Electronic Discovery 

 

E-Discovery or Electronic Discovery refers to the method, via which electronic data is searched for, discovered and secured and saved for the purpose of facilitating the evidence is being recorded as the evidence in a civil or criminal court case. The E-Discovery software allows the recoding of both online as well as offline information. E-discovery, also, includes court-approved hacking of certain systems to get essential information.
The advantages of electronic discovery over paper documents include:

• This software simplifies the search of required data and information from the electronic database. This database is constantly updated to facilitate the collection of useful information for any civil or criminal case.
  
• Using this software for recording the data saves a lot of time as manually looking out for relevant documents consumes a lot of time. Also, data in hard copy has to be manually interpreted and analyzed, and such analysis cannot be completely validated as compared to the electronic data received through E- Discovery software.
  
• Data obtained through E-Discovery has lesser chances of being lost as it is in a digital format. There is also less chances of the data being stolen or deleted as it is saved on multiple destinations. This makes data obtained from E-Discovery more reliable as well.
  
• The usage of E- Discovery software has led to development of cyber forensics which is completely a new field of study and includes the investigation of digital data in the social, legal and political spheres of life. Thereafter, the pc is secured to prevent distortion of important data or information by isolating the pc from the network.
  

The process of Electronic Discovery is starts with information management. If you want to minimize the the costs and risks involved, you need to identify and ascertain them very carefully. Identification of the sources of Electronically Source Information (ESI) is the next stage of the process of E-Discovery. The information gathered is scrutinized on the relevance factor so that useful data is collected.
The data thus scrutinized is collected and preserved. This includes the securing of useful information by ensuring that it is adequately protected and not subject to deletion by any unauthorized source. All the information that is collected from various sources for further processes that include processing of the data is termed collectively as collection.
Thereafter comes the processing, review and analysis of the concerned data or information. Here, the ESI is compressed to make it easier for reviewers and approvers to sift through data. After all these steps are successfully completed, the data is evaluated on the basis on relevance, importance, applicability and pattern.
The delivery of ESI to the final clients or the concerned parties is the last and final step of the whole process of ElectronicDiscovery. The client is free to use this data in any area of life including court cases and use it for his advantage.
The whole process of searching, identifying, collecting, processing, interpretation and delivering of the data is covered under E-Discovery.