When lawyers say “e-discovery,” they’re usually referring to the dreaded and laborious effort of looking at individual documents to make strategic decisions on the relevancy of their content—we call this document review. But document review is a lavish waste of time without a trustworthy data processing stage.
Twenty years ago, we “processed” physical paper documents by scanning them and manually coding fields of information (author, date, source, etc.) into a linear database. Today we have emails, spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, and a whole mess of digital files collectively referred to as electronically stored information (ESI). ESI is processed by computers extracting every morsel of metadata so it can be sorted, filtered and searched. This includes the sender, recipient, and sent date of an email, but also pulls out the BCC field, conversation threads, and determines whether a message was opened.
