Review

The review phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) is the phase that consumes the greatest amount of resources and costs for most organizations involved in litigation. A comprehensive archiving solution can help cull large volumes of messages and find relevant and responsive data. The overall objective of the review phase is to expedite legal discovery and reduce the amount of responsive data that has to be reviewed by outside counsel.

Without a comprehensive archiving solution in place, companies spend significantly more time and money on the review phase, because they have to sift through a lot more data, review data manually and hire expensive attorneys to help cull data. With the right solution, organizations should be able to:

• Share access and review tasks with multiple reviewers
• Delegate management and review of matters to legal personnel
• Use tags to categorize emails for more efficient review
• Produce data for review in native file format and eliminate data duplication through single-instance storage
• Perform detailed exports of emails for review in any given matter
• Prove chain of custody from matter to reviewer to message
• Quickly search emails and attachments for review, using a variety of search criteria, including to, from, date, subject, message body, message attachments and other message properties
• Conduct iterative searches (i.e., search within a search), so reviewers can fine-tune results in real time, without having to rebuild the entire search

When it comes to the review phase of legal discovery, it is imperative to have the appropriate tools in place to cull data before you receive an e-discovery request.