Panel of Experts from Dropbox, Seyfarth Shaw, and the eDisclosure Information Project to Discuss 2015 E-Discovery Survey Results

Collecting data from cloud repositories, a myriad of mobile devices, and social media artifacts is challenging enough for most corporate counsel. Add the possibility of a data breach and resulting litigation, and the situation calls for the sharing of emerging best practices. Our 2015 E-Discovery Survey uncovered some valuable results, and you’re invited to hear our panel of e-discovery and security experts discuss them.

New Research: In-House Legal Teams Reveal Top Trends in E-Discovery

We're happy to be publishing the results of the 2015 Guidance Software Second Annual E-Discovery Survey.  Responded to by nearly 100 people from in-house legal departments and e-discovery service providers this survey shows some key trends with e-discovery teams, such as:

Strategies for Mitigating Business Risks Associated with Cloud Repositories

You may be among the many organizations who are considering deploying enterprise file synchronization and sharing solutions (EFSS) or cloud repositories to empower your mobile workers, implement BYOD policies, and support collaboration. You’re in good company.  Cloud adoption rates are rising as more and more companies deploy file synchronization and share capabilities, and the reasons for doing so are important: To enable their users to have access to data anywhere and to easily share that information and collaborate with their colleagues, partners and customers.

It’s working in their favor. According to Forrester:

91% of companies reported increased productivity thanks to file sync and share

70% of employees using file sync and share reported using it every day, while nearly one in five use it hourly.

But the challenges are also obvious:

• Security teams haven’t been able to determine with certainty whether sensitive data is in the cloud
• Performing e-discovery search and collections in a way that a court will accept could be both time-consuming and fraught with peril
• Best practices for reducing risk when negotiating cloud vendor contracts are in the beginning stages of development.

In fact, at Guidance Software, we’ve been integrating with leading EFSS and cloud collaboration systems like Dropbox for Business to make it all easier—and fully defensible from a legal standpoint. Take a look at our new paper, where we define the critical business requirements related to cloud and EFSS solutions and offer some advice on how to negotiate them into vendor business agreements. It also covers the challenges of collecting ESI from the cloud for purposes of e-discovery and highlights the integrations of EnCase® eDiscovery with Amazon S3, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Office 365.

Download the paper here

Comments? Have best practices of your own? We welcome your thoughts in the Comments section below.

Announcing an Industry-first Integration between EnCase eDiscovery and Box for Defensible Cloud Collection

   

All of us on the EnCase eDiscovery team are excited to announce a new integration between EnCase® eDiscovery and Box, the enterprise cloud content management platform used by 97% of the Fortune 500. Enterprise IT teams have come to rely on Box for cloud storage capabilities that map to their information governance policies and processes. This makes Box the perfect choice for this industry-first integration with our complete e-discovery product, an integration that will let legal teams securely search, collect, and preserve electronically stored information (ESI) located on Box from within EnCase eDiscovery just as easily as with on-premise data.

Now Collect and Preserve Information Managed in Box as Readily as On-Premises Data

Whitney Bouck, the senior vice president and general manager of enterprise at Box, has said that many of their enterprise customers reside within highly regulated industries, so they need a way to meet e-discovery and compliance requirements in a way that does not compromise efficiency and user experience. This makes Box and EnCase eDiscovery ideally suited to offer IT and legal teams a scalable, reliable, and secure way to gain visibility of content stored in Box, to manage access to that content, and to control retention and dispensation.

See for Yourself: EnCase® eDiscovery v5 is Out

Bryant Bell

EnCase® eDiscovery v5 marks the advent of significant new capabilities – breakthroughs, even – for in-house counsel, government agencies, and law firms who need to get e-discovery done right. No more outsourced black boxes. For the first time, litigation specialists and their legal teams can have complete oversight of the entire e-discovery process, from a greatly automated legal hold phase through early and continuous case analysis all the way through to production.

A Strategic Approach to Cloud E-Discovery: Five Key Considerations

Bryant Bell

According to a Nov. 2011 survey from analysts at eDiscovery Journal, 35 percent of in-house legal teams surveyed were planning a move to a cloud or hybrid cloud solution for e-discovery. Why this increasing interest in cloud? Because of the scalability, computing power, and secure accessibility it offers for facilitating portions of the e-discovery process.

If you’re considering a move to cloud or hybrid e-discovery, you first need a good grasp of what the cloud can and can’t do. And central to that is an understanding of which e-discovery processes are best adapted to cloud solutions. In actual practice, those phases best suited to cloud solutions are:

• Processing
• Analysis
• Review
• Production. 

New Options in Cloud Computing and E-Discovery

Bryant Bell

In the information age, one of your biggest challenges as in-house counsel is defending the enterprise along increasingly porous electronic borders, as well as in litigation matters calling for accountability in communications of every type, from chat messages to documents on thumb drives.

Which makes cloud computing for e-discovery a matter for cautious investigation for the midsized to large corporation. As a recent article on The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel website noted:

With litigation and e-discovery on the rise, it’s important to cut costs without sacrificing quality, and cloud computing is the new “go-to” solution. Yet some litigators are hesitant to switch e-discovery databases to the cloud for fear of risks such as security breaches or data loss.

E-discovery in the Cloud, A New Approach to In-house E-discovery

Guidance Software Organizations are adopting cloud computing at an exponential rate. Projections for the cloud computing market show a jump from $37.8 billion in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015, according to marketsandmarkets.com . Even if your organization hasn't migrated to an Internet-based environment, you've likely heard about technology that facilitates the storage and retrieval of electronic information, collaboration among custodians and cost-effective scaling of web-based applications.

When it comes to e-discovery the question is no longer whether the cloud should be used. The question is what components of the e-discovery process are most usefully deployed in the cloud and which components work best behind the firewall to help an organization solve their e-discovery challenges. To date, in-house e-discovery often meant the purchase, installation, use and maintenance of e-discovery software for various e-discovery tasks.

Instead of making an either-or decision, organizations should leverage the strengths of their internal resources and the cloud to meet their overall e-discovery needs. A practical approach is to use internal capabilities on-premise for e-discovery functions that occur near the data and use the benefits of the cloud for geographically dispersed resources in multiple geographic locations both inside and outside the organization. With this approach, e-discovery functions such as legal hold, collection, preservation, and processing, that typically occur near the data are performed inside the firewall and early case assessment, review and production are performed in the cloud, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of these delivery models. Separating e-discovery functions is not absolute, many organizations will decide in certain cases that processing and early case assessment is best done on-premise and for other cases in the cloud depending upon the specific needs of a given situation.

Of course, as with any technology decision, the business problem and/or litigation profile should be analyzed first; understanding the combination of cases, users, data volumes and future projections is important. Organizations should look for a solution that not only enables a repeatable, defensible process that is scalable from small to large matters, but one that also enables them to deploy the technology in a manner that best meets their needs (on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid of both).

There is no question that cloud computing offers organizations significant benefits for e- discovery, including faster deployment, increased storage flexibility, increased access to data and reduced infrastructure costs. However, for e-discovery you don’t have to make an either-or decision. The technology is available today to enable your organization to achieve its business objectives by deploying a hybrid approach with some e-discovery functions on-premise and some in the cloud.

Learn more about e-discovery in the cloud and the new approach to in-house e-discovery:

Watch Guidance Software's webinar Migrating to the Cloud, Read the Blueprint for Cloud-Based eDiscovery or Discover the benefits of controlling on-premise e-discovery processes.