E-Discovery Day: How much do I actually need to preserve and collect?

Featuring: Judge Ronald Hedges (Ret.), Sr. Counsel, Dentons US LLP
Robert Cruz, Sr. Director, Information Governance Practice, Smarsh
Mike Hamilton, Director, E-Discovery Programs, Exterro

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“Educate your workforce on the process, and monitor how the process works. So at the end of the day, you can go back to a court with information that's been lost and say, these are the reasonable steps I've taken. It’s one thing to say, ‘I do this,’ but it’s another thing to make sure it is in fact done.”

- Judge Ronald Hedges, retired US Magistrate Judge, Senior Counsel, Dentons

In this on-demand webcast, get expert advice from an active e-discovery special master, an e-discovery director and an information governance expert on what new preservation techniques and tools are available to minimize e-discovery preservation costs without sacrificing defensibility.

When the phrase “How Much?” is raised you also introduce the topics of proportionality and cost. This, in turn, raises several new considerations, including:

  • New sources of Electronically Stored Information: as organizations adopt new tools to communicate and collaborate, discovery is increasingly moving toward new, dark corners including social media, text messaging, collaborative platforms and personal devices.
  • Wide variety of methods of collection: each communication source is different, some with well established methods of collection, some not as much. The challenge of estimating the effort and expense in establishing what is proportionate will only become more complex.
  • Lack of custodian control: unlike the world of emails and documents, social media and mobile applications are difficult for custodians to control. Less reliability of custodian self-collection and preservation can lead firms to increase use of outside services or methods that are not optimized for that specific communications network.
  • Context: understanding context is imperative to eDiscovery, the natural questions that should follow are not just how content much do I need to produce, but how much content, context and metadata should I attempt to collect and preserve in order to avoid a review science project later on.

Ultimately, this topic should bring the question of proactive versus reactive collection and preservation back to the table. The equation is now more complex, because the reactive cost calculus needs to consider the frequency of collection times the average volume per discovery times a significantly larger number of content sources per matter.