Category Archives: Information Governance

May 7, 2024 · 9:28 AM

Index and Search In-Place Workflows Are Essential for Information Governance

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

Information Governance

Accurate pre-collection data insight is a game-changing capability that enables organizations and their legal teams to determine the scope, volume, and content of electronic information before the very disruptive and expensive step of collecting the data. This insight is enabled through distributed index and search in-place technology.

A true distributed index and search in-place capability for unstructured data requires a software-based indexing technology be deployed directly onto fileservers, laptops, or in the cloud to address Microsoft 365 and other cloud-based data sources. This indexing occurs where the data sources reside without requiring a bulk transfer of the data to a central location. Once indexed, searches can be performed in seconds, supporting complex Boolean operators, metadata filters and regular expressions. Searches can be iterated and refined without limitation, which is critical for large data sets.

While our previous blog post addressed the critical importance of this capability in eDiscovery matters, it is equally essential in information governance projects such as PII audits, the purging of redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data, and due diligence and data separation efforts in support of corporate mergers and acquisitions. Many X1 customers have recently employed our indexing in-place technology on such projects with remarkable success.

Incredibly, many of these customers also received alternative proposals that leverage traditional eDiscovery workflows presenting much higher estimated costs and much longer durations. Traditional eDiscovery workflows mandate broad and manual data collection, copying and migration efforts, large scale data processing, and loading the data into a different platform for review and analysis. There are three fundamental reasons why this “traditional approach” is fatally flawed for information governance projects.

  1. Prohibitive Cost and Risk. The data scope of information governance projects involves terabytes and sometimes petabytes of data. Mass collection, copying and migration of these data sets with manual hand-offs for later analysis in a centralized location is extremely expensive, disruptive, and time consuming. Also, mass duplication and egress of enterprise data under control to execute ROT, PII, data separation or other due diligence projects is completely antithetical to their very purpose.
  2. The “Now What?” Problem. Let’s assume an organization has decided to incur the enormous cost, disruption and risk associated with the mass copying, migration, and centralization of unstructured data, and after loading the data into a review process, a key subset of documents and emails are finally identified for purging or other remedial action. Now what? You are merely working with copies! The live “original” emails and documents are in M365, email accounts, file servers or on laptops. It is possible to manually retrace and remediate, but that process is expensive and disruptive.
  3. Instant Staleness. Finally, a mass copying and migration effort often requiring several weeks to complete, is immediately stale once eventually completed as the live data in its original location has inevitably changed.

X1 solves these challenges though our proprietary and patented distributed index and search in-place technology that enables scale by bringing true distributed indexing in-place to laptops, file shares, M365 and other cloud sources. X1 Enterprise Collect significantly streamlines information governance workflows by identifying and allowing for the remediation of targeted data in-place, thereby eliminating the need for expensive and cumbersome data duplication and migration.

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 Cloud Data, compliance, Corporations, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Governance, law firm, Preservation & Collection

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January 24, 2024 · 11:21 AM

Massive Data Centralization for MS 365 Does Not Work for Enterprise eDiscovery and Information Governance Workflows

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier

CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. Many CIOs attempt to address this daunting challenge by migrating disparate data from around the global enterprise into a central location. However, they quickly find that such attempts to “boil the ocean” are extremely expensive, highly disruptive, and unworkable due to massive scalability issues. The HP Autonomy vision was an example of this approach that seemed like a good idea, but never scaled and required significant manual effort and expensive outsourced services to execute.

And history is repeating itself with Microsoft’s Purview eDiscovery platform. MS Purview Premium is a very expensive add-on designed to mine data in Microsoft’s 365 platform for eDiscovery collection and export. However, MS 365 is a massive data ocean that was not purpose built for compliance and eDiscovery. Furthermore, a new “compliance index” must be created with data carved out of the MS 365 ocean to initiate an eDiscovery or compliance case in Purview eDiscovery to ensure proper and complete content indexing.

As a result of this disjointed two-step process, users are encountering significant problems with low throughput and defensibility. Many customers report to us that Microsoft Purview Premium’s documented inability to handle anything other than small matters due to their 2GB per hour throughput limit. A matter involving 100 custodians at 10GB of MS 365 data would take several weeks to complete with Microsoft Purview Premium.

X1 Enterprise Collect is not subject to these limitations due to our MS 365 data connector approach supported by the X1 proprietary search technology. X1 Enterprise Collect can complete the same sized matter within 24 hours (search, collection and export) better meeting the needs of eDiscovery and investigation matters and requiring only an E3 level M365 license.

Purview Premium faces other key limitations such as not searching files and attachments over 150 MB, not addressing hidden mail folders, and not accessing files and emails without “compliance copies” and overall challenges with search syntax and search reliability and accuracy. In response to these challenges, Microsoft Purview customers are being forced to spend significant sums on outsourced service providers who, just like in the Autonomy days, are engaging in substantial efforts to make the process work. We have spoken to several eDiscovery service providers who are giddy over all the work they are getting to compensate for Purview’s limitations with outsourced services. However, in-house legal teams are not happy with the situation.

In response to these challenges, X1 launched MS 365 data connectors to our X1 Enterprise Collect platform to provide a previously unmet critical need for enterprises to conduct cost-efficient yet highly scalable eDiscovery search and collections of MS 365 data. The response has been tremendous, with X1 seeing record demand.

X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to search and collect MS 365 data in-place, in a targeted and iterative manner, at speeds and throughput far exceeding other tools, including Microsoft Purview Premium. X1 achieves such scalability through a targeted, custodian-based approach that minimizes 365 API calls, and does not rely on the MS Search Index, which has been demonstrated to be untrustworthy and with limited throughput. X1’s approach enables a very scalable, defensible, and robust data collection now at speeds 10x that of other approaches.

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 eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Governance, Corporations, eDiscovery, ECA

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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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March 30, 2023 · 7:59 AM

Three Major Observations and Developments from the Legalweek Conference

By Larry Gill and John Patzakis

Last week X1 attended and exhibited at Legalweek in New York, engaging with many customers, partners, and industry colleagues. It was great to connect with so many of our customers, and friends and hear their valuable feedback and insight regarding industry trends, pain-points, and their process and technology wish-lists to better address today’s eDiscovery and information governance challenges. Here is a report on three key takeaways from these interactions and the sessions we attended:

1. Corporate Counsel and Their Outside Law Firms are Both Seeking Cost Benefits Through Streamlined Processes

ALM hosted a State of the Industry session, that emphasized recent trends showing a disruption in the industry that once rewarded for inefficiency but is now being forced to change…and a digital transformation is happening. In fact, corporate legal is increasingly bringing their eDiscovery workflows in-house and seeking operational efficiencies to drive better collaboration, more predictable outcomes, and minimize costs in response to economic pressure. The presentation highlighted the top General Counsel pain-points and expectations toward streamlining their efforts including good advice, excellent technology, and efficient services.

We also heard this refrain in our various discussions with law firms and some service providers. The law firms are growing frustrated with the overcollection and other costly inefficiencies employed by service providers they hire for reactive eDiscovery engagements. These firms are working with their corporate clients to internalize a more systematic process to better manage costs and risk, with an emphasis on preservation and collection solutions to gain control earlier in the process. One service provider we met with has also recognized this trend and is sponsoring enterprise eDiscovery software deployments on a managed services basis.

2. Many Discussions About the Need for a Unified Collection Process

Every discussion we had confirmed cloud data sources such as MS 365 Mail, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and now Slack, comprise a significant portion of responsive ESI in nearly every matter. However, file shares, laptops and on-premise email servers remain a significant source of ESI as well, and that in-house counsel, their firms, and service providers must employ an approach that addresses all relevant data sources. Adding to this challenge, all this proliferated data can add up to tens of terabytes in a single mater. We met with one service provider with a project requirement to search several large file shares behind a company’s firewall for PII, while also needing to address company data stored in OneDrive and MS 365 mail. They expressed frustration over point solutions that did not address all the data sources they needed, did not scale, and required mass data transfer to begin assessing the data.

These demands require a robust platform to search, identify and act on all this disparate data from a unified interface and workflow. Additionally, given the volume and complexity of this data, it is important to be able to index and search this data in place to allow for iterative and targeting collection, instead of the bulk download/transfer approach by legacy tools that drive up costs and increase risks.

3. eDiscovery Vendors are Moving Upstream to Focus on Preservation and Collection

In recognizing these trends, solution providers “moving to the left” with greater urgency was evident at Legalweek. Acquisitions like LIGL by Reveal and Relativity investing in successful partnerships with collection platforms Cellebrite and X1, show that offering a solution that addresses the most critical “front end of the legal eDiscovery process” is absolutely necessary moving forward. In fact, the buzz at Legalweek was that eDiscovery review platforms are or are looking to make bold moves to the left in order to better differentiate and better control eDiscovery workflows and start with collection.

Another factor in the renewed focus on collection relates to the proliferation of AI, a clear theme in many conference sessions and floor discussions. With AI becoming more ubiquitous yet more commoditized, organizations are looking to solidify their collection approach. As OpenAI and many other open-sourced platforms dominate the landscape, the advantages of proprietary AI technologies are diminished. But now more than ever, there is a need for a streamlined data collection “pipeline” into these AI engines. The more streamlined and efficient the collection process, the more powerful and iterative the AI capabilities.

To discuss some of these Legalweek takeaways in greater detail, X1 will be hosting a webinar on Thursday, April 20 featuring Navigating Data Discovery in a Microsoft 365 Centric World, register here.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Information Governance, law firm, OneDrive, Preservation & Collection, SharePoint

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January 10, 2023 · 11:43 AM

Move to the Left and Targeted Collection Featured Widely as a Key 2023 eDiscovery Trend

By John Patzakis

It is prediction season for trends in the eDiscovery space for 2023. While many good eDiscovery scribes have published their prognostications in recent days, the annual predictions and overall analysis from Doug Austin in eDiscovery Today are invariably insightful. As a top industry analyst, Austin is in constant contact with eDiscovery executives and professionals and thus has a good finger on the industry pulse.

One of his key predictions this year, which notably appears in several trending 2023 forecasts, centers around the upstream focus on information governance and targeted collection. “I’m hearing more legal and eDiscovery professionals than ever talk about the importance of information governance, early data assessment (EDA) and targeted collections in discovery,” reports Austin, who then poses a very good question about the ramifications of this trend: “What happens when eDiscovery professionals are no longer routinely collecting the entire data corpus of custodians to sort out downstream? The growth of data for eDiscovery hosting providers to host slows dramatically – which jeopardizes growth in hosting revenue that is based on gigabytes (GBs) online.”

There is a lot going on in terms of takeaways from this paragraph. The “collect everything and sort it out later” is still the dominant model for service providers and, as Austin points out, it can be difficult for them to pivot from this economic model. However, this highlights a key reason why many in house legal departments are now routinely deploying in-house collection and EDA solutions. There are significant cost savings and efficiencies to be gained by narrowing the data funnel upstream before the data is sent out for data hosting. And this approach is favored by the courts in applying the principles of proportionality now ensconced in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, with a wealth of case law establishing that ESI preservation efforts should be reasonable, proportionate, and targeted to only relevant information, as opposed to being overly broad and unduly burdensome.

While there is keen awareness of proportionality in the legal community, attaining the benefits requires the ability to operationalize workflows as far upstream in the eDiscovery process as possible. The case law and the Federal Rules provide that the duty to preserve only applies to potentially relevant information, but unless you have the right operational processes in place, you’re losing out on the ability to attain the benefits of proportionality. And with the proliferation of enterprise cloud data sources, it’s important that holistic and targeted collections encompass Microsoft 365 data as well as laptops and file shares.

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, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, Information Governance, Preservation & Collection, proportionality