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Today electronically stored information is increasingly being used in legal matters as evidence. Hence, laws have been enacted for the preservation and disclosure of electronic evidence. In the past, lawyers had to look through hundreds or thousands of physical documents for evidence, but now the increase in electronic data has made searching for evidence an arduous task involving millions of files. Digital evidence includes email, word processing documents, instant messaging histories, digital photographs, backups, printouts, ATM logs, spreadsheets, databases, internet browser histories, digital video and audio files. Basically anything that is stored or transmitted in digital format is considered digital or electronic evidence.

Recently, it has been noted that digital evidence has become an important factor for lawyers losing cases or facing fines. And this has been happening not because courts have reservations regarding the authenticity of digital evidence (as it can be easily modified) but because of the inability of lawyers to process digital information accurately.

Challenges of Processing Digital Information

Lawyers identified three major reasons behind the difficulty in producing digital evidence. They are the voluminous amount of electronically stored information, time constraints for conducting investigations thoroughly and, above all, the absence of good eDiscovery technology that can carry out eDiscovery requests successfully. Let’s explore it further:

1.       Electronically stored information is voluminous.
Corporations today rely heavily on electronic communication because it is simple, easy and fast. Hence, a great amount of information is stored in digital form. Enterprises and organizations retain almost all these records on the belief that it might be useful in the future as proof for litigation. And in some cases, due to simple retention rules which are usually event dependent, much unnecessary and insignificant data gets stored. Therefore, during corporate investigations, lawsuits, or regulatory audits, lawyers would have to sift through a mountain of significant as well as insignificant information.

2.       Filtering electronically stored information is time consuming
Since everything that is in digital form is permissible as evidence per federal and state regulations, it is a time consuming process to filter data stored in network drives, both Mac and PC, desktops, laptops, PDAs, Smartphones, voicemail, content and document management systems and storage and archiving systems. Moreover, good keyword choices are also crucial in identifying and processing electronically stored information. If poor search terms are used, then filtering such voluminous data would lead to nothing, and lawyers would have to wade through every single page.

3.       Absence of good eDiscovery technology
An effective eDiscovery technology is crucial for successful processing of eDscovery requests. When an eDiscovery request is made, enterprises and organizations have no other choice but to comply with the request since non-compliance could mean incurring millions of dollars in fines. Therefore, if the eDiscovery solution deployed fails to serve the purpose, it means huge losses.

How to Process Digital Information Successfully

The answer is a good eDiscovery solution. It would put an end to all the problems faced by lawyers in processing digital information accurately. Let’s look at what a good e Discovery solution should be capable of:
.          Managing all eDiscovery tasks defined by the ERDM standard
·          Reading and retrieving data from diverse sources

·          Optimum search accuracy

·          Easy to deploy, use and maintain

·          Cost effective

Hence, investing in good eDiscovery software translates into the easy management of vast amounts of information and the effective processing of digital information.