What Should I Know About Electronic Discovery Services?

Electronic discovery services or e-discovery services are the method of choice today to deal with electrically stored information. The most important reason of the popularity of e- discovery services is the online availability. With more and more going online today, it is surely the best way to access information. This in turn is increasing their online footprint. Online footprint can be described as anything from your emails, blogs, videos, YouTube uploads to Facebook posts. All this contributes to electronically stored information.

To sum it up, we can say that a company has your electronically stored data if it has,

1. Your name,
2. Address,
3. Your current designation in your company,
4. Your past performance ratings,
5. Current designation,
6. Job description,
7. Information on hobbies, like and dislikes etc.

The user group of Electronic discovery consists of litigation firms, attorneys and lawyers.

Are there any sub-parts to electronic discovery services?

Electronicdiscovery services include several important parts. Read on to know more about them and have a better understanding:

1. Data processing
   1. The data present in the form of online blogs, audios, videos and texts. All this data needs to be processed at a high speed and thus the electronic discovery services should have relevant technology.
   2. Even the relevant documents are also scrutinized and are sorted out later under data processing.
   3. A sound electronic delivery system should be able to manage all these tasks efficiently.
2. Data collection and data preservation
   1. Access to electronically stored data becomes important when you are about to start a litigation. Such data is thus electronically stores and is called data preservation to give your case a sure shot advantage as you already know the parties you are going to deal with.
   2. Data collection also entails data identification. The staff at the electronic discovery service provider is expert in scrutinizing the relevant data from a vast data pool.
3. Data analysis and filtering
   1. Identification of data is followed by its careful analysis. Preliminary analysis of relevant data might reveal some interesting facts.
   2. After the preliminary analysis of the data is completed, a further and in depth analysis is required to extract maximum information from the available data keeping in mind the purpose of the litigation.

Why should I use electronic discovery services, when my staff can do the same work?

There is a simple reply to this; it saves cost to the company! All the steps involved in the whole process right from the collection, identification, preservation and analysis are more or less done online. This is surely better than sending your staff to personally visit the location and collect information manually who may face resistance in people divulging their personal information to a stranger.

Electronicdiscovery services are only just catching up and like with anything new it takes time to gain confidence of the people around. More and more people are getting to know of the advantages of taking electronic discovery services. It is not hacking in to any system or database. This is not so, as it is almost like making a request and court intervention can be made to collect this data if such request is denied.

How do I find the best vendor for electronic discovery services?

You can go through any of the following suggested ways to find the best electronic discovery provider:

1. Google electronic discovery services. The easiest and the best way to find a good electronic discovery provider is surely the internet and you can get a list of almost all the service providers in a few seconds.
2. The second best way is to ask around. Even your litigation firm can suggest some good service provider. Then check out their services either by visiting them or asking for more opinions around.
3. You need to perform extreme caution in deciding the final service provider and if you can keep following some points in mind, you won’t have too much of difficulty:
   1. Check for the credentials of the electronic discovery service provider and look for some previous clients and references. However, you may find it a bit difficult as people are usually discrete about these services. Even in this case, you can assure them to keep their references confidential and try to get a reference.
   2. Evaluate the service providers based on the amount of time that they spend with you. As a client you have every right to know the source of their information.
   3. Draw up a contract with the electronic discovery services provider clearly stating confidentiality clause and ownership of data clause. Towards the end of the litigation, all data used for the case and also that considered irrelevant should reside with you.
      
      

In the current environment of technology beating any and every evidence, electronic discovery services can just be the things that you need in order to turn the tides in your favor.