5 Ways eDiscovery Solutions Can Streamline Your Legal Process 

eDiscovery software handles the process of processing, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information (ESI). This includes emails, text message conversations, accounting databases, websites, etc.

This technology enables attorneys to efficiently review large volumes of ESI without breaking the bank with expensive discovery technologies and vendors. Here are five ways eDiscovery solutions can streamline your legal process:

AI and Advanced Analytics

AI can help automate repetitive tasks and improve collaboration, making legal teams more efficient—for example, cloud software providers.

Legal professionals can also use AI to enhance research by analyzing case outcomes, judges’ rulings, and other data to provide predictive insights. This can help them predict potential outcomes for a particular case and make better decisions based on current evidence.

In addition, AI can be used to streamline contract review and analysis. 

However, it is important to note that legal teams should always ensure they are operating ethically while utilizing AI and advanced analytics. Ethically using these technologies means ensuring processes are in place to address societal concerns and regulatory constraints on storing and using data.

Searchability

When lawyers gather ESI, they need to organize it for review. During the collection process, legal teams must interview stakeholders and likely owners (custodians) of data sources to identify and preserve digital assets relevant to litigation.

They then upload these files into an eDiscovery tool, which will extract metadata and index plain text to allow for searchability by keywords.

During the processing phase of eDiscovery solutions, digital assets are organized for presentation and reviewed manually or with the help of AI. At this stage, attorneys separate pertinent information from non-responsive or privileged documents and design a format for the electronic evidence to be presented to the court or client.

A streamlined discovery process makes it easier for law firms to meet their eDiscovery obligations without adding additional costs to the client bill.

An eDiscovery solution like Intradyn can eliminate ancillary legal services for small and mid-sized clients by rolling email, social media, and text message archiving, legal holds, eDiscovery, advanced analytics, and reporting into one powerful platform trusted by law firms.

Streamlined Review

While eDiscovery isn’t necessarily easy, the technology helps reduce legal teams’ workloads and expenses. However, it is still possible to mishandle data and documents during this process. It’s important to have tighter controls to prevent tampering and for organizations of all sizes to keep a digital audit trail on all files and data.

The first step of the eDiscovery process is to gather data from all sources. This includes electronic files, emails, social media and text messages, audio and visual data, and IoT devices (interconnected Internet of Things-enabled computers in everyday objects).

The next stage is to upload all of this data into an eDiscovery tool that extracts metadata, indexes plain text and organizes documents by subject.

The legal team can then review the data to determine the relevance and privilege of each document. The goal is to identify and produce only the most relevant ESI while protecting privileged information from inadvertent disclosure to opposing counsel. Streamlined review tools, like those in 

Time-Saving Tools

Legal teams must quickly identify and collect relevant data when a new matter arises. This requires a comprehensive eDiscovery solution that offers advanced indexing and processing, email threading, audio/video file transcription, and a centralized case management tool.

Forensic legal analysts are tasked with finding evidence hidden within dynamic electronic documents and files. These documents may include text, metadata, and image files from desktops, servers, cloud platforms, or other devices connected via the Internet of Things (IoT).

Using a unified discovery platform with intelligent analytics tools, predictive insights, and document coding can speed up legal strategy development, early case assessment, and document review. This helps mitigate risk and costs while improving results and reducing human error.

Security

As most information is now digital, it’s easy for sensitive data to fall into the wrong hands. Whether through a cyber attack or human error, breached data during eDiscovery could be devastating for your company and potentially expose confidential customer, employee, or proprietary information.

To avoid this, choosing an eDiscovery solution with built-in security is essential. The best tools use multilayered security, including a robust audit log and an automated process for identifying and protecting confidential or privileged information.

Lastly, an eDiscovery solution should make searching and finding ESI easy from all sources, including collaboration software and A/V files. For example, some tools allow users to search through up to 10GB of data with a free trial and automatically redacts files, indexes metadata, and removes duplicates.

Additionally, the software transcribes audio and video files upon upload, making it easy for teams to find relevant content quickly.

Relativity, a leading legal technology provider, helps organizations and law firms perform rapid discovery using its cloud-based platform. The company’s streamlined, end-to-end eDiscovery solution provides automation to help speed up legal processes and reduce cost and risk.