Working for an information management company I might be a bit jaded toward the lack of visibility TV dramas provide into the discovery process. However I do know it’s unlikely you’re going to find key evidence or a “smoking gun” wadded up in a trash can in the bad guy’s office – though it seems to happen a lot on TV. No, more than likely you are going to have to wade through terabytes or even petabyes of electronic data from multiple custodians spread across email, file shares, laptops, document management systems, etc.  Your first thoughts are probably, “How long is this going to take and how much is it going to cost?”

Organizations must expect the unexpected and be prepared to deal with several concurrent matters with varying electronic discovery requirements. In a recent whitepaper from Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, he discusses the often unpredictable and challenging eDiscovery process – and the opportunities that in-house eDiscovery solutions provide for real world improvement including:

• Incorporate All Data – ensure that your eDiscovery solution is comprehensive and goes beyond email to include other corporate ESI sources – locating the data you need to make informed case strategy decisions and minimizing your risk for non-disclosure sanctions.

• Timeliness Matter – other than meeting tight deadlines, organizations can benefit from speeding up the eDiscovery process by meeting the duty to preserve early, more accurately predicting case budgets, preparing for initial case assessments, and reducing reliance on outsourced review resources when pressed for time.

• Resource Scalability – utilizing a holistic eDiscovery solution, corporations can ensure that all departments and users involved in the legal discovery process are not overburdened by disparate tools and technologies, and that productivity isn’t impacted as the amount of corporate information and number of matters continues to grow.

As Mr. Babineau states in the paper, “Electronic discovery, when supported by the right technology has the potential to deliver benefits greater than a simple reduction of legal service provider costs. Corporate counsel can near-instantaneously analyze data to see what should be collected and preserved, enabling them to make strategic decisions sooner in the legal process, and swiftly adapt as new information is discovered.”

Perhaps as more organizations adopt in-house eDiscovery solutions, the legal discovery process will become more intelligent, less cumbersome, and less costly. And who knows, one day it may start to resemble the legal dramas we watch on TV. 

For more in-depth information, download the complete whitepaper from Enterprise Strategy Group.

“StoredIQ continues to deliver an industry leading product that provides customers with deep intelligence and understanding into their data and gives them the ability to quickly act on that information – this is why StoredIQ is again on our list of Trend-Setting Products.”

Hugh McKellar, editor in chief of KMWorld

StoredIQ recently announced the availability of its 6th generation award-winning solution. StoredIQ 6.0 is designed to empower corporate counsel with a legal-friendly, best-of-breed application – eDiscoveryManager – that addresses the wide range of legal discovery requirements, including search, identification, collection, early case assessment (ECA) and analysis, as well as legal hold and review. By integrating an easy to use eDiscovery application with the power of the StoredIQ platform, legal teams have a single solution to make more informed strategic decisions in less time, cut the cost of litigation and reduce legal risk.

We are very pleased to again be recognized by KMWorld and its judges. The continued recognition as a Trend-Setting Product of the Year is a testament to our dedication and commitment to enabling organizations to manage their information according to its business value and reduce cost and risk in the process.

Organizations can leverage the combined, comprehensive set of classifications to better manage and control all of their unstructured data to address their eDiscovery and information management needs.  Based on the classifications applied to unstructured data by our combined solution, StoredIQ can automatically execute records management, legal holds and document retention and disposition policies, thereby reducing costs, mitigating risks, and simplifying information governance.

“Classifying unstructured information is increasingly important as today’s organizations face mounting pressure to establish and maintain effective corporate governance strategies and respond timely to litigation requests. The combined data classification capabilities of StoredIQ and FCI will help organizations identify and manage information according to its business value, retain only necessary records, while meeting compliance requirements and reducing legal risk and storage costs.“ — Eric Jewett, Director of Marketing, Windows Server at Microsoft

StoredIQ can leverage the data classifications inherent in Microsoft’s File Server and apply policies to automatically act on that data including copying, moving, deleting, changing security information, placing data on legal hold, etc. This is a powerful resource, allowing companies to accelerate the understanding of their unstructured data based on the value of their information.

For more information send an email to info@storediq.com.

Need to streamline eDiscovery process, predict legal review cost and make strategic legal decisions much sooner?

With the rise in opinions and sanctions issued on electronic discovery, this new white paper from analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), is provided to help corporate counsel and legal professionals address the new eDiscovery realities which include managing multiple concurrent matters – with varying eDiscovery requirements, across multiple custodians, locating electronically stored information (ESI) that is spread across disparate data sources – all on tighter budgets and timelines.

“As the amount of electronic discovery related opinions and sanctions increases, organizations must be prepared to efficiently manage the complexities of responding to today’s legal matters that involve ESI,” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with ESG and author of the whitepaper.  “StoredIQ allows companies to standardize electronic discovery processes on a single platform, while providing the flexibility that corporate counsel needs to better prepare case budgets and make more informed legal decisions.”

In this paper, StoredIQ Accelerates Electronic Discovery While Providing Cost Predictability, Mr. Babineau discusses how StoredIQ enables companies to control costs, mitigate risk, and manage cases in the face of varying types of matters.  Specifically, he explains how StoredIQ:

• Provides greater insight into ESI including unstructured documents within email, file shares, SharePoint, and other repositories;
• Facilitates more detailed early case analysis, allowing legal teams to analyze data in-place – prior to preservation and collection;
• Reduces the amount corporations spend on legal service provider review fees;
• Allows IT and Legal to work seamlessly together.

To learn more, download the whitepaper from the StoredIQ website at www.storediq.com.

– Brian Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group

Building on our industry-leading platform for information management and eDiscovery solutions, we’ve designed StoredIQ 6.0 to empower corporate counsel with a legal-friendly, best-of-breed application – eDiscoveryManager – that addresses the wide range of legal discovery requirements, including search, identification, collection, early case assessment (ECA) and analysis, as well as legal hold and review. By integrating an easy to use eDiscovery application with the power of our StoredIQ platform, we’re giving legal teams a single solution to make more informed strategic decisions in less time, cut the cost of litigation and reduce legal risk.

With 6.0, we are excited to introduce a new sophisticated user interface coupled with a step-by-step, straightforward legal-focused workflow that enables legal teams to dexterously drive a matter through the entire eDiscovery process. StoredIQ 6.0 also gives inside counsel the ability to perform real-time analysis on data in its native location, prior to preservation and collection, to quickly perform ECA. We have also made architectural enhancements that solidify our industry-leading speed and performance of data identification and collection, allowing our customers to meet time-sensitive compliance, governance and legal discovery requirements, even in petabyte-scale environments. Some of the new features in StoredIQ v6.0 include:

StoredIQ eDiscoveryManager™

StoredIQ 6.0 includes eDiscoveryManager, an innovative application built to run on our Intelligent Information Management Platform.  eDiscoveryManager leverages a refined user interface designed to guide legal users through the eDiscovery process .  In addition, user-friendly analysis tools help to make sense of unwieldy amounts of discovered data; the user interface includes both graphical analysis and matter management dashboards to facilitate early first-pass review.  And throughout the eDiscovery process, the StoredIQ Scoreboard™ displays a running count of the files eliminated from consideration, automatically calculating the potential savings from the downstream review cycle.

StoredIQ AnalyzeAnywhere™

StoredIQ’s novel technology, AnalyzeAnywhere, enables early case assessment (ECA) prior to preservation and collection, without requiring the movement of data from where it natively resides. With the powerful ability to perform early case analysis on data “in the wild”, legal counsel can assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning a matter significantly faster than traditional ECA.

StoredIQ Scoreboard: Custodian Analysis by Email Domain

Prior to any collection of data, StoredIQ AnalyzeAnywhere gives legal counsel the ability to dynamically tune searches, review analytics, and modify custodian lists to accurately narrow the preserved and collected set of data subject to the “duty to preserve,” mitigating further legal risks and providing a legally defensible audit trail. By using AnalyzeAnywhere, legal counsel can reduce the potentially matter-relevant ESI to the smallest legally defensible, yet qualitatively enriched, data set, thereby dramatically lowering the cost of downstream formal review.

Market-Leading Performance and Scalability

We’ve also extended our performance lead in indexing and processing of unstructured enterprise data with an updated platform architecture. Enhancements have been made to the entire StoredIQ IIM Platform appliance, including:

• An upgraded 64-bit software stack, including the operating system, applications, database and search/index engines;
• Server nodes have been upgraded to industry-leading Dell™ PowerEdge™ R610 with state-of-the-art Intel® Xeon® Processor E5520;
• On-board storage now leverages best-in-class NetApp® NAS.

With these and other architectural enhancements, a single StoredIQ appliance can achieve performance levels of 24TB of full-text indexing per day, and through a federated solution, performance can scale to well over 100TB of full-text indexing per day.  In addition, StoredIQ 6.0 now boasts embedded disaster recovery technology as well as support for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint 2010.

The StoredIQ Intelligent Information Management Platform v6.0 is available immediately. For pricing and purchase information contact info@storediq.com, or for more information:

• Download ESG Whitepaper – StoredIQ Accelerates Electronic Discovery While Providing Cost Predictability
• Download StoredIQ Whitepaper – Managing and Accelerating the eDiscovery Process with StoredIQ eDiscoveryManager
• Visit our new website -  www.StoredIQ.com

The inherently litigious environment of the health care industry, exponentially-increasing amounts of data, compounded with strict compliance requirements, are forcing hospitals and health care providers to get a better handle on their electronic information. This is not without its challenges, according to a recent article in FierceEMR, “EHR implementations open ‘cans of compliance worms,’” which discusses decisions and issues that need to be addressed when adopting EHR technology.

In the article, Cheryl Rice, VP and chief corporate responsibility officer for Cincinnati-based Catholic Health care Partners notes that one of the ‘four pressing issues’ hospitals face while converting to EHRs is audits and litigation defense. This speaks to the growing amount of discoverable information held in EHR systems, which means it is important that as health care providers increase their use of EHR systems, they also implement an information management and proactive eDiscovery solution, to help ensure compliance, and reduce litigation.

StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Platform has helped many companies – including a leading health care provider – address enterprise-level information management. With our auditable solution, companies can automate their records retention and disposition strategy to comply with corporate information governance guidelines (IP, HR, trade secrets, etc.), as well as regulatory compliance mandates (PII, PCI, HIPAA, etc.) – reducing overall risk and cost. StoredIQ provides health care organizations with a range of business-critical benefits, including the ability to:

• Comply with corporate policy and government regulations
• Reduce risk, preempt litigation and avoid fines
• Protect sensitive, business-critical information
• Automate management of storage and retention policies
• Optimize storage and delete unnecessary information

As the health care industry moves toward greater use of electronic medical records, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies – any organization that is managing patient information – should have a solution that helps meet escalating compliance requirements, mitigate risk and minimize cost.

For more information on StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Solution email info@storediq.com.

The StoredIQ Intelligent Information Management Platform is an enterprise-class, software-based appliance designed to manage the functional intersection of eDiscovery, information governance, records management and storage management. By providing an in-depth assessment of unstructured data across the enterprise, StoredIQ gives organizations critical visibility into and control over their business content to make more informed decisions about the management, retention, and disposition of their data. StoredIQ discovers, assesses, and manages data across the industry’s broadest range of data sources, including storage, email, archiving, content, document and record management systems.

Though eDiscovery remains the strongest driver for implementing robust information governance, corporations are facing increased risk from tougher privacy mandates and regulatory compliance, as well as the need to secure and protect data, all pain points that a solid information management solution like StoredIQ can address. eDSG will market StoredIQ to its Global 2000 client base both directly and through its international consortium of independent consultants, consulting organizations, litigation service providers and eDiscovery technology vendors.  In addition, StoredIQ will have access to the breadth of consulting, services and technologies from the eDSG International Consortium to help corporations address their legal and regulatory risk through strong information management strategies and technologies.

eDSG and its international consortium of eDiscovery consultants represent an excellent addition to our channel strategy. We are delighted to be working with eDSG and its consortium members to leverage synergies and to deliver the best eDiscovery and compliance solution to the market.

For instance, StoredIQ’s advanced search capabilities can look within compressed files, email archives and email attachments, in addition to the text contained in the email message itself. It can also search non-printable text within a document or email and can search through comments and revisions. In addition to search using keywords, StoredIQ supports many advanced search capabilities including:

• Single term search
• Multiple term search
• Concept-based search
• Boolean operators
• Logical grouping of terms
• Wildcards within search terms or Boolean expressions
• Proximity searches
• Natural language entities
• Regular expressions
• Macro-based searches
• Object level attributes
• By hash value (digital signatures)

Probably of greatest interest to litigators during the discovery process is StoredIQ’s ability to perform natural language processing (NLP), which is the ability to extract linguistically derived natural language concepts from within email and user files including people, places and things. Legal teams can immediately search using over 250 out-of-the-box concepts and attributes including credit card accounts, social security numbers and stock symbols. NLP identifies word usage based upon context within a sentence. For example, NLP can identify if the word ‘will’ is used to identify a person’s name, a legal document or an auxiliary verb showing intent. StoredIQ has proprietary technology for adaptive sentence boundary disambiguation (ASBD) which substantially increases the precision of Natural Language Processing to address common grammatical deficiencies that are present in many business documents. No other information management technologies have this capability. NLP is a critical capability necessary to accurately perform eDiscovery, records management or risk management as full text indexes alone cannot provide the required level of precision.

I know a lot of these terms can be a mouthful, but the underlying take away is that legal teams have the technology to precisely and accurately search electronic data, including email, making it much easier for litigators to discover data that was at one time hidden from them.

In addition to our IBM Information Archive integration, StoredIQ discovers, assesses, and manages unstructured data across the industry’s broadest range of data sources, including email systems and archives, storage file systems, workstations, NAS systems, retention platforms, document management platforms, directory services, and WORM archives.  Like the integration with IBM Information Archive, all of StoredIQ’s data connectors are agentless, and do not require installation of any software on the data source, nor any additional, interceding hardware such as a gateway. This design feature is critical to any large enterprise deployment in order to enable scalability and maintainability.

All data connectors from StoredIQ, including our latest for IBM Information Archive, are optimized for performance, scalability, and depth, and with particular attention to the eDiscovery-centric issues of audit trails, chain of custody, and data preservation. This allows StoredIQ to manage electronic information more efficiently and quickly, reducing eDiscovery and storage costs while mitigating risk.

For more information about the benefits of the joint solution, please contact info@storediq.com.

1. Does the solution automate a wide range of the eDiscovery processes as defined by the EDRM model from information management through preparing load files for litigation review?
2. Does it provide an open integration platform to index all your unstructured data sources including various email systems, storage systems, archiving systems, and content / document management systems—without the need to install software on the target system or additional gateways?
3. Can it execute without impacting employee productivity?
4. Can it conduct ECA on data where it natively resides—prior to collection?
5. Can it create a data topology map identifying electronically stored information by system, custodian, access time, size, and content type?
6. Is it able to output electronically stored information to legal, HR or audit teams prior to the completion of the collection process?
7. Does it interact with electronically stored information on active systems without changing metadata?
8. Does it execute forensically-sound collection policies while providing defensible, comprehensive audit logs?
9. Can it provide rich metadata tagging and classification capabilities?
10. Is it easy to deploy and maintain, accelerating the speed from installation to productivity?

If you answered yes to all ten questions then you can enjoy your summer, knowing that your eDiscovery solution is able to effectively manage all of your reactive and proactive litigation needs. However, if you’re eDiscovery solution doesn’t quite stack up, learn how StoredIQ’s Intelligent Information Management Solution addresses all of these questions, download our in-depth evaluation checklist or email info@storediq.com.