When companies are involved in a lawsuit, they must be able to produce evidence when requested. How does this process look like? What are the single steps from the first Document Retention Order to a report delivers to the responsible authority?

MAR. 2017 | 3 MIN. READ

AUTHOR: Robin Auer, Design Research, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software

Procedure

Through multiple interviews with Attorneys, Data Privacy Specialists, Legal Assistants, and people from Litigation Support, we created a clear picture from their tasks and their roles. After we identified the overlaps, we brought them into an eDiscovery lifecycle graphic. At the beginning of the interview, we asked the participants some general questions about their job and their current role. We wanted to understand how large their team is and what other roles the people are working with. Other questions we asked about their eDiscovery process were:

1. Describe the life-cycle of an eDiscovery matter (or perhaps a recent matter) at your company. 
2. Who ‘has the ball’ at different stages and how does ‘the ball’ get passed around?
3. What is your part/tasks in this life-cycle? With whom do you interact?
4. Tell me about a typical day (or perhaps yesterday) from the time you walk into work to the time you leave.
5. What aspects of your job does this ‘typical day’ not capture?
6. Describe a frustrating experience you had in your job role.
7. Describe a time when something went particularly well.
8. etc. …

Key insights

• Within the whole process, many people use different tools to fill the gaps which StoredIQ for Legal still has. The exchange between these tools is very painful for our users because they have to export and import data multiple times.
• The Department of Justice gets a final report and a bunch of files and data as a delivery. They use Relativity as a tool. Files have to be delivered in a way that it can be imported into Relativity.
• A huge amount of files—different formats—need to be screened manually to find relevant content. Structured data is easier to screen than unstructured. However, companies have to deal with both.