E-Discovery Management More Effective in the Cloud: 10 Reasons Why

by Chris Preimesberger

Some lawsuits and investigations involve millions of documents and terabytes of data, gathered from multiple sources—including email, word processing documents and unstructured data from social media. Cloud-based e-discovery, referred to in the business as the e-cloud, allows for unlimited scalability without degradation of speed or efficiency.

Hosting documents in the cloud allows corporations and law firms to use hundreds or thousands of reviewers from around the globe to access the data using any Web browser and review documents in an organized and consistent way.

For big data cases, e-cloud predictive coding allows investigators and attorneys to focus on the most important documents first, using a combination of artificial intelligence and human review of sample data sets.

Increasingly, legal matters cross borders, requiring search and translation of foreign-language documents before they can be reviewed and presented to courts. E-clouds provide the speed and processing power to efficiently manage multiple languages, especially Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, that are difficult to search and translate.

Hosting data in an e-cloud costs about 35 percent less than managing e-discovery using an in-house appliance server and hardware. This is on par or better than other cloud-based applications. With an e-cloud, clients don’t have to buy servers, licenses or upgrades—or hire IT staff to maintain them.

E-cloud platforms are faster than in-house systems, especially those that use XML database structures instead of SQL databases that require frequent indexing, which leads to delays and errors. When paying reviewers by the hour, speed counts.

With the scalability of an e-cloud, users need no longer rely solely on complex Boolean search techniques. By viewing the data through the lens of charts, graphs and visual maps, they can visualize the relationships between people and concepts and drill down to find the most important documents. Interactive visual analytics give investigators and researchers powerful tools to conduct early case assessments efficiently.

Many corporations already keep some or all their data in the cloud. The e-cloud allows for fast, secure and accurate cloud-to-cloud data transfer to a private and secure data repository. As the documents are imported, searches are performed to sort the data into folders for efficient processing and review. No more shipping hard drives.

E-cloud platforms allow a variety of users (such as in-house counsel, information governance, law firms and contract reviewers) permission-based access to the data based on their security levels and roles in the e-discovery process. Companies have full control of their data, from upload to production of documents to the court or administrative agency.

Many corporations are involved in multiple matters that involve similar document sets for e-discovery. The e-cloud gives companies the ability to store a single document and code it for privilege, issue or other characteristics for future matters. This saves money by reducing the need to store and re-code duplicate copies of documents.