Tag Archives: X1

November 1, 2022 · 11:42 AM

Proportionality in eDiscovery is Ideal, but Difficult to Realize Without an Optimized Process

By John Patzakis

(Originally published October 24, 2022 by JD Supra and EDRM)

Image: Kaylee Walstad, EDRM

Proportionality-based eDiscovery is a goal that all corporate litigants seek to attain. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1), parties may discover any non-privileged material that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. Litigants that take full advantage of the proportionality rule can greatly reduce cost, time and risk associated with otherwise inefficient eDiscovery.

While there is a keen awareness of proportionality in the legal community, realizing the benefits requires the ability to operationalize workflows as far upstream in the eDiscovery process as possible. For instance, when you’re engaging in data over-collection, which in turn incurs extensive labor and processing costs, the ship has largely sailed before you are able to perform early case assessments and data relevancy analysis, as much of the discovery costs have already been incurred at that point. 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.

However, traditional eDiscovery services typically involve manual collection, followed by manual on-premises hardware-based processing, and finally manual upload to review. These inefficiencies extend projects by often weeks while dramatically increasing cost and risk with purposeful data over-collection and numerous manual data handoffs. The good news is that solutions and processes addressing the first half of the EDRM involving collection and processing are now far more automated than they were even a few years ago.

Recently EDRM hosted a webinar addressing these issues – “Operationalizing your eDiscovery Process to Realize Proportionality Benefits” – and more specifically, as the title reflects, explored how to operationalize your eDiscovery process to achieve lower costs, improve early case strategy, realize faster time to review and reduce overall legal risk.

Here are some key takeaways from the webinar:

  • A detailed legal analysis was provided highlighting the case of Raine Group v. Reign Capital, (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 22, 2022), which applied proportionality at the point of identification and collection, not just production. The court endorsed the use of detailed and iterative keyword searches to identify and preserve potentially relevant ESI.
  • A demonstration was shown on how to enable detailed and proportional search criteria, applied in-place, at the point of collection. Such a capability is key to realizing the blueprint for targeted and proportional ESI collection outlined in Raine Group.
  • The speakers also discussed how organizations should move upstream to focus on information governance to reduce the data funnel as soon as possible. The new generation of eDiscovery technology in the areas of collection, identification, analytics, and early data assessment, enables enterprises to operationalize proportionality principles.

The webinar culminated with the notion that an optimized process that applies proportionality upstream at the collection and identification stage reduces the data volume funnel by as much as 98 percent from over-collection models, yet with increased transparency and compliance. A link to the recording from the webinar can also be accessed here.

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Filed under Best Practices, Case Law, Case Study, ECA, eDiscovery, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Preservation & Collection, proportionality

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September 20, 2022 · 10:46 AM

The Traditional Workplace is Not Coming Back, with Major Implications for eDiscovery

By John Patzakis

The world has in many ways returned to life as it was prior to the pandemic. Restaurants and hotels are packed again. Children are all back in their classrooms. Rock bands and philharmonics are playing in front of full audiences. But this is not so for the office.

Only about a third of knowledge workers are back in the office more than once a week, but, according to CNN, only 5 percent of employers are requiring in-office attendance five days a week. And it doesn’t look like these trends are going to change dramatically any time soon. In fact, the trend toward remote work should continue as office leases continue to expire. The vast majority of knowledge workers prefer some form of hybrid or remote work, and executives are increasingly coming to accept that reality. Remote and hybrid work is here to stay. And this has major repercussions for eDiscovery practices.

This is because the legacy manual collection workflow involving travel, physical access and one-time mass collection of custodian laptops, file servers and email accounts is a non-starter for the new era of remote and distributed workforces. Manual collection efforts are expensive, disruptive and time-consuming as many times an “overkill” method of forensic image collection process is employed, thus substantially driving up eDiscovery costs.

When it comes to technical approaches, endpoint forensic crawling methods are now a non-starter. Network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate all endpoint data back to the forensic crawling tool renders the approach ineffective, especially with remote workers needing to VPN into a corporate network. Corporate network bandwidth is at a premium, and the last thing a company needs is their network shut down by inefficient remote forensic tools.

For example, with a forensic crawling tool, to search a custodian’s laptop with 20 gigabytes of email and documents, all 20 gigabytes must be copied and transmitted over the network, where it is then searched, all of which takes at least a day or so per computer. So, most organizations choose to force collect all 20 gigabytes. But while this was merely inefficient and expensive pre-pandemic, it is now untenable with the global remote workforce.

Solving this collection challenge is X1 Enterprise Collect, which is specially designed to address the challenges presented by remote and distributed workforces. X1 enables enterprises to remotely, quickly and easily search across up to thousands of distributed endpoints and data servers from a central location. Legal and compliance teams can perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, and full results with completed collection in hours, instead of days or weeks. The key to X1’s scalability is its unique ability to index and search data in place, thereby enabling a highly detailed and iterative search and analysis, and then only collecting data responsive to those steps.

X1 operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or the cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. After indexing of systems has completed (typically a few hours to a day depending on data volumes), clients and their outside counsel or service provider may then:

  • Conduct Boolean and keyword searches of relevant custodial data sources for ESI, returning search results within minutes by custodian, file type and location.
  • Preview any document in-place, before collection, including any or all documents with search hits.
  • Remotely collect and export responsive ESI from each system directly into a Relativity or RelativityOne® workspace for processing, analysis and review or any other processing or review platform via standard load file. Export text and metadata only or full native files.
  • Export responsive ESI directly into other analytics engines, e.g. Brainspace®, H5® or any other platform that accepts a standard load file.
  • Conduct iterative “search/analyze/export-into-Relativity” processes as frequently and as many times as desired.

To learn more about this capability purpose-built for remote eDiscovery collection and data audits, please contact us.

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Filed under Best Practices, ECA, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, Enterprise eDiscovery, ESI, Preservation & Collection

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June 15, 2017 · 8:22 AM

eDiscovery Tech Can Effectively Address Key Cybersecurity Requirements

Organizations spent an estimated 122.45 billion USD in 2016 on cybersecurity defense solutions and services, in a never-ending effort to procure better firewalls, anti-malware tools, and intrusion detection and prevention systems to keep hackers out of their networks. However, recent industry studies clearly demonstrate that threats posed by insiders (whether through malice or negligent conduct) dwarf those from the outside.

In fact, industry experts assert that employees are inadvertently causing corporate data breaches and leaks daily. The Ponemon Institute recently surveyed hundreds of companies in its 2016 Cost of Data Breach Study.  Among 874 incidents, the survey revealed that 568 were caused by employee or contractor negligence; 191 by malicious insiders and only 85 incidents purely attributed to outsiders.

An insider is any individual who has authorized access to corporate networks, systems or data.  This may include employees, contractors, or others with permission to access an organizations’ systems. With the increased volume of data and increased sophistication and determination of attackers looking to exploit unwitting and even recruit malicious insiders, businesses are more susceptible to insider threats than ever before.

The most serious and often devastating cybersecurity incidents are usually related to “spear phishing” attacks, which are comprised of targeted and often highly customized electronic communications sent to specific individuals in a business that appear to come from a trusted individual or business. The targeted insider is often tricked into disclosing their passwords, providing highly sensitive information, or installing malware on their computer. These attacks tend to be successful because they are so customized and are designed to evade traditional cybersecurity defenses.

Much of the evidence and other indications of spear phishing and malicious insider incidents are not found in firewall logs and typically cannot be flagged or blocked by intrusion detection or intrusion prevention systems. Instead, much of that information is found in the emails and locally stored documents of end users spread throughout the enterprise. To detect, identify and effectively respond to insider threats, organizations need to be able to search across this data in an effective and scalable manner. Additionally, proactive search efforts can identify potential security violations such as misplaced sensitive IP, or personal customer data or even password “cheat sheets” stored in local documents.

To date, organizations have employed limited technical approaches to try and identify unstructured distributed data stored across the enterprise, enduring many struggles. For instance, forensic software agent-based crawling methods are commonly attempted but cause repeated high user computer resource utilization for each search initiated and network bandwidth limitations are being pushed to the limits rendering this approach ineffective. So being able to search and audit across at least several hundred distributed end points in a repeatable and quick fashion is effectively impossible under this approach.

What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and return results within minutes instead of days or weeks. None of the traditional approaches come close to meeting this requirement. This requirement, however, can be met by the latest innovations in enterprise eDiscovery software.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints from a central location.  Legal, cybersecurity, and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, instead of days or weeks. With X1DD, organizations can proactively or reactively search for confidential data leakage and also keyword signatures of customized spear phishing attacks. Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1DD is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed searching that is executed in its entirety on the end-node computers for data audits across an organization. This game-changing capability vastly reduces costs and quickens response times while greatly mitigating risk and disruption to operations.

X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the Cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations.

Beyond providing enterprise eDiscovery and information governance functionality for an organization, employees benefit from having use of the award-winning X1 Search product to improve their productivity, with the added benefit of allowing the business to address the prevalent cybersecurity gap in addressing spear phishing attacks and other insider threats.

 

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March 28, 2017 · 8:25 AM

Key to Improving Predictive Coding Results: Effective ECA

Predictive Coding, when correctly employed, can significantly reduce legal review costs with generally more accurate results than other traditional legal review processes. However, the benefits associated with predictive coding are often undercut by the over-collection and over-inclusion of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) into the predictive coding process. This is problematic for two reasons.

The first reason is obvious, the more data introduced into the process, the higher the cost and burden. Some practitioners believe it is necessary to over-collect and subsequently over-include ESI to allow the predictive coding process to sort everything out. Many service providers charge by volume, so there can be economic incentives that conflict with what is best for the end-client. In some cases, the significant cost savings realized through predictive coding are erased by eDiscovery costs associated with overly aggressive ESI inclusion on the front end.

The second reason why ESI over-inclusion is detrimental is less obvious, and in fact counter intuitive to many. Some discovery practitioners believe as much data as possible needs to be put through the predictive coding process in order to “better train” the machine learning algorithms. However this is contrary to what is actually true. The predictive coding process is much more effective when the initial set of data has a higher richness (also referred to as “prevalence”) ratio. In other words, the higher the rate of responsive data in the initial data set, the better. It has always been understood that document culling is very important to successful, economical document review, and that includes predictive coding.

Robert Keeling, a senior partner at Sidley Austin and the co-chair of the firm’s eDiscovery Task Force, is a widely recognized legal expert in the areas of predictive coding and technology assisted review.  At Legal Tech New York earlier this year, he presented at an Emerging Technology Session: “Predictive Coding: Deconstructing the Secret Sauce,” where he and his colleagues reported on a comprehensive study of various technical parameters that affect the outcome of a predictive coding effort.  According to Robert, the study revealed many important findings, one of them being that a data set with a relatively high richness ratio prior to being ingested into the predictive coding process was an important success factor.

To be sure, the volume of ESI is growing exponentially and will only continue to do so. The costs associated with collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing documents in litigation are the source of considerable pain for litigants. The only way to reduce that pain to its minimum is to use all tools available in all appropriate circumstances within the bounds of reasonableness and proportionality to control the volumes of data that enter the discovery pipeline, including predictive coding.

Ideally, an effective early case assessment (ECA) capability can enable counsel to set reasonable discovery limits and ultimately process, host, review and produce less ESI.  Counsel can further use ECA to gather key information, develop a litigation budget, and better manage litigation deadlines. ECA also can foster cooperation and proportionality in discovery by informing the parties early in the process about where relevant ESI is located and what ESI is significant to the case. And with such benefits also comes a much more improved predictive coding process.

X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) uniquely fulfills this requirement with its ability to perform pre-collection early case assessment, instead of ECA after the costly, time consuming and disruptive collection phase, thereby providing a game-changing new approach to the traditional eDiscovery model.  X1DD enables enterprises to quickly and easily search across thousands of distributed endpoints from a central location.  This allows organizations to easily perform unified complex searches across content, metadata, or both and obtain full results in minutes, enabling true pre-collection ECA with live keyword analysis and distributed processing and collection in parallel at the custodian level. To be sure, this dramatically shortens the identification/collection process by weeks if not months, curtails processing and review costs from not over-collecting data, and provides confidence to the legal team with a highly transparent, consistent and systemized process. And now we know of another key benefit of an effective ECA process: much more accurate predictive coding.

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September 27, 2016 · 10:02 AM

LTN: Social Media Evidence Even More Important than email and “Every Litigator” Needs to Address It

legaltech-news-thumbBrent Burney, a top eDiscovery tech writer of Legaltech News, recently penned a detailed product review of X1 Social Discovery after his extensive testing of the software. (Social Media: A Different Type of E-Discovery Collection, Legaltech News, September 2016). The verdict on X1 Social Discovery is glowing, but more on that in bit. Burney also provides very remarkable general commentary on how social media and other web-based evidence is essential for every litigation matter, noting that “email does not hold a flicker of a candle to what people post, state, admit and display in social media.” In emphasizing the critical importance of social media and other web-based evidence, Burney notes that addressing this evidentiary treasure trove is essential for all types and sizes of litigation matters.

Consistent to that point, there is a clear dramatic increase in legal and compliance cases involving social media evidence. Top global law firm Gibson Dunn recently reported that “the use of social media continues to proliferate in business and social contexts, and that its importance is increasing in litigation, the number of cases focusing on the discovery of social media continued to skyrocket.” Undoubtedly, this is  why Burney declares that “every litigator should include (X1 Social Discovery) in their technical tool belt,” and that X1 Social Discovery is “necessary for the smallest domestic issue all the way up to the largest civil litigation matter.” Burney bases his opinion on both the critical importance of social media evidence, and his verdict on the effectiveness of X1 Social Discovery, which he lauds as featuring an interface that “is impressive and logical” and providing “the ideal method” to address social media evidence for court purposes.

From a legal commentary standpoint, two relevant implications of the LTN article stand out. First, the article represents important peer review, publication and validation of X1 Social Discovery under the Daubert Standard, which includes those factors, among others, as a framework for judges to determine whether scientific or other technical evidence is admissible in federal court.

Secondly, this article reinforces the view of numerous legal experts and key Bar Association ethics opinions, asserting that a lawyer’s duty of competence requires addressing social media evidence. New Hampshire Bar Association’s oft cited ethics opinion states that lawyers “have a general duty to be aware of social media as a source of potentially useful information in litigation, to be competent to obtain that information directly or through an agent, and to know how to make effective use of that information in litigation.” The New York State Bar similarly weighed in noting that “A lawyer has a duty to understand the benefits and risks and ethical implications associated with social media, including its use as a … means to research and investigate matters.” And the America Bar Association recently published Comment [8] to Model Rule 1.1, which provides that a lawyer “should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”

The broader point in Burney’s article is that X1 Social Discovery is enabling technology that provides the requisite feasibility for law firms, consultants, and other practitioners to transition from just talking about social media discovery to establishing it as a standard practice.  With the right software, social media collections for eDiscovery matters and law enforcement investigations can be performed in a very scalable, efficient and highly accurate process. Instead of requiring hours to manually review and collect a public Facebook account, X1 Social Discovery can collect all the data in minutes into an instantly searchable and reviewable format.

So as with any form of digital investigation, feasibility (as well as professional competence) often depends on utilizing the right technology for the job.  As law firms, law enforcement, eDiscovery service providers and private investigators all work social discovery investigations into standard operating procedures, it is critical that best practices technology is incorporated to get the job done. This important LTN review is an emphatic punctuation of this necessity.

 

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