Understanding E-Discovery: The Process of Handling Electronically Stored Information (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What is e-discovery? Electronic discovery, or e-discovery, is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information, ESI, in response to a request for production in a lawsuit or investigation. ESI includes, but is not limited to, emails, documents, presentations, databases, voicemail, audio and video files, social media, and websites. First, potentially responsive ESI needs to be identified from the various sources where it might be stored, such as from a mobile phone, a computer hard drive, or the cloud. Then the identified data are placed under a legal hold, meaning they cannot be modified, deleted, erased, or otherwise destroyed. Potentially relevant data is collected and then extracted, indexed, and placed into a database. Since this can often amount to a very large amount of ESI data, a process called culling is utilized, during which a large number of emails, documents, and other files are processed and reduced. All the data are funneled through this process and the quantity of data are significantly reduced by removing duplicate copies, irrelevant files, and by applying filtering criteria such as keywords and data ranges, thereby reducing the number of documents that will require review, which means improving efficiency and reducing e-discovery costs. The remaining content is then hosted in a secure environment and made accessible to reviewers who code the documents for their relevance to the legal matter. Once this has occurred, responsive documents can be produced in what is called the production phase. For production, sometimes the relevant documents are converted to a static format, such as TIFF or PDF, making redaction of privileged and non-relevant information possible. The ultimate goal of e-discovery is to produce a core volume of evidence for litigation in a defensible manner. So in a nutshell, e-discovery refers to discovery in legal proceedings such as litigation, government investigations, or Freedom of Information Act requests, where the information sought is in electronic format.