A robust data collection process is the basis of all great eDiscovery cases. Making sure your data is collected in a forensically defensible manner is instrumental to the success of your case, and should always be your first consideration. Allowing your client to become too involved or take on the collection themselves will effectively make them a witness to their own disclosure, this can leave you open to uncomfortable queries from the other side.
Once you have employed a trusted provider to tackle this first step in your collection process, the next question you have to ask is "Where is my data located and how can it be collected?"
In today's data-forward society, data can be stored in many different places, and as such, your options for collection are broader than you might previously have thought. In this blog post, we will be looking at the different collection services offered by eDiscovery providers, such as Altlaw, so that when your next project comes along you can be better informed as to your collection options.
First things first:
Before reaching out to consult on collection services there are a couple of pieces of information your provider will ask you...
- How many custodians are we collecting for?
- What devices/mediums of data are we collecting?
- Where are the devices located?
- What are the IT policies in place with your client?
- Is there a company document storage suite?
- Do you have any backups?
- Case-specific document storage e.g. construction, pharma, IT, financial bookkeeping
This allows us to provide an accurate quote for the collection services as well as make plans regarding travel, if needed, and time taken to collect. The answers to these questions will also help determine the types of collection that will suit your case.
Remote collection:
Remote collection is best suited to email data, which we can access from the cloud, and to devices like laptops that can be collected via remote capture.
Email -
There are a couple of options for collecting email data, depending on its location and the complexity of the data. In most cases, prior to collection, we will reach out to your IT department and request that a legal hold be put in place. This prevents any changes from being made to any of the data we need to collect.
Once the legal hold is in place, a collection tool, for example, Microsoft 365 Ediscovery, Google Takeout or Metaspike, is used to push PST or OST files from your email storage location into our processing platform/server for later upload into our processing platform. The application used, as mentioned above, is chosen based on the location of your email data and each is a completely accountable method.
When handling more complex data, Metaspike (or another tool of such nature) is used to ensure a robust and forensically defensible collection, as more complex data may require extra capabilities in order to handle it properly.
