Fox added: “Encryption can also be an issue. From a security point of view, clearly encryption is good practice on your network, for emails and sensitive documents and so on. But over time, people leave, passwords are forgotten and keys get lost. That can cause real problems if you receive an eDiscovery order. You could find a whole set of documents – or even one key one – that is directly relevant to the case and have to say ‘we no longer have access’. A court might well take a view of that. If a relevant person is long gone and not contactable, you literally may not have a clue. Here in Deloitte we have a high-powered lab that can throw processing power and cracking tools and so on at the problem but we’re not always successful.”
“Pre-indexing reduces costs, up to an estimated 80% compared to traditional transcription methods,” Darragh Fegan, Symantec
The third area Fox noted is access control, especially on a large network. “Who might have had access to what and when? If those questions cannot be satisfactorily answered, your entire data store could be subject to eDiscovery,” she pointed out. “Once again, you have extended the scope of the search by default. On the other hand, tight access control and logging means you can pinpoint exactly the parameters of a search, which is then both more effective and less costly.”
Transparency
Given its strong market position in security and content management, it is no surprise that Symantec has become a serious contender in eDiscovery, a rapidly growing market globally. It acquired and has invested significantly in Clearwell as the principal software tool in what it calls its eDiscovery Platform. “Of course litigation, compliance and criminal investigations are driving this market but there is also a growing corporate eDiscovery requirement to investigate incidents and events as part of their internal procedures,” said Darragh Fegan, Symantec’s Irish channel manager.
Whatever the reason for a specific search, an eDiscovery solution brings control and transparency to the entire process. “It can dramatically cut the legal review time required by searching over 400 file types and reducing the information requiring review by up to 90%. The organisation saves without any penalty in legal defensibility or the forensic integrity of the search.”
A major emerging category of data to be searched in eDiscovery is audio recordings. Clearwell offers advanced audio processing, search and review capabilities, Darragh Fegan said. “That is very significant in sifting through, for example, audio recordings in a financial services call centre. The system can index up to 20,000 hours of audio per day. Pre-indexing reduces costs, up to an estimated 80% compared to traditional transcription methods.”
The Espion Group is a leader in eDiscovery and IT forensics in both Ireland and the UK and a Symantec partner across Europe in the real life application of Clearwell technology. “There is a growing requirement for organisations to search and analyse their electronic documents and records and report to somebody,” said Colm Murphy, Espion director and head of its investigation services. “It could come from senior management, especially in large and multinational enterprises—an internal audit or HR investigation would be common – or of course it could be a court or a regulatory authority, at national or EU level.”
The business people and the IT guys need to work together so that documents can initially be reviewed internally in an efficient and meaningful way, Colm Murphy said. “Deduplication, for instance, is basic. You don’t always have a simple list of key words, so there are other very sophisticated analytical tools today like Concept Search which can find relevant material that does not share the key words.”
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