eDiscovery efforts are often costly, time consuming and burdensome. The volume of Electronically Stored Information is growing exponentially and will only continue to do so. Even with the advent of technology assisted review (TAR), the costs associated with collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing documents in litigation are the source of considerable pain for litigants. The only way to reduce that pain to its minimum is to use all tools available in all appropriate circumstances within the bounds of reasonableness and proportionality to control the volumes of data that enter the discovery pipeline.
Litigators and commentators often pine for the advent of a systemized, uniform and defensible process for custodian self-collection. Conceptually, such an ideal process would be where custodians are automatically presented with a set of their documents and emails that are identified as potentially relevant to a given matter through a set of keywords and other search parameters that are uniformly applied across all custodians. This set of ESI would be presented to the custodian in a controlled interface with no ability to delete documents or emails, and only the ability to review and apply tags and annotations. The custodian would have to comply with the order and all documents responsive to the initial unified search would be collected as a default control mechanism.
With X1 Distributed GRC (X1DGRC), the option for a defensible custodian assisted review (CAR) is now a reality. At a high level, with X1DGRC, organizations can perform targeted search and collection of the ESI of thousands of endpoints over the internal network without disrupting operations. The search results are returned in minutes, not weeks, and thus can be highly granular and iterative, based upon multiple keywords, date ranges, file types, or other parameters. This approach typically reduces the eDiscovery collection and processing costs by at least one order of magnitude (90%), thereby bringing much needed feasibility to enterprise-wide eDiscovery collection that can save organizations millions while improving compliance. X1GRC includes X1 Insight and Collection for pure eDiscovery use cases.
As a key optional feature, X1DGRC provides custodian assisted review, where custodians are presented with a listing of their potentially relevant ESI in a controlled, systemized and uniform identification process for their review and tagging. Instead of essentially asking the custodians to “please rummage through your entire email account and all your documents to look for what you might think is relevant to this matter,” the custodians are presented with a narrow and organized subset of potentially relevant ESI for their review.
While the custodians are able to assist with the review, they cannot impact or control what ESI is identified and preserved; this is controlled and managed centrally by the eDiscovery practitioner. This way, custodians can apply their own insight to the information and even flag personal private data, all while effectuating very cost-effective and systematic ESI collection.
Powerful Analytics Engine
TAR features powerful algorithms that cluster documents and otherwise work their magic. CAR also relies on a powerful analytics engine — the human brain. Custodians know a lot about their own documents and emails. This is particularly true in technical or other complex matter where the custodians are engineers or other professionals who simply better understand the dynamics and the nuances of their information. With the X1 process, the custodians provide a key data point, where their input is used to inform the secondary review.
The process is very defensible as the exercise is logged and documented, with all metadata kept intact and a concise chain of custody established. Best of all, the custodian-applied tags and annotations are preserved and retained through the review process with X1 integration with Relativity. I could describe this very important feature a lot further, but candidly the best way to get a full picture is to see it for yourself. I recommend that you view this recorded 9 minute demonstration of X1’s custodian self-review feature here.
We believe X1’s functionality provides the optimal means for enterprise eDiscovery preservation, collection and early data assessment, especially with the key additional (and optional) feature of custodian assisted review. But please see for yourself and let us know what you think!