In-house e-Discovery With No “Cap-X” Investment

By Brad Jenkins
President and CEO
Trial Solutions

Introduction

Is it time to take charge of your e-discovery budget and bring the process in-house? If your organization can identify one or two capable IT personnel who want to learn this skill, we can teach them how to access our powerful online application to process your e-files into a searchable database, without an up front investment in special computer servers and software. Trial Solutions has created the “Easy Button” for in-house clients.

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You may not be aware that Trial Solutions is an end-to-end provider of litigation support services to the legal profession and that we have been in the e-discovery business from the very beginning, providing e-file processing and document hosting services to our clients. The reason you may not have heard of us is that many of our clients are “wholesale” clients. What I mean by that is, we do the e-file processing and document hosting for other vendors in the e-discovery space. Some of our wholesale clients send us a hard drive filled with data for our staff to process. Other clients use our secure web connection to load their data, but their staff controls the whole process utilizing our technology platform. In other words, we provide the entire infrastructure, and they run the processing.

Now, we are supporting corporations that are interested in the same arrangement, collecting their own potentially relevant electronically stored information and using our technology platform to process their information into a searchable database.

If you are ready to take on all of, or part of, the e-discovery process and thereby lower your e-discovery cost, then please continue reading this article.

Managing The Risk As Well As The Cost

We understand that lowering the cost is often the key motivation for our clients to begin taking ownership of the e-discovery process, but we also understand that the risk of being sanctioned by the court for an inadequate methodology can force an organization to continue using an expensive outside provider for these tasks.

Our direct-to-client service focuses on three important issues: lowering the cost of e-discovery, reducing the risk of spoliation and chain of custody claims from opposing counsel, and providing a scalable solution. The “scalability” of our solution is very important for managing risk because clients can take on as much of the process as appropriate based upon your staff’s availability and experience. On some projects you might want to provide us with the potentially relevant data and to utilize our staff to control the entire process. And on other projects, you might want our staff to look over your shoulder as your team loads and processes your own data. And, on other projects - after your staff is trained - you might want to take full responsibility.

Intuitive Web Browser Interface

The Trial Solutions program has been designed with easy to use fill-in fields and drop-down menus to enhance training and improve consistent data entry.

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Consistent Structured Methodology

Over the years, we have learned from many e-discovery projects that providing a consistent structured methodology for clients to follow is critical. The Trial Solutions program is a logical six-step process, which begins with our clients identifying and collecting their own potentially relevant documents.

1. Identification and Self-Collection of Potentially Relevant Documents
   Successful e-discovery projects begin with the identification and collection of potentially relevant materials. For matters that involve allegations of fraud, theft, or malfeasance, an organization should utilize the expertise of a computer forensics expert to ensure proper collection and preservation of data that may be used in a criminal proceeding. For routine civil disputes, many organizations are “self-collecting” potentially relevant materials, while being supervised by legal counsel. Any collection, whatever the method, should be accompanied by detailed documentation to maintain and prove adequate “chain of custody” as well as adequate methodology. The identification and collection documentation should include a “history” of actions taken during the collection. For example, the history should include: searches by custodian, key word, date range, or document type. This history must be detailed and thorough enough to defend the identification and collection process in a court of law.
   
   
2. Secure Data Transfer To Trial Solutions Custody
   Depending upon the volume, a client can securely transfer data to Trial Solutions in two ways. First, for most small to medium sized projects, clients are provided their own private and confidential online data port within the Trial Solutions infrastructure. The secure data port method facilitates a fast transfer of files from the client’s computer to the Trial Solutions’ computer and creates a complete audit trail authentication report.
   
   The second method to transfer data to Trial Solutions is by hard drive. For larger projects, clients copy their electronically stored information onto a hard drive and overnight it to our facility. Upon arrival of the hard drive, Trial Solutions employees record the receipt of the media and load the contents into a project folder, ready for a client employee to begin the process.
   
   
3. Automatic Creation of an Inventory Report
   The rule in discovery is -- the greater the volume, the greater the cost. The standard Trial Solutions’ process automatically creates an online inventory report of all data received by source, custodian, document type, and date range. This gives clients the ability to collect a large volume of data and to gain insights from the inventory report before selecting which data to process. For example, from the report, a user can identify specific file types or a short list of key employee custodians to process as a “tier one” data production.
   
   
4. Identification of Data Sources, Custodians, or Document Types to Process
   Clients do not have to process all of their data at one time. Data can be segregated by document type, source, relevance or other logical grouping and processed on a rolling schedule. For example, users can identify a sub-set of the data population to process first, to give the lawyers the ability to quickly view document samples in their native file format before making decisions about culling the entire population.
   
   
5. Identification of Culling Criteria (duplicates, key words, date ranges, file types, etc.)
   “Culling data” is the act of reducing the data population based upon pre-determined filters. One of the great advantages of controlling an e-discovery project is the ability to try different culling criteria on a sample set of data before applying the criteria to the entire population. If the culling criteria are too restrictive, you may be accused of discovery impropriety. If the culling criteria are too broad, your cost for e-discovery may be unnecessarily high.
   
   
6. Identification of Data Output Format
   Within the project set-up, the Trial Solutions program offers several options to the user for data output. Documents can be automatically published to Trial Solutions’ secure on-line repository, ImageDepot™, in native file format; automatically converted to TIFF or PDF format with or without meta-data; or automatically formatted to the specification of a standard document review load file (e.g., Concordance, Summation, etc.)

Audit Trail

The Trial Solutions program provides a detailed audit report that matches the unique file HASH value of every file received with the source name and path of the original file. This feature confirms chain-of-custody and establishes a baseline of authenticity for every file. In addition, the report accounts for every file, was it processed, not processed and why, etc. And for container files like a .zip or .pst file, the audit trail confirms the contents of all additional files that were extracted during the flattening process.

Conclusion

When we founded Trial Solutions six years ago, a litigation project with 1,000 boxes of documents was very big. Today, the data equivalent to 1,000 boxes of documents can be found stored on just one portable “thumb drive.” E-discovery is not going away. Without an effective document retention/destruction program, an organization’s data will continue to proliferate. Collecting, processing, and culling electronically stored information in a legally defensible manner is a skill that many organizations need to develop in order to lower their cost and risk of e-discovery. Trial Solutions is prepared to assist your organization in this process by providing the scalable technology solution, consistent structured methodology, and the backup technical support that you may require from time-to-time.

About Trial Solutions

Trial Solutions is a leading end-to-end litigation support technology company offering the Litigation Support Ecosystem®. Trial Solutions services the legal industry through its brands ImageDepot™, Attorney Solutions and Discovery Law in 90 metropolitan regions in the US and Canada. Last year, Inc. Magazine ranked Trial Solutions No. 899 on its Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, making Trial Solutions No. 19 among the top 50 businesses in Houston, Texas. For more information about Trial Solutions, please visit http://www.trialsolutions.net.