bulk transfer triggers data transfer throttling by Microsoft, causing significant time delays. But the main problem is that clients who are investing in MS 365 do not want to see all their data routinely exported out of its native environment every time there is an eDiscovery or compliance investigation.

So, enterprises with relevant data stored in MS 365 need to have a good process to perform unified and efficient search and collection of MS 365 and non-MS 365 sources. To achieve requisite efficiency and the minimization of data transfer, this process should be based upon a targeted search and collection in-place capability, and not simply involve mass export of data out of MS 365 for downstream processing and searching.

To answer this unmet critical need, X1 launched MS 365 data connectors to our X1 Enterprise Collect platform. X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to search and collect MS 365 data in-place. X1’s optimized approach of iterative search and targeted collection enables organizations to apply proportionality principles across both cloud and on-premise data sources with clear and consistent results for effective eDiscovery.

And now, X1 has added cutting-edge Teams support to complete our existing support of OneDrive, MS Mail and SharePoint. The X1 Enterprise Collect Teams collection capabilities include the following unique benefits unmatched by other independent software providers:
• The ability to target individual custodians and specific messaging threads, displacing any need to mass download channels
• Unified search and collection of on-premise and cloud data sources, including Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Mail, laptops and file-shares for an optimized approach
• Patented index, search and process the data in-place, removes any reliance on premium processing or supplemental services
• One-click upload into Relativity for review, for a streamlined end-to-end process
• A truly automated product solution, as opposed to a service-based offering

Winston & Strawn eDiscovery partner Bobby Malhotra notes: “With the vast number of users and unyielding amount of data in collaboration applications such as Teams, having the ability to target and triage data by specific custodians and threads allows organizations to handle discovery in an efficient and pragmatic manner. X1 provides the unique ability to seamlessly collect and search across numerous web, collaboration, and social, data sources.”

X1 will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday, May 23 on the topic of Best Practices to Collect from MS Teams in an Effective, Defensible and Proportional Manner.

The X1 Enterprise Collect Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud, on-premise, and with our services available on-demand. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.

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Filed under Authentication, Best Practices, Cloud Data, collection, compliance, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, law firm, MS Teams, OneDrive, proportionality, SharePoint

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April 24, 2023 · 3:56 PM

X1 Introduces Cutting-Edge Instagram Support with X1 Social Discovery Version 7

By Larry Gill

Since I joined the X1 team last year as CEO, I have made it my priority to double down on our support and expansion of our X1 Social Discovery solution. To that end, I am excited to announce that we have just launched version 7 of X1 Social Discovery, social media and web collections solution, which includes a new cutting-edge Instagram connector, along with our revamped Facebook support, where all our users now have native post-level collection and parsing to ensure accuracy, key metadata collection, court authentication, and evidentiary completeness of the collected data. Nothing short of those capabilities is acceptable and that is why I can confidently say that X1 Social Discovery is the only solution in the industry capable of delivering all those requirements.

Over the past year, I have spoken to many of our customers and prospects about what they need to support their social media eDiscovery collections and investigations. One thing that became clear: post-level native file collection for social media evidence, including Instagram, is essential.

Other tools simply provide bulk flat file screen shots of social media feeds, and are of very limited value, as they merely provide a screenshot PDF image file without searchable text or metadata, other than what is visible on the image itself. This does not meet the needs of attorneys and paralegals seeking to leverage and admit key social media and website evidence into their cases. For this reason, X1 has put in the work and R&D investment, and, as CEO, I am committed to doing so on an ongoing basis, so that our users would have native post-level collection and parsing as required.

X1 Social Discovery is the only solution to provide native file, post-level Instagram support, and in a manner that is fast and scalable. This enables the following top 5 key benefits for Instagram collections:

  1. Fast and Automated Instagram Feed Capture. X1 Social Discovery v7 captures hundreds of Instagram posts with assorted comments per hour. We have successfully captured several thousand posts in our testing, including individual posts that have hundreds of associated comments and replies. This level of performance is simply impossible with “web plug in” tools.
  2. Post-Level Collection, Filtering and Production. The ability to search, tag, sort, authenticate (with their own hash value), and produce individual Instagram posts with X1 is essential for an efficient and effective workflow. Other tools require “all or nothing” production & hash of the flat PDF output.
  3. Federated Search and Review. With X1, multiple Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and web page collections can now be searched, sorted, and reviewed in a unified manner. No other tools on the market have an integrated review capability.
  4. Robust Post-Level Metadata Capture. X1 Captures over a dozen unique item-level metadata fields for an individual Instagram post. Other tools only record general URLs of the bulk collection, a hash of the entire “all or nothing” bulk PDF export containing up to hundreds of individual posts, with no individual hash values or metadata fields specific to any of those posts.
  5. Deep Integration with Relativity for Review. X1 custom-developed a Relativity .RAP file that enables social media data (now including Instagram) to be displayed natively – at the post-level — in full context in Relativity, the same as it appears in X1 Social Discovery. All metadata is overlayed, and the comments are kept in line and in context. Importantly, each Instagram post collected by X1 is treated as an individual record in Relativity, instead of the bulk export from other tools being a single record. This enables efficient review as well as robust data analytics of social media evidence in Relativity.

To see all these exciting new features in X1 Social Discovery v7, please watch our product tour on-demand. Alternatively, we would welcome the opportunity to brief you and your colleagues directly. Please contact us to speak with a member of the X1 Team.

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Filed under collection, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Enterprise Search, ESI, Information Governance, Information Management, Legal Ethics & Social Media, Preservation & Collection, Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

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February 28, 2023 · 2:26 PM

A Tectonic Shift is Occurring in eDiscovery

Guest Blog Post by Insight Optix
Original post date by IO: February 23, 2023

Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a guest blog post from legal technology company Insight Optix on the changes occurring in eDiscovery with reference to key survey reports by Doug Austin and Rob Robinson.

Are you tired of hearing about high eDiscovery costs? Legal professionals spend countless hours talking about it, yet year after year the only thing that changes is that costs continue to rise. Will 2023 be any different? We’re seeing a number of indicators pointing to yes.

The eDiscovery software and services market is expected to grow from $14.05 billion in 2022 to $22.31 billion in 2027, according to Rob Robinson’s An eDiscovery Market Size Mashup: 2022-2027 Worldwide Software and Services Overview (complexdiscovery.com). With current economic pressures, it is difficult to see how corporations can continue this trajectory without making significant changes in how they manage eDiscovery.

Corporate legal departments are starting to say enough is enough. While we have recently seen legal departments bringing more work inhouse and moving discovery responsibilities to mid-sized firms or boutique practices, we’re now seeing an even bigger shift — corporate legal departments are actively seeking innovation in the delivery of legal services that drastically reduces discovery spend.

Evidence of this change can be found in eDiscovery Today’s third annual State of the Industry Report Survey published in January. When asked what the top eDiscovery challenge is that not enough people are talking about, the second-highest answer from the 410 respondents was the move to the left of the EDRM and indexing in place, with nearly double the percentage than was received in 2021. As Doug Austin stated in his 5 Legal Tech Predictions for 2023 blog post, “I’m hearing more legal and eDiscovery professionals than ever talk about the importance of information governance, early data assessment (EDA) and targeted collection in discovery.”

Recent technology innovations that focus on identification and collection are shining a spotlight on these critical early stages of the EDRM, finally making it achievable to counteract the high costs of eDiscovery. Insight Optix’s early case strategy and discovery scoping solution, Evidence Optix® and the X1 Enterprise Collect iterative search and targeted collection platform are two examples of innovative solutions that can achieve significant cost reduction.

Corporations that embrace innovation, such as Evidence Optix and X1 Enterprise Collect, are positioning themselves to counteract the rising volume of data and the proliferation of data sources to accomplish what the 2015 amendments to the FRCP intended — right-sized discovery.

While many law firms continue to maintain the status quo, innovative firms who recognize the value of blending early-stage solutions into their case strategies to impact their clients’ bottom line are emerging. These firms are focused on assisting their clients with building better workflows to reduce costs, while also differentiating their services in a highly competitive market.

This past year, many eDiscovery service providers began talking about the early stages of the EDRM and strategically planning a move to the left. This is one of the most telling indicators of the tectonic shift that is changing the landscape of eDiscovery.

How is your company or firm addressing this shift? If you would like to leverage recent technology innovations and get out in front of this important trend, contact us at info@insightoptix.com.

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

December 6, 2022 · 10:23 AM

Significant Microsoft 365 eDiscovery Challenges Require a New Approach

By John Patzakis

The adoption of cloud-based Microsoft 365 (“MS 365”) by enterprises continues to grow exponentially, with the company recently reporting 300 million monthly active users, and the addition of over 100 petabytes of new content each month. There is no question that MS 365 is now a major data source for eDiscovery, second only to file-shares and laptops, and as such provides challenges to every legal and eDiscovery practitioner.

While MS 365 includes built-in eDiscovery tools in the Security and Compliance Center, many users look to third party alternatives due to the high cost, perceived concerns over the accuracy of search results, and other key challenges. However, most non-MS eDiscovery tools collect from MS 365 by simply making bulk copies of data associated with individual accounts, and then attempting to transfer that data en masse to their own proprietary processing and/or review platform. This problematic approach is counter-productive to the very purpose of why you put data in the cloud.

Such an effort is very costly, time consuming, and inefficient for many reasons. For one, this bulk transfer triggers data transfer throttling by Microsoft, causing significant time delays. But the main problem is that clients who are investing in MS 365 do not want to see all their data routinely exported out of its native environment every time there is an eDiscovery or compliance investigation. Organizations are fine with a targeted set of potentially relevant ESI leaving MS 365. What they do not want is a mass bulk export of terabytes of data at great expense because eDiscovery and processing tools need to first broadly ingest that data in their disparate platform in order to even begin the indexing, culling and searching process.

Additionally, organizations, especially larger enterprises, rarely house all or even most of their data within MS 365, with hybrid cloud and on-premise environments being the norm. MS 365 eDiscovery tools can only address what is contained within MS 365. Any on-premise data, including on-premise Microsoft sources (SharePoint, Exchange) cannot be readily consolidated by MS 365, and neither can data from other cloud sources such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, etc. And of course, laptops and file-shares are critical to eDiscovery collections and are also not supported by the MS 365 eDiscovery tools, with Microsoft indicating that they do not have any plans to address all of these non-MS 365 data sources.

So, eDiscovery software providers need to have a good process to perform unified search and collection of MS 365 and non-MS 365 sources. To achieve requisite efficiency and the minimization of data transfer, this process should be based upon a targeted search and collection in-place capability, and not simply involve mass export of data out of MS 365 for downstream processing and searching.

To answer this unmet critical need, X1 has added MS 365 data connectors to our X1 Enterprise Collect platform. X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to search and collect MS 365 data in-place. X1’s optimized approach of iterative search and targeted collection enables organizations to apply proportionality principles across both cloud and on-premise data sources with clear and consistent results for effective eDiscovery. 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%).

The X1 Enterprise Collect Platform is available now from X1 and its global channel network in the cloud, on-premise, and with our services available on-demand. For a demonstration of the X1 Enterprise Collect Platform, contact us at sales@x1.com. For more details on this innovative solution, please visit www.x1.com/x1-enterprise-collect-platform.

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Filed under Best Practices, Cloud Data, Corporations, Data Audit, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Governance, Information Management, OneDrive, Preservation & Collection, SharePoint

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October 4, 2022 · 9:49 AM

Flawed Collection Methods Prevent TAR and Other Applications of Analytics on Social Media Evidence

By John Patzakis

Every litigator and eDiscovery practitioner is aware of the critical importance of analytics as a tool to support their cases. AI-driven analytics supercharges compliance investigations, data security, privacy audits, and Technology Assisted Review (TAR) of documents, emails, social media and other web-based items. AI machine learning employs mathematical models to assess enormous datasets to gain deep insights into key information. This enables the identification of discrete and hidden patterns in thousands of emails, social media posts and other electronic files to categorize and cluster documents by concepts, content, or topic.

However, it is important to understand that such a powerful capability requires the extracted text and metadata of the subject documents, emails and social media posts. So when examiners resort to screenshots, including flat file PDF image captures, this prevents the use of game-changing analytics in your case. Screenshots do not natively preserve the subject text or metadata and are useless if fed into analytics engines. This is a major disconnect with many eDiscovery practitioners who may not fully understand that by utilizing print screen, they are forfeiting their clients’ ability to utilize otherwise game-changing analytics on the social media and other web-based data they are collecting.

Bobby Malhotra, eDiscovery team co-lead at Munger Tolles highlighted this point in a recent webinar addressing the importance of native file collection for social media evidence: “If you are on a matter that is going to be very data intensive in terms of collecting voluminous amounts of data from social media sites, and you are going to need to mine through that data to understand what happened and get the relevant context (with an AI engine) the only way to really do that is to collect the full text and metadata, and so, screenshots will not suffice.” Malhotra emphasized that this is a “really critical point regarding the analytics process as a lot of people don’t think about that.”

In fact, not only will screenshots omit text and metadata, the screenshot will create a false record if introduced into the review and analytics workflow as the metadata of the screenshot itself will be completely different that the metadata of the original native object. For these reasons, it is important under an attorney’s duty of competency related to eDiscovery technology, to understand the implications of not collecting social media and web based evidence in native format, and strongly consider utilizing best practices technology to properly collect and preserve this critical source of evidence.

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Filed under Authentication, Best Practices, Data Audit, eDiscovery & Compliance, ESI, law firm, Preservation & Collection, Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

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