Question & Answer: What To Know About E-Discovery

VARs with expertise in managing or storing electronic content should understand how new e-discovery rules can positively affect their sales.

What technologies aid in e-discovery?
William Lyons, chairman & CEO, AXS-One: In e-discovery, there's been a gradual transformation in both the technologies used and the way in which they're used. Traditionally, this has been a reactive function — in response to an e-discovery request, corporations reached into their backup vaults, fished out backup tapes, identified a list of Electronic Evidence Discovery (EED) vendors, and outsourced the job to one of them. EED companies in turn used proprietary tools to ingest and troll through the data and develop an appropriate response. Even when done right, the process was tedious, labor-intensive, and expensive. It's also error-prone, in an area where even minor mistakes can expose corporations to severe legal damages.

What's different now is the emergence of archiving, which provides a proactive solution to the problem. In addition, to handle the high volume of data that typically exists, solutions have to be highly scalable and offer a cost-effective way to add more hardware resources. And since searches have to be accurate and provide meaningful hits, full-text indexers and the associated search engines have to be flexible and feature-rich. These search engines should support high-level conceptual searches and allow you to hone in on the results. To facilitate long-term storage and fast access, CAS (content addressed storage) devices have also emerged as a cost-effective alternative for storage.

Bill Thornton, VP of business development, Surety: With the recently amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), where native electronic files are not only discoverable but must be authenticated for admissibility purposes, data authentication technologies are rapidly becoming an important aid in e-discovery. Trusted time stamps are becoming more valuable to litigation support companies that have to eliminate doubt that e-records could have been mishandled in the discovery process.