What Is e-Discovery?

And why should you care? This December amendments to the federal procedures for e-discovery will go into effect. Companies large and small are going to be affected by the new rules, and IT is going to be burdened with yet another level of electronic recordkeeping. If they don't do it well, their companies have a lot to lose, at least in the eyes of the law.

E-discovery is the process in which "electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it in a civil or criminal legal case." The new amendments call for legal parties involved in litigation in federal court to sit down prior to the proceedings to discuss their clients' document management systems. The rule also requires each company to designate a spokesperson to represent its IT group in litigation. States are already, or will soon be, following suit.

The new amendments take e-discovery to a new level of maturity that companies won't be able to ignore. Keeping good records of employee's electronic communications will be a necessary part of being in business. Records will include everything from the obvious emails and documents, to the less obvious but equally important images, calendar files, databases, spreadsheets, audio files, web site logs, VoIP calls, and more. It's a herculean task, especially for small or mid-sized businesses, and the expense can be sizable.

Storing employee information is the easier part of the process. Finding the relevant data when it's requested is tougher. This reminds me of the apartment buildings in NYC. It's routine for them to keep a camera in the lobby and in the elevators recording comings and goings. But in the event of some sort of issue, a human (the building's superintendent) needs to sit down and wade through months of grainy video footage.

To avoid the labor-intensive process of humans sifting through megabytes of emails, specialized e-discovery software has become a growing area in cybersecurity. "Lawsuits have become arms races," says Nick Kingsbury, CEO of Chronicle Solutions, a provider of e-discovery, audit, and regulatory compliance solutions. "If you have a good e-discovery system the other side will not start shelling you."

Chronicles Solutions' product, netReplay, is a box with gigantic amounts (about 7 terabytes) of storage space. The box attaches to the Internet gateway of a company and captures everything that every single employee does on the network, including FTP transfers, chat room visits, blogs, and IMs. It then provides the IT person with powerful tools to search the archives right down to the occurrence of a word or phrase.

Kingsbury says that, while netReplay can give an employer information about everything from who's wasting time by surfing the web at work to who's leaking trade secrets, most employers are concerned with the latter, not the former. Still, while companies are scurrying to beef up their recordkeeping systems it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves that it's our records they'll be keeping. Read Nick's blog for some chilling tales of how bad guys do what they do. To find out more about the e-discovery regulations and case history, visit ediscovery law.