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In eDiscovery, organizations and their legal teams must convert raw data collected from custodians’ electronic files into a format more suitable for easily securing, reviewing, and analyzing the information in those files. eDiscovery processing software makes this conversion happen.
Although it might seem like all eDiscovery solutions are the same, nothing could be further from the truth. Finding the right eDiscovery processing software can significantly cut down on costs, speed up the process of review and production, and increase accuracy so organizations can produce relevant data without accidentally producing confidential or privileged information.
eDiscovery processing is a stage in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, a nine-stage framework that serves as a guide for the eDiscovery process. The processing stage occurs after organizations or legal teams have identified, preserved, and collected electronically stored information. Processing usually involves taking raw data formats and converting them into searchable image or text files, but original files will be preserved in case parties need to forensically analyze them and their associated metadata.
Processing, Not Procrastinating: How eDiscovery Processing Software Saves You Time
A powerful eDiscovery processing tool can save organizations and legal teams critical time and money. During eDiscovery, they must review documents or files they’ve identified as potentially relevant or privileged to confirm their relevance and identify any privileged or confidential material that may require redacting or withholding a document. The more documents and files that teams need to collect and review, the longer and more expensive eDiscovery becomes. However, because only a relatively small percentage of collected ESI is usually produced to the opposing side during eDiscovery, automating eDiscovery processing through software can avoid wasted time and money.
eDiscovery solutions like Logikcull now provide automatic processing features to whittle down collected ESI to those files and documents that need human review. For example, Logikcull automatically deduplicates uploaded data, removing duplicate documents and files from the review set (while preserving those duplicate files within the data set in case they need to be accessed at a later time). Logikcull also automatically performs deNISTing, which removes from review sets system applications and files that are unlikely to contain relevant information.
The Logikcull platform also automatically sorts and organizes processed ESI into an easily reviewable and searchable format. For example, the platform’s automatic email threading capabilities produce threaded emails as a single document. Logikcull also enables data culling via date range, file size/type, written language, and custom keyword searches.
By culling duplicate or irrelevant documents and files with automated processing software, legal teams can more quickly get through the review process so they can prepare discovery responses and move the case or matter along.
Making Sense of Information with eDiscovery Processing Software
Legal teams can rely on eDiscovery processing software to convert various file types into easily readable and searchable formats and to remove any extraneous files from the review set so they can focus on reviewing only those documents that may be potentially relevant and subject to discovery.
Platforms like Logikcull can ingest and convert complex file types by using tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) and deep text recognition (DTR) to extract text from files like PDFs, PowerPoints, and images. Platforms can then place this extracted text layer over the original file to enable searches of files, with the search terms highlighted on the text layer.
Effective eDiscovery processing software also makes organizations and legal teams more efficient when conducting eDiscovery by whittling down review sets through deduplication. When platforms like Logikcull perform data deduplication, they will identify duplicate copies of files and remove them from the produced review set, although Logikcull keeps the duplicate copies available for access if necessary. In addition, with deNISTing, Logikcull and other eDiscovery platforms can remove as much as 40 percent of collected ESI from a review set.
Many file types include metadata, or information about the data in the file, including authors, creation and modification dates, recipients, and parties who’ve accessed the file. Metadata can help legal teams more quickly collect relevant ESI. For example, if a case involves a certain employee in the company, a metadata search of the email system can identify any emails that the employee sent, received, or was copied on. eDiscovery processing software solutions like Logikcull can create search filters using metadata to allow legal teams to quickly find potentially relevant, privileged, or confidential documents.
In the Hot Seat: Evaluating eDiscovery Processing Software
With so many eDiscovery processing solutions on the market, the process of finding the right solution for your organization or firm can make dating look like a walk in the park in comparison. The right processing tool should have features that increase the efficiency of your document review process.
Look for these critical features when vetting eDiscovery processing software:
- Data parsing abilities that include the ability to retrieve data from password-protected, corrupted, or nested files
- Robust searching and indexing functionality that allows users to configure search parameters, including omitting or including “stop words”
- Tagging abilities so you can label documents and files for later access, including labeling documents as “relevant,” “PII,” or “privileged.”
- Automatic converting of files from native formats into easily accessible and reviewable formats like PDFs, and creating secure styled versions of the original document (so teams can avoid changing the file or its metadata, or it being exposed to malware)
- Automatic transcribing of audio or video files
- OCR/DTR from image files or files without a native text layer
- Email threading
- Machine learning or AI assistance
eDiscovery processing platform companies often make it easy to view demonstrations of their platforms and they frequently offer trial periods. Organizations and law firms should take those companies up on their offers so they can find a software solution that strikes the right balance between functionality and cost. They’ll also want to avoid potential pitfalls in selecting a processing software, such as choosing a platform that doesn’t have all the functionality they need (which may lead to purchasing another specialized solution to fill in those functionality gaps) or picking a solution that doesn’t neatly integrate with their existing software suite (which may require costly manual file transfers or other workarounds).
Logikcull’s eDiscovery processing software provides organizations with the tools they need to quickly upload and organize ESI into a review set for manual review. Data loading, processing, and analytics are all handled automatically with Logikcull’s cloud-based platform, which further eliminates unnecessary hosting or license fees.
Many leading organizations have turned to Logikcull to streamline their eDiscovery processing. For example, Twilio saw data reductions of 50 to 70 percent and $360,000 in savings on legal costs. Veolia saw a 99.4 percent reduction in data requiring outside counsel review, eliminating over 100,000 review hours.
Conclusion
Effective eDiscovery processing software can provide significant cost and time savings for organizations and law firms as they prepare to produce ESI in legal matters.
A good eDiscovery processing tool should significantly reduce the sizes of review sets by eliminating duplicate files and unnecessary data like system or application files. eDiscovery processing software should also be able to convert different file types into easily reviewable formats, including by lifting text from images or transcribing audio or video recordings to provide searchable text, and permit searching through metadata.
Logikcull’s eDiscovery processing platform offers tools and capabilities that organizations and law firms can use to cut down on the time and expense of document and ESI review, all on a secure cloud-based platform that provides a collaboration space for team members.
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If you're looking to save your organization time and money through eDiscovery processing software, Logikcull can help. Schedule a demo today to learn exactly how.
