In his recent blog post, X1 CEO Craig Carpenter discussed the inability of any software provider to solve a critical need by delivering a truly scalable eDiscovery preservation and collection solution. As Craig pointed out, in the absence of such a “holy grail” solution, eDiscovery collection remains dominated by either unsupervised custodian self-collection or manual services, driving up costs while increasing risk and disruption to business operations.
Craig outlined how endpoint forensic imaging are still employed on a limited basis. Many companies have also tried network crawling methods with repurposed forensic tools. (A “collection 2.1” method, if you will). While this can be feasible for a small number of custodians, network bandwidth constraints coupled with the requirement to migrate all endpoint data back to the forensic crawling tool renders the approach ineffective. For example, to search a custodian’s laptop with 10 gigabytes of email and documents, all 10 gigabytes must be copied and transmitted over the network, where it is then searched, all of which takes at least several hours per computer. So, most organizations choose to force collect all 10 gigabytes. The case of U.S. ex rel. McBride v. Halliburton Co. 272 F.R.D. 235 (2011), illustrates this specific pain point well. In McBride, Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s instructive opinion outlines Halliburton’s eDiscovery struggles to collect and process data from remote locations:
“Since the defendants employ persons overseas, this data collection may have to be shipped to the United States, or sent by network connections with finite capacity, which may require several days just to copy and transmit the data from a single custodian . . . (Halliburton) estimates that each custodian averages 15–20 gigabytes of data, and collection can take two to ten days per custodian. The data must then be processed to be rendered searchable by the review tool being used, a process that can overwhelm the computer’s capacity and require that the data be processed by batch, as opposed to all at once.”
Halliburton represented to the court that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on eDiscovery for only a few dozen remotely located custodians. The need to force-collect the remote custodians’ entire set of data and then sort it out through the expensive eDiscovery processing phase, instead of culling, filtering and searching the data at the point of collection drove up the costs. As such, this network crawling based architecture is fundamentally flawed and cannot scale.
What is needed is the ability to gain immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and collect across several hundred endpoints and other unstructured data sources such as file shares, and return results within minutes instead of days or weeks. The approaches outlined above and by Craig Carpenter do not come close to meeting this requirement and in fact actually perpetuate eDiscovery pain.
Solving this collection challenge once and for all is basis for X1 Distributed Discovery, which is our eDiscovery collection 3.0 solution. X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) enables enterprises to quickly and easily search across up to thousands of distributed endpoints and data servers from a central location. Legal and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, and full results with completed collection in hours, instead of days or weeks. Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1DD is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed data discovery across an organization. X1DD replaces expensive, cumbersome and highly disruptive approaches to meet enterprise discovery, preservation, and collection needs.
Targeted and iterative end point search is a quantum leap in early data assessment, which is critical to legal counsel at the outset of any legal matter. However, under today’s industry standard, the legal team is typically kept in the dark for weeks, if not months, as the manual identification and collection process of distributed, unstructured data runs its expensive and inefficient course. To illustrate the power and capabilities of X1DD, imagine being able to perform multiple, detailed, Boolean keyword phrase searches with metadata filters across the targeted end points of your global enterprise. The results start returning in minutes, with granular statistical data about the responsive documents and emails associated with specific custodians or groups of custodians.
Once the legal team is satisfied with a specific search string, after sufficient iteration, the data can then be collected by X1DD by simply hitting the “collect” button. The responsive data is “containerized” at each end point and automatically transmitted to either a central location, or uploaded directly to Relativity, using Relativity’s import API where all data is seamlessly ready for review. Importantly, all results are tied back to a specific custodian, with full chain of custody and preservation of all file metadata. Here is a recording of a live public demo with Relativity, showing the very fast direct upload from X1DD straight into RelativityOne.
This effort described above — from iterative, distributed search through collection and transmittal straight into Relativity from hundreds of endpoints — can be accomplished in a single day. Using manual consulting services, the same project would require several weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars in collection costs alone, not to mention significant disruption to business operations. Substantial costs associated with over-collection of data would mount as well, and could even dwarf collection costs through unnecessary attorney review time.
X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations. Beyond enterprise eDiscovery and investigation functionality, organizations can offer employees the award-winning X1 Search, improving productivity while maintaining compliance.
As Relativity Product Manager Barry O’Melia said in the live X1/R1 integration demo, it is something you have to see for yourself to believe. So please check out the demo here, or contact us to arrange for a private demo.