Reducing the Risks, Costs and Time of e-Discovery: EDRM and Email Archiving

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

This week I participated in a live webcast at Fortiva that discussed how an email archive can reduce the cost, risk and time involved with e-discovery. I thought it might be helpful to share some of the ideas from that event here on the blog.

A lot of people use the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) to explain the steps involved in the e-discovery process. Since having an email archive significantly changes how a company deals with the first four phases of the model, I’m going to focus on those areas (as they pertain to email). First, I’ll explain what each step involves, and then provide a general sense of the time and costs involved (with and without an email archive).

Ultimately, as the diagram below shows, having an email archive in place can dramatically reduce the costs involved with e-discovery, not to mention the risks.

1. Information Management – This is the first step in the model, and it refers to the organizing of information and the application of consistent retention policies. 
   

   Today, most firms have poorly defined retention policies and little, if any, way to enforce them across the organization. As a result, most companies dedicate very little – if any – budget to this step. The problem is, with no enforced policies, businesses are at risk of spoliation from destruction of data that should have been retained during a lawsuit. They also may be exposed to excess legal risk by maintaining data beyond the retention policy.

   By adding an email archive which captures a copy of every email message and applies consistent retention policies, a company can avoid these risks. Proactively capturing email into a central, searchable repository also increases visibility, and allows legal counsel to conduct early case assessment. It also makes future steps in the EDRM process faster and less expensive.  However, adding an archive requires a company to dedicate a moderate budget amount upfront.

2. Identification – This step basically involves determining where – and in what format – email exists.

   Without an archive, this may require IT to find and catalog backup tapes, PST files (on the corporate network, individual laptops and desktops, and portable storage devices), and email servers. The hard costs are generally fairly low, but the time and effort required by IT can add up significantly.

   By adding an email archive, this step can essentially be eliminated, especially if a company takes steps to eliminate the use of PST files. Since all email is stored in the archive, it is a single source from which all e-discovery requests can be met.

3. Preservation & Collection – Preservation means ensuring that email is protected against destruction or alteration (generally after a litigation hold), while collection refers to the gathering of email from the various sources catalogued in the identification phase. These two steps can sometimes overlap.

   Without an archive, enforcing a litigation hold manually (by asking individuals to retain information) is a hit or miss situation. Even if you can ensure that all relevant information is preserved (ie. by storing complete backup tapes), you will almost always end up retaining more data than necessary – potentially exposing the business to additional risk.

   With an archive in place, the preservation & collection process is radically reshaped. With all data stored in a central location, there’s no need for collection at all. The archive also allows you to easily enforce a preservation/hold order for only the data required, without risking additional data deletion/spoliation of evidence (in Fortiva’s case, a litigation hold can literally be enforced with a click of a button).

4. Processing, Review & Analysis – This phase involves the preparation of data, as well as the review and analysis of that data. This is where the most dramatic time and cost-saving benefits can be achieved with an email archive.

   Without an archive, this generally involves restoring backup tapes and removing duplicates, which can be an extraordinarily expensive process (the average cost to restore a single backup tape is $2,500 and some businesses may have hundreds of tapes to restore). This is also when the initial culling process takes place - eliminating unnecessary documents in order to reduce the amount of data that needs to be manually reviewed. Since processing work is typically done by third parties with limited culling capabilities, the resulting dataset that needs to be reviewed is generally very large.

   With an archive in place, all the data is stored in a deduplicated fashion, and it can be searched and reviewed at any time.  This allows businesses to conduct early case assessment before meeting with opposing counsel (or even before a formal case is filed).  A powerful search feature also makes the culling process more effective, ultimately reducing the amount of data that needs to be reviewed and analyzed.

5. Presentation – Since theoretically, the same dataset will be produced following the first four stages, an archive has no material impact on production and presentation costs.

As you can see in the diagram above, an archive involves moderate incremental costs in the information management phase (regardless of whether or not you’re involved in litigation); however, it dramatically reduces the total cost of the e-discovery process when a request comes up. Ultimately, even if you only have one case that requires e-discovery over the course of three years, it still makes economic sense to implement an archive (based on Fortiva’s pricing). This is true without taking into consideration the additional risks (and potential costs) that come with not having an archive in place.