Written By: Jason Purcell
You’ve likely heard the common catchphrase ‘end-to-end’ many times in our little eDiscovery world. It’s a buzzword that has helped to serve many of us in the investigations, eDiscovery, and compliance communities. Even Gartner uses it, stating “By 2023, more than 70% of enterprise IT leaders will upgrade to end-to-end e-discovery software to reduce time and legal spend, up from 10% in 2019.”
In recent years, there has been an undeniable uptick in enterprise customers leveraging a combination of software and eDiscovery consultants helping to build their own end-to-end in-house eDiscovery and information governance program. In helping to architect many of these, it occurred to me that the very phrase itself can be quite misleading.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
The left ‘end’ is rather straightforward. The duty to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) gets triggered when litigation is reasonably anticipated. From there, we know the rest—preservation, collection, processing, and review of discoverable ESI ensues. Makes sense.
The right ‘end’ is where it gets a little foggy and some logical questions begin to surface:
- Does it truly end with a production / presentation?
- If so, is it safe to presume that each end-to-end process is an isolated, matter-by-matter task that has a defined beginning and a defined end?
- What about all the time and money we just spent on the last case? Are we going to let all those expensive coding and case strategy decisions go to waste?
- Wait, are you telling me that we are also going to have to re-collect, re-process, and re-review everything again the next time a new matter pops up, even if the same custodian’s data is required again?
At Nuix, we embrace these questions and begin asking questions of our own, for your eDiscovery and information governance program’s benefit:
- Why collect the same data over and over?
- Why process data more than once?
- Why not create a principal data inventory of your frequent flier custodians’ ESI?
- Why can’t we leverage modernized scalable architecture to be able to search, analyze, and cull even the largest and most voluminous data sets?
- If data makes it to review, do you want to be clever with those coding decisions and bolt them back onto your ESI warehouse, ensuring that these costly coding decisions get reused to help guide attorneys for future matters?
- If redactions are being made for PII, PHI, trade secrets, etc., would it be helpful to carry those coding decisions and redactions forward for each new matter containing that identical record?
- For data that has been processed and is no longer responsive to legal hold, wouldn’t it help to be able to safely and easily release the data from your ESI warehouse and where it lives in the wild?
AN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTIONS
These questions have led us to create a 360° approach to the litigation lifecycle that saves millions of dollars and thousands of hours of time previously spent in collection, processing, and review. Perhaps even more important, it delivers consistency across future reviews and productions. As the intelligence layer grows over time, your ESI warehouse becomes smarter, more agile, and exponentially more valuable.
Combining enterprise-grade collection, processing, and review technology with knowledgeable experts can help you build a defensible, repeatable, and future-proof eDiscovery and information governance program. In short, putting an end to ‘end-to-end.’
Source: https://www.nuix.com/blog/ending-end-end
Recent Comments