Email Search: Nowhere to Hide

A recent article by Jacob Goldstein, 23 Things Not To Write In An Email, illustrates the type of granularity as well as breadth of keywords that can be used by litigators during the legal discovery process to search for relevant information. He points out some keywords that may raise a legal red flag and should be used carefully when constructing emails. However, today’s technology search capabilities provide such precise, complete and accurate results, that there just isn’t anywhere to hide.

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.

StoredIQ Intelligent Information Management Platform Receives “Ready for IBM Tivoli Software” Certification

StoredIQ is pleased to announce that our Intelligent Information Management (IIM) Platform has been certified “Ready for IBM Tivoli Software” for our integration with IBM Information Archive, an archiving repository.  The combination of the StoredIQ and IBM solutions enables organizations of any size to address information retention and legal hold needs for business, legal, or regulatory requirements, and provides complete visibility and control over all its unstructured business content. StoredIQ leverages our agentless connector to copy, move, index, search, delete, and manage data within the IBM Information Archive, as well as assign and execute retention and legal hold policies using IBM Information Archive’s native facilities.

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.

Planting the Seeds for Successful eDiscovery

With Spring in full bloom and Summer just around the corner, it’s a natural time to take a moment to evaluate whether the work you’ve put into your lawns and gardens has prepared them to withstand the coming attacks of hot weather, weeds and insect infestations.  This taking stock activity can be applied on a regular basis to all aspects of your life, both personal and professional.  So, if you’re involved in litigation, and eDiscovery in particular, consider this checklist of the Top 10 Questions you should ask eDiscovery vendors as you begin “planting the seeds” for a successful eDiscovery solution.

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.