Digital information, commonly referred to as electronically stored information (ESI), has experienced exponential growth in recent years and has become a critical source of evidence in legal actions across the world.
This is the view of Fred Mitchell, Symantec's business unit manager at Drive Control Corporation, who says this growth is set only to accelerate, with a recent study by IDC revealing that by the end of 2010, the amount of ESI grew to 1.2 million petabytes.
According to Mitchell, ESI has gained popularity because it takes up less space than physical documentation and offers advanced capability designed to speed up the search process.
However, he argues: “With the massive growth expected in the amounts of this information, is this search capability enough for the legal sector or has finding evidence become akin to finding a mythical needle in a haystack?”
He explains that electronic search capability has been thought of as a boon to the legal industry, where in the past investigators would have had to search through thousands of paper-based documents to assemble evidence.
Theory versus practice
“In theory, ESI allows investigators to search through these thousands of records electronically using intelligent search terms, which would speed up the search process to just a matter of minutes.
“In practice, however, this virtual mountain of information is made difficult by sheer data volumes and compounded by poor data management,” notes Mitchell.
He points out that the reality is that today ESI plays a pivotal role in legal matters, and the success and cost of legal processes requiring this data depends heavily on being able to rapidly retrieve accurate information.
“If data is badly managed, it takes longer to retrieve, if it can be found at all, which risks
bringing the entire legal process to a halt,” he says.
It is also Mitchell's view that the growth of data is a growing problem in the e-discovery process as the amount of data that needs to be searched per legal matter is ever increasing. “Problems related to e-discovery on ESI can cause cases to be lost or delayed or to result in sanctions, and many of these problems occur as a result of poor availability of relevant data from electronic sources.”
He believes that the need for compliance can sometimes lead to over-sensitive data retention policies, which exacerbates the information overload situation even further, furthering hampering the legal process.
Providing evidence
“Having said that, however, ESI can be a source of vast amounts of potential evidence, and advances in e-discovery have contributed to the rise of digital evidence as a contribution to a large number of legal successes.
“ESI can be used to demonstrate the financial well-being of an organisation as well as address queries relating to financial transactions, due diligence and compliance checks.
“Other applications of ESI recovered using E-Discovery include employee behaviour checks, human resources investigations and other internal processes,” he says.
Mitchell adds that ESI and digital evidence have a variety of applications in the business and legal worlds, however as discussed the volume of this can make E-Discovery a difficult process, especially if data is not well managed.
“This problem is complicated by the vast variety of media in which digital evidence may be
found, from e-mails to digital photographs, word processing documents, spreadsheets and databases to instant messaging history, Internet browser history, digital audio files and social media.
“Many of these sources of information are not habitually located within corporate archives, adding even more time onto the search process as individual machines need to be examined along with corporate archives,” he notes.
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