Peer to Peer Magazine

for instance, allows for limiting PST file creation on local machines — an answer to the rapid growth of email boxes and the difficulty in managing records retentions across those disparate systems. IT, too, wants to keep the data small. A Chorus Calling for Minimization It is not only IT and legal departments which are aligned in keeping data small; reducing data is becoming part of best practices for all parties responsible for an organization's data, including: Corporations: Corporations are always looking to keep the minimal amount of data needed to operate their businesses while still complying with legal requirements for data preservation and storage. Disaster recovery has become just that, a mechanism for restoring corporate data in emergency situations but not for discovery. Programs that "auto-clean" employee systems such as email accounts and laptops or workstations are being implemented with enforceable procedures. More attention is being paid to records information management policies by in-house and outside counsel, and internally by executives as part of their management goals. Smarter enterprise content management systems allow for the maintenance of only the most critical corporate information and a higher sensitivity to data disposition policies and activities among common employees. Courts: Ultimately, some portion of the mounds of data gathered and analyzed for legal and regulatory matters ends up used in legal proceedings and in court. Knowing that the datasets are usually large, courts have begun to limit the use of documents in proceedings where those documents are not relevant or are meant to simply burden the parties with more data than can be handled. Members of the judiciary and other experts continue to endorse the use of new technologies to help reduce the data referenced in legal matters and are always looking for ways for parties to come to agreement on data-related issues as opposed to simply using brute force mechanisms to reduce datasets. Vendors: The service and solution providers that cater to the attorneys and the corporate clients are continually striving to bring best-of-breed technology solutions and practices to the market that specifically help minimize the data involved in a suit or legal matter. Those efforts to reduce data are driven by the desire to reduce the costs of e-discovery. Attorneys: From a discovery perspective, lawyers are becoming savvier in their efforts to minimize the data that must be collected, sorted, organized, culled and sent to review. They are using smarter technologies, more surgical gathering methods, best practices with respect to identifying relevant data from the get-go and analytics such as suggestive/predictive coding and concept searching to speed up and increase the accuracy of the legal document review and tagging processes. A Nice Little Bundle Unmanaged data create unnecessary liabilities for the organization as well as unnecessary costs during discovery. Because of the increased data created every day, and all of the data stored in disparate systems across organizations and their networks and systems, there is an ever-increasing need for tools and methods to help reduce the overall data gathered, analyzed and reviewed for litigation and regulatory matters. There are several common methods that are used today in legal matters to reduce data, such as: • Identifying possibly relevant data and then surgically gathering the data (during the collection stage); • Filtering the data by dates and types, as well as searching the data for relevant keywords and using concept clustering and other new data analytics technologies (during the analysis stage); and, • Efficiently organizing and storing data using single- instance storage, hosted data repositories, predictive coding, bulk-tagging functionality and automated qualitycontrol functions (during the review stage). Wrapping It Up (with a Bow) Big data doesn't mean better data. The dichotomous split between the enormous amount of data created by organizations and the amount of data they actually want to keep as part of the discovery or legal data preservation process, however, can be solved through proactive use of technology tools. In discovery, reducing data to a core (accurate) set is attainable when relying on relevant best practices and the correct technology tools. Smart mechanisms should be used when identifying data sources such as custodian interviews, data designation processes, focused data gathering and smart culling techniques. In litigation, and for other legal matters, reducing the data gathered, analyzed and reviewed is the fastest and most definite way to reduce costs and liabilities, which is the ultimate goal of every organization. ILTA Alon Israely, CISSP, is an attorney, IT professional and computer forensics expert. He is a Senior Advisor at BIA, an e-discovery product and services provider that delivers a wide range of e-discovery solutions. Alon has over 15 years of experience in a variety of advanced computingrelated technologies and has authored many articles on various topics in e-discovery. He can be reached at aisraely@biaprotect.com. Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 69

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