Tag Archives: Gartner

While the eDiscovery industry has seen notable advancements and gained efficiencies in widespread adoption of hosted document review and supporting technologies, the same is not yet true for the collection and preservation of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Leading industry research firm Gartner notes in a recent Market Guide report that eDiscovery collection and preservation process “especially when involving device collection, can be intrusive, time consuming and costly..”  And some recent court decisions imposing sanctions on corporate litigants who failed to meet their ESI preservation obligations are symptomatic of these pain points.

Earlier this year, a Magistrate judge imposed spoliation sanctions for destruction of ESI in a commercial dispute, where the Plaintiff made no effort to preserve such emails — even after it sent a letter to the defendant threatening litigation. (Matthew Enter., Inc. v. Chrysler Grp. LLC, 2016 WL 2957133 (N.D. Cal. May 23, 2016). The court, finding that the defendant suffered substantial prejudice by the loss of potentially relevant ESI, imposed severe evidentiary sanctions under Rule 37(e)(1), including allowing the defense to use the fact of spoliation to rebut testimony from the plaintiff’s witnesses. The court also awarded reasonable attorney’s fees incurred by the defendant in bringing the motion.  And in another case this year,  Internmatch v. Nxtbigthing, LLC, 2016 WL 491483 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 8, 2016), a U.S. District Court imposed similar sanctions based upon the corporate defendant’s suspect preservation efforts.

In her June 30, 2016 “Market Guide for E-Discovery Solutions,” Gartner eDiscovery analyst Jie Zhang notes that “searching across multiple and hybrid data repositories becomes more onerous and leads to overinvestment.” Given that most enterprises’ retention policy efforts are often unenforced or immature, there is often a glut of content to search through. Accordingly, almost every e-discovery request is different and often time pressured, as IT typically handles e-discovery requests in an ad hoc manner.” As such, Jie observes that “In order to guarantee data identification and collection quality, IT tends to err on the side of being overly inclusive in data preservation approach. This could result in too much legal hold or preservation. For example, it is not rare for an organization to put all mailboxes on legal hold or put them on legal hold over time (due to multiple holds and never-released holds). Being put on hold not only adds to IT management overhead and prime storage cost, but also makes any archive or records management difficult.”

The common theme between the cited cases and Zhang’s analysis is a perceived infeasibility of systemized and efficient enterprise eDiscovery collection process, causing legal and IT executives to wring their hands over the resulting disruption and expense of ESI collection. In some situations, the corporate litigant opts to roll the dice with non-compliance — a clearly misguided and faulty cost benefit analysis.

What is needed is an effective, scalable and systemized ESI collection process that makes enterprise eDiscovery collection much more feasible. More advanced enterprise class technology, such as X1 Distributed Discovery, can accomplish system-wide searches that are narrowly tailored to collect only potentially relevant information in a legally defensible manner. This process is better, faster and dramatically less expensive than other methods currently employed.

With X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD), parties can perform targeted search and collection of the ESI of thousands 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.