Belated Happy New Year everyone, I am forecasting a very busy eDiscovery in SA year starting already, of course, with the fantastic news that RelativtyOne is now hosted via MS Azure in South Africa. RelativityOne is the global market leader in eDiscovery and investigations solutions and it is just wonderful that it is now hosted in our country, removing any data protection concerns for corporations and individuals. Watch this space for more news following this announcement in the coming weeks.
Speaking of discovery in SA I have recently come across a large number of instances where SA law firms are preparing schedules of documents for discovery in MS Word. There are complaints that it is a tedious process, takes time and therefore costs money! I can see why it is done this way in small cases or where all of the documents are in paper format. What I cannot understand is why is this process followed when the documents are electronic (as is the case more and more every day in SA). As far as I am aware, and I have checked as much as I can, there is no rule or practice directive in SA which states that the schedules must be in Word. It cannot be argued that under the new e - Court rules, Word is required, as Caselines accepts all of the usual electronic formats. The simple point is this, where a case is handled via eDiscovery technology, the solution (with a little input from an eDiscovery specialist), almost automatically produces the schedule along with the necessary fields of metadata (properties) pertaining to each discovered document. The format will MS Excel which can of course be converted to PDF and therefore all complies with the Caselines system. The time saving and resultant costs are so significant that if I were a client I would refuse to pay for this process to be done via Word. Unless someone can show me a rule or practice directive that tells me I am wrong, my message is stop doing this important step in this manner – use technology – its quicker, less expensive, less risky and join the 21st century!
I also have to mention again the use of keyword searches in eDiscovery technology. I have written about it many times in the past. It is a great feature of the solution but needs to be done carefully by using the expertise of a specialist and preferably in conjunction with other features. I was reminded of this in an excellent recent post. They provided a summary of best practices and risks which I cannot better and will therefore simply repeat:-
· Search and retrieval vary across systems—understanding exactly how information is indexed and how search functions operate in a given system is essential.
· Search in discovery has a different intent than internet or knowledge base searching and therefore requires different skills.
· Keywords, without refinement and testing, are both under-and over-inclusive.
· Search term development should be a qualitative process. Quality is measured through an iterative process that includes testing and sampling.
· Search terms, when used appropriately with a sound methodology, can yield good results.
· Defensibility requires a sound methodology and a documented process.
Simply, don’t just prepare one list and have it put through the system – that is a problem waiting to happen. Discuss the list with your expert provider, listen to their advice and be open to change the list more than once. Rely upon the expertise of your provider and the solution and take note of all the points listed above.