Traditionally, eDiscovery has been primarily associated with legal proceedings. However, as the role of data and the regulations surrounding data storage and use have evolved, the use of eDiscovery has also expanded. eDiscovery tools and processes can play a pivotal role in the data lifecycle by enabling organizations to locate and access quality data swiftly.

Consider the following eDiscovery practices that support powerful data governance.

Ensure Effective Data Identification and Classification

Data involved in eDiscovery must be searchable and accessible. Additionally, a clear chain of custody for all data ensures the preservation of data integrity, a fundamental goal in eDiscovery.

Achieving these goals requires proper indexing and classification of data through effective metadata management. This in turn makes it easier to manage the data lifecycle and retrieve relevant information when needed.

Today’s platforms offer many different locations and service providers to store information, including localized to computers, internal computer networks, and the cloud. Understanding and controlling the location of information by type is critical to avoid deduplication of effort and having conflicting or out of date documents and information. Data classification is nearly as important as where data is stored.

Prioritize Data Security and Confidentiality

To ensure regulatory compliance and prevent spoliation of data for litigation purposes, companies must focus on data security and privacy. Best practices include encrypting sensitive data and implementing access controls. Organizations should also regularly audit security protocols to prevent data breaches.

Data security and privacy also prove essential for effective data governance. Consequently, this focus on protecting sensitive data and controlling data access accomplishes two critical goals at once.

Automate Where Possible

As the data environment grows increasingly complex, legal teams can find themselves bogged down with identifying and collecting data. Automating many routine and time-consuming tasks frees up legal counsel to focus on doing what they do best. It also allows teams to establish case strategy more quickly while improving accuracy.

For example, automation streamlines tasks such as data identification and classification, deduplication, redaction, review, and analysis. This saves money in eDiscovery while simplifying data governance.

Understand the Benefits and Dangers Posed by AI

AI figures prominently in automating data tasks. It also improves speed and accuracy by quickly combing through huge datasets to identify certain types of information such as account numbers or protected health information. And by identifying trends and anomalies that human reviewers might miss, it helps to uncover hidden insights.

At the same time, however, AI introduces several significant risks. For instance, the accuracy of data used to train AI systems will affect the quality of the data classification the system produces. AI may also introduce unintended bias and privacy concerns. Consequently, while AI may prove essential, business leaders must understand the risks and use the technology wisely.

Leverage eDiscovery Technology

Utilizing eDiscovery tools not only streamlines the eDiscovery process but also reinforces data governance. For example, cloud-based and SaaS eDiscovery solutions provide increased accessibility, scalability, and flexibility. Also, by design, they handle vast amounts of data more efficiently and facilitate seamless collaboration across multiple teams and locations.

When choosing technology to support eDiscovery and data governance, organizations should look for solutions that provide robust security while scaling to handle large and complex data volumes. And to ensure these solutions deliver value, choose tools that are intuitive, easy to learn and use.

Choose Your eDiscovery Vendor Carefully

Finally, as both the data environment and the legal landscape continue to evolve, organizations will benefit from partnering with an experienced eDiscovery vendor. But take time to vet potential vendors carefully, as the decision can significantly impact both legal outcomes and data quality.

Ask detailed questions. For instance, you should prioritize vendors that can demonstrate specific experience in your industry. Also look for providers that have implemented stringent security measures to protect sensitive data and that can ensure compliance with applicable regulations.

Implement eDiscovery Best Practices for Effective Data Governance

eGovernance provides cloud-based solutions for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data. We provide fully managed solutions with access to subject matter experts in the fields of Information Governance, records retention policies and eDiscovery.

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Moving from Traditional eDiscovery to TAR

Traditional eDiscovery methods involved using keyword searches to reduce the number of documents to collect for review. In theory, this approach had merit. However, it proved both cumbersome and time-consuming.

In the first place, large volumes of data in various locations and formats make it difficult to access relevant information. Secondly, because keyword searches do not take context into account, they may miss important data.

Enter technology-assisted review (TAR), also known as predictive coding. Using AI algorithms, TAR analyzes document sets, identifying and tagging potentially relevant documents. Humans train algorithms using examples of relevant and non-relevant data. During this training phase, the algorithm learns to make educated guesses about the remaining data.

While courts have approved the use of TAR for several years, recent advances in AI promise even greater benefits.

AI Delivers Clear Benefits for eDiscovery

AI, including TAR and additional emerging tools, has the power to revolutionize eDiscovery through automating tedious tasks and offering important insights. Advantages of this technology include:

• Enhanced efficiency – By automating time-consuming tasks such as data tagging, AI can free up valuable human resources. And by prioritizing data with a higher probability of relevance, AI greatly reduces the amount of data for review. AI can also assist with creating summaries and chronologies.
• Greater accuracy – Generative AI excels at combing through large datasets to extract and highlight relevant information. AI can also assist with automatically detecting and redacting sensitive data such as PII, thus improving compliance with data privacy regulations.
• Ability to uncover hidden insights – By identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies, AI helps to reveal hidden connections that human reviewers might miss. It can also suggest documents similar to those already identified as relevant, potentially uncovering important information.
• Improved reliability, reduced bias – AI applies a consistent approach to document review throughout the process. This helps to ensure fairness and reduce inconsistencies.

Every Lucky Penny Has a Flip Side

However, with great power comes increased risk, and AI introduces several key challenges that legal teams cannot afford to overlook.

• Data security and privacy – Integrating AI into eDiscovery workflows adds another element to an already complex cyber security and privacy landscape. For instance, LLMs typically reside in cloud services such as Microsoft Azure. Additionally, threat actors can potentially poison the data used to train AI algorithms, significantly affecting output.
• Unintended bias – The accuracy of AI algorithms depends on the data used for training. An AI model trained on biased data will amplify those biases.
• Unexpected output and lack of transparency – No AI application can guarantee 100 percent accuracy, and many AI models operate as black boxes. This means that it can prove difficult to interpret how the AI tool reaches decisions. However, ethical decision making and regulatory compliance require transparency.
• Validating evidence in an era of generative AI – In addition to risks in the eDiscovery process, AI also introduces difficulties in determining the veracity of evidence. Legal teams need to ensure that they are not including deepfakes in submitted evidence.

Responsible Implementation of AI in eDiscovery

Despite these challenges, careful implementation of AI holds immense potential to continue transforming eDiscovery. Legal teams should critically evaluate AI solutions, ensure human oversight, and address ethical considerations throughout the process. With eGovernance, organizations gain access to powerful, proven AI-powered eDiscovery.

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Managing Data in Diverse Locations and Formats

The increasing adoption of cloud services, mobile devices, social media, and the IoT places substantial demands on eDiscovery systems. Data generated and stored in numerous locations and formats proves difficult to find and manage. Remote work further complicates the process by increasing the risk of data loss due to the use of personal devices and insecure networks.

For instance, data relevant to a given case may appear in videos, documents, text messages, and security camera footage. Information that lives on mobile devices or in highly disorganized data stores in legacy systems present additional challenges for legal teams.

To address these challenges, organizations should take a proactive and holistic approach to information governance. This involves implementing policies and procedures to track and secure data throughout its lifecycle. But classifying and monitoring sensitive information at scale, as well as enforcing security and privacy policies, requires automation.

AI Plays Complex Role Technology for eDiscovery

AI has become essential to automating and optimizing information governance tasks such as data classification and policy enforcement. It can also help legal teams improve the accuracy and efficiency of eDiscovery outcomes by automating data deduplication, redaction, document review, and predictive coding.

Further, AI enables more advanced capabilities like sentiment analysis and topic modeling. These capabilities help legal teams understand the context and meaning of the data, as well as identify relevant facts and patterns. Note that AI does not replace information governance. But it can help information governance personnel find and process data at scale.

On the other hand, AI adds risk to information governance and eDiscovery processes. For example, using poor quality or insufficient data to train AI algorithms can result in biased or inaccurate results. False or misleading texts in turn affect the reliability and admissibility of evidence.

Organizations using generative AI should implement best practices including flagging text generated by AI. They should also apply rigorous quality control to ensure that generated texts are accurate, relevant, and consistent with original sources. Further, clear protocols and standards for the use and disclosure of AI in discovery will prove essential.

Cloud-based eDiscovery Delivers Scalability, Efficiency

Cloud-based solutions dominate the eDiscovery technology landscape because they offer lower costs, greater scalability, and faster deployment. Additionally, they deliver vastly improved accessibility for teams spread across distance. Consequently, experts predict that legal adoption of cloud-based technology will continue to grow rapidly in the coming year.

Cloud computing allows organizations to store, process, and access large amounts of electronically stored information (ESI) from anywhere. This improves collaboration, saves time, and promotes data security by allowing responders to perform an initial data review in place.

Blockchain on the Horizon for eDiscovery

While not yet in mainstream use, blockchain technology has the power to play an increasingly useful role in enhancing eDiscovery. By recording transactions in a secure, transparent, and immutable way, it promises significant eDiscovery benefits, including:

• Verifying the authenticity and provenance of ESI
• Tracking data ownership, custody, and transfer
• Reducing the risk of data breaches by strengthening access control and encryption
• Promoting efficiency and accuracy by enabling smart contracts and automating tasks such as data collection, preservation, and review
• Enforcing compliance with regulations such as data retention policies

Proactive legal teams will keep a close eye on developments in blockchain technology, as it could have a substantial impact on eDiscovery.

Partner with Technology for eDiscovery Experts

Navigating eDiscovery challenges and opportunities requires an approach that harnesses technology for eDiscovery while instituting information governance best practices. With eGovernance solutions for eDiscovery and information governance, organizations reduce costs while simplifying processes and producing consistent, defensible results.

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Collect Massive Amounts of Data from Disparate Sources

Civil and criminal cases frequently hinge on digital evidence, and that can mean data requests involving millions of document files. With modern collaboration methods, those documents include everything from email and voicemail to word processing files, social media and more.

In addition to including many different types of files, eDiscovery must also address numerous data environments. For instance, employees may use both company-owned and personal devices, from laptops to phones and tablets. Additionally, the organization may store data both on-premises and in multiple cloud environments and numerous applications.

Legal teams must find efficient methods to locate, collect and process that data. This involves finding a balance between collecting all relevant information and yet avoiding a data dump.

With the right tools, legal teams can locate and assess the data in place before collecting anything. An early data assessment that involves an initial in-place review of data delivers several key benefits. Legal teams can identify and address potential roadblocks early on. They also avoid over-collection of data, saving significant time and money.

Prevent Digital Spoliation of Evidence

While gathering these massive amounts of data, legal teams must take care to prevent destruction of or tampering with relevant data. This includes altering or deleting documents in any way. Whether intentional or not, this destruction of evidence, or spoliation, can result in stiff penalties and cause enormous problems.

To avoid spoliation claims, the team must use defensible methods to collect and preserve data. A critical component of this involves legal holds. Once again, early data assessment plays a key role. When the legal team identifies potentially relevant information early on, they can immediately apply legal holds to protect that data.

Technology has simplified legal holds, allowing legal teams to automate the process of creating and sending legal hold requests and releases. Reliable legal hold technology also includes auditing capabilities that ensure defensibility.

eDiscovery Challenges to Ensure Data Security

When organizations collect huge amounts of data and send it outside the organization, they effectively lose control of that data. Consider the thumb drives and other copies of data held by opposing counsel and expert witnesses. Every copy of the data distributed represents a cyber security risk.

Organizations reduce that risk by mapping and indexing the data, making it possible to conduct a preliminary review in place. Done well, this will reduce the amount of data that needs to be collected.

Taking the process a step further, the organization can collaborate with outside counsel on keywords and other search criteria. They can then gather the data set into one place and grant outside counsel conditional access to run reviews and publish for litigation. Keeping sensitive data in house ensures that the organization retains control and can audit any access.

Address eDiscovery Challenges with Unique eDiscovery Solution

Locating, collecting, and preserving data in a defensible way can prove incredibly difficult and time consuming when organizations do not have control of their data. And because of the amount of data and the time involved, eDiscovery costs typically represent from 20 to 50 percent of the costs of litigation.

Proactive organizations meet eDiscovery challenges with a strong foundation of information governance, aided by the right technology. When companies know where data resides, who owns it and who can access it, eDiscovery becomes much less painful. Legal technology such as legal holds software and automated early case assessment further streamlines the process.

eGovernance provides a comprehensive eDiscovery solution to reduce discovery overhead and improve the speed and efficiency of managing requests across disparate systems. Our unique tools allow organizations to centralize eDiscovery. Whether legal counsel reviews data in place or extracts copies for more resilient retention requirements, the data stays secure.

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