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Aug
16
The data universe continues to get larger. Law firms face greater challenges in figuring out how to sort out ever increasing volumes of electronic documents. I had a chance to speak with Steve Akers, founder and current CTO of Digital Reef, which has developed a solution designed to manage large amounts of unstructured data.
An 2008 IDC study estimated the size of the digital universe at 281 exabytes, or 281 billion gigabytes. Furthermore, they estimated that by 2011, it will be 10 times larger than it was in 2006. This has serious implications from an e-discovery standpoint, as it becomes much more difficult to pinpoint relevant and responsive data out of this morass.
The Digital Reef solution navigates through the entire enterprise (network, SharePoint and e-mail servers, desktops and laptops, for example) and applies proprietary algorithms to create conceptual categories of data. This not only helps to identify relevant data for e-discovery purposes, but also helps the organization find data for business purposes when it is needed. For e-discovery purposes, however, counsel can utilize early case assessment techniques to make important decisions regarding litigation without the necessity of collecting large amounts of data. The solution includes a variety of analytical tools, such as grouping of near duplicate documents or e-mail threads, as well as data classification and different levels of de-duplication. The Digital Reef approach works without moving any of the organization’s information. However, once the desired information is identified, it can be seamlessly and automatically moved to a review platform. Digital Reef has recently formed an alliance with Anacomp to facilitate direct transfers of data to Anacomp’s CaseLogistix platform.
Digital Reef has incorporated a variety of techniques into its application to insure integrity of the e-discovery process. When data is first touched by the Digital Reef solution, a manifest is created which includes, among other things, several hash values which uniquely identify each electronic document. If that data is ultimately collected, a new manifest is created which has the ability to determine if any changes were made to that document between the time of identification and collection, and if so, who made them, when they were made, and the extent of the changes. A score is assigned to the document to help counsel identify the extent of those changes.
As the volume of information increases, the fears of accidentally disclosing privileged information also increase. By assessing the similarity of privileged information and documents in the production set, Digital Reef can provide an additional layer of quality control by pointing out documents in the production set counsel might want to recheck because of characteristics resembling documents previously identified as privileged.
The volume of unstructured data in organizations presents significant risks as they attempt to locate information responsive to discovery requests. Digital Reef has developed an approach worth considering which can mitigate these risks. For more information, see www.digitalreefinc.com.
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