HOLMDEL, NJ — Mar. 7, 2011 — Index Engines, a leader in enterprise discovery, today highlighted four major identification and collection areas that should be reviewed when collecting Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Index Engines noted that the old tried and true collection processes are often flawed, resulting in inaccurate data that creates discovery risk in the courtroom.  This has paved the way for new technology innovations for better eDiscovery collection.

 

Today the problem of providing inaccurate data is on the rise. A recent analysis of cases prior to 2010 by King and Spalding found there were more eDiscovery sanction cases and awards in 2009 than in any prior year. In fact, there were more eDiscovery sanction cases in 2009 than in all years prior to 2005 combined. The report also found that failure to produce ESI was the most common basis for sanctions.

 

“There is so much that can go wrong with traditional approaches to ESI collection,” said Jim McGann, vice president, Index Engines. “Dates can be changed. Entire emails and files can disappear; it’s imperative that the discovery team works closely with IT to ensure your company maintains a sound and defensible collection strategy.”

 

Index Engines Key Strategies Include:

 

IT and legal must work closely together. Initially it is imperative that IT and legal work closely to look at the current online network data. IT is aware that deleted emails are recoverable from an Exchange server. And most often, the most untampered source for email collection is email residing in offsite storage, typically on backup tapes. In the past, legacy backup tapes were often overlooked because it was historically difficult and expensive to collect data from them.

 

Be proactive with legal requirements. Get ahead of the curve by proactively managing legacy data. Know what data should be kept and what can be purged. By determining this, a company can develop a policy to save specific content so that is identifiable and ready for on demand discovery. This is the first step in a proactive strategy.

 

Understand the limitation of technology. Knowing the limitations within your technology platform is critical to your success. Only use tools that index all the content and don’t change any of the metadata. Understand how duplications are defined and whether the metadata is modified. Some of the older search solutions compromise the indexing process, which will affect the outcome of your discovery.

 

Become a discovery expert. New technology is able to improve and strengthen the discovery process. New technology can search out a single email without duplicating the original environment. It is possible to make tapes searchable by creating an index in the cloud for review. Then the bit of data that is requested can be pulled with very little effort, expense or time. With less than 5% of old legacy data being relevant, today’s new technology eliminates the unnecessary process of restoring and then rebuilding the data.

 

For more information on electronically stored information and the strategies and techniques that make ESI more collectible contact Index Engines.

 

 

About Index Engines Founded in 2003, Index Engines is the leader in enterprise discovery solutions. Our mission is to organize enterprise data assets, making them immediately accessible, searchable and easy to manage. Businesses today face a significant challenge organizing their files and email to ensure timely and cost efficient access, while also maintaining compliance to regulations governing electronic data. Companies rely on Index Engines solutions for comprehensive insight into their data to simplify information discovery, classification and management.   The patented Index Engines discovery platform is the only solution on the market to offer a complete view of electronic data assets. Online data is indexed in-stream at wire speed in native enterprise storage protocols, enabling high-speed, efficient indexing of proprietary backup and transfer formats.  Index Engines’ unique approach to offline records scans backup tapes, indexes the contents and extracts relevant data, eliminating the time-consuming restoration process.  Index Engines provides the only comprehensive discovery platform across both online and offline data, saving time and money when managing enterprise information.   ###  Index Engines, Power Over Information and Litigation Ready are trademarks or registered trademarks of Index Engines, Inc. All rights reserved. All product names mentioned are or may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective organizations. ###