The traditional view of electronically-stored information (ESI) is outdated. It focuses on document metadata, the text within the document. The emergence of the cloud, however, has given us not only greater volumes of data but also legal teams a veritable gold mine of additional information that is rich in evidentiary value. As increasing numbers of organizations are moving to cloud solutions like Box, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, there is much discussion by the legal community about the risks posed by these new data sources yet very little about the evidentiary opportunities. Corporate legal teams can gain advantage by looking beyond the norm and find key data that can give their strategy a leg up!
When digging for gold, it’s important to revisit what’s considered responsive in cloud data sources versus traditional ones. Traditional metadata shows more limited information than what is available with cloud metadata. For example, traditional metadata shows when a document was created, modified and accessed and by whom. From an evidentiary perspective, this information collected doesn’t necessarily tell the whole picture. On one hand, it can help prove that the custodian may have had opportunity or intent. On the other hand, it can be argued that someone else might have had access to someone’s physical computer, calling the evidence into question and diminishing its value.
