Alextronic Discovery
Alextronic Discovery
An Electronic Discovery Blog covering News, Articles
and Thoughts for the Legal and Corporate Community Author: Alexander H. Lubarsky, LL.M., Esq. - alubarsky@enterusa.com - Tel. (415) 533-4166 OR 800-375-4222 THIS BLAWG IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE WEB SITES WWW.DISCOVERYRESOURCES.ORG OR WWW.DISCOVERYRESOURCES.COM


Thursday, September 15, 2005

Will live capture of e-mail make ED processing as we know it obsolete?  

Will live capture of e-mail make ED processing as we know it obsolete?

As rules such as SEC 17(a)4 requiring live capture of e-mail communications by publicly traded entities in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and ten thousand dollar shower curtains (Tyco) begin to be the rule rather than the exception, live capture of electronic communications seem to be more and more the norm. Combine the flow of this tide with the reduced cost of storage and the electronic data does not have to be harvested and massaged and indexed... it's simply already there.

In fact, this progression makes sense. History supports it. Early man hunted with poison darts and clubs before Ugtar the Bison hunter concocted a fence and bred bison in a secure area with saber tooth tiger firewalls. Streamlining live data to a digital archive with audit and query capacities results in data instantly searchable and classifiable without necessarily pushing it through the indexing and meta tag extraction exercises.

Of course, chain of custody is hardly an issue as the live stream does not necessarily divert from its environment. Deduplication and virus protection can be scripted into the archive via front end filtering. Data which has been live captured can be simply queried for relevance and/or repsonsiveness and then this sub population can be exported into a full fledged litigation support tool for redactions/annotations/production subset numbering and ultimate export into a trial presentation application such as Trial Director or Sanction.

This isn't Star Wars. This stuff exists now and the tier one EDD players are moving into this model slowly but surely. If you are interested in a list of companies doing this now, e-mail me at alubarsky@enterusa.com .

Of course, in the short term traditional EDD processes will likely continue to grow but this growth will ultimately move sideways as live streamed data is more and more routinely captured. In the meantime, don't throw out that MD5 hash code.

posted by Alexander | 11:33 PM

Resources

Law Blog Links

Meet the Blogger

Weekly Blog Email

Archives