Editor’s Note: This article was chosen in the second annual blind competition by the Arizona State University-Arkfeld E-Discovery and Digital Evidence Conference. Joel Henry also was selected in 2014, for “Predictive Coding is So Yesterday.“ The 2015 winners, including Maureen O’Neill, have been invited to present their papers during the conference, March 11-13 at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, in Tempe, Ariz. (Monica Bay, LTN’s editor-in-chief, will be speaking at the conference.)
Preservation requires parties to ensure that electronically stored information “is protected against inappropriate alteration or destruction,” states the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. Collection, on the other hand, entails “gathering ESI for further use in the e-discovery process,” EDRM continues. Collection is something that many teams simply equate with preservation—if ESI is preserved, then it is collected and is fed into the review process. This mistake results in inflated ESI review costs.
