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Alan Pelz-Sharpe

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No magic in eDiscovery

9-Jun-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), E-mail Archiving and Management, Enterprise Search, SharePoint Ecosystem, E-Discovery, Governance

In the American corporate world, eDiscovery is the "pain du jour," as requests to find and turn over documents grow exponentially.

Yet many organizations seem to be under the impression that if they buy eDiscovery software something magical will happen: That regardless of the complete and utter chaos that constitutes information management within their organizations, at the push of a button or two the eDiscovery software will find the required information, and then present it in a neat and secure format, thereby meeting the eDiscovery request.  Even in the world of Harry Potter, there is no magic that powerful.

A good example of just how far the hype is from reality was nicely illustrated by Goldman Sachs this week. In responding to an FCIC (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) request for information, Goldman provided 5 Terabytes of data, the equivalent of 2.5 billion pages of documents. To quote the FCIC Chairman, "We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a load of rubbish."  Now I have no idea whether this was simply a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and hinder the crisis probe -- as the FCIC seems to believe -- but I doubt that it's the whole of the story even if it is a part of it.

eDiscovery requests fall into two main categories: the easy and the impossible.  The easy ones relate to specific individual and a specific transaction. By freezing an individual's email account and network folders almost everything you have been asked to look for is found.  The impossible category consists of almost everything else. In these cases lawyers sort things out in back rooms, usually come to a compromise, and when they can't, either fight the request through the courts or simply settle.  When a government probe like this comes along though you have no real option other than to comply, or at least attempt to as best you can.

To meet eDiscovery requests with ease, you need solid information governance across the whole organization to be in place, and you need a lot more than a search engine on steroids.  When firms have billions of documents or even just millions, knowing exactly which documents are needed, and how they related to each other in a chain of events resulting in an eDiscovery request, will require a lot of manual trawling, lawyers at high hourly rates, and pragmatism for the foreseeable future. 

The only good news is that many firms are now recognizing that no magical software will ever be able to fix this situation. You need good information management practices, and a plethora of content technologies (ECM, Search, Archiving etc) all working in tandem.