Tips to Optimize Your Preservation Process

E-discovery professionals should not use the same preservation approach for each case, but rather should follow a repeatable process that meets a reasonableness standard.

Keep in mind that by asking the right questions in the identification stage, you can create a proportional and defensible preservation strategy. Preserving irrelevant data is easy to do on the front end but will cost you on the back end.

There are three general categories of data in an organization: Unstructured data, structured data and new data types (social media, mobile, chat, etc.). Finding how much total responsive data you have is crucial early in the process and can determine the scope of discovery. One of the easiest ways to begin finding responsive data is custodian interviews.

To achieve efficient preservation, there are a number of often-overlooked strategies. Among them is to leverage in-place searching, before collection.

This little-known technique is powerful, and it brings significant cost savings. Traditionally in early data assessment, you have to collect a sample of the client’s data. Now, some e-discovery solutions are able to go out and look at the data before collection.

Given that collecting data is an expensive and time consuming endeavor, if you have the ability to index data without having to process it and collect it, costs are lowered considerably.

There is no good alternative to preparing for preservation before there is even a hint of litigation. Assume that sooner or later, preservation will be an issue.