Electronic Legalities

New Technologies Aid Discovery

The growing use of electronic evidence in the courtroom has spawned an industry of commercial vendors and consultants that offer products and services designed to make the recovery, preservation, and review of documents—which sometimes can number in the millions—more time and cost efficient than ever. According to survey data from Socha Consulting, a St.Paul–based electronic discovery consulting and research firm, the national commercial electronic discovery market had almost $2 billion in revenues in 2006, up 51 percent from 2005 revenues. George Socha, founder and president of the company, expected those revenues to grow another 33 percent in 2007 based on surveys his firm conducts.

That growth is being fueled by companies such as Eden Prairie–based Kroll Ontrack, which specializes in helping its clients recover seemingly unrecoverable computer files. Kroll’s line of products and services help companies recover e-mails, data on backup tapes, or inaccessible computer files. A new Kroll product that is proving popular with attorneys offers an overview of e-mail communication between key players involved in lawsuits or investigations, allowing counsel to grasp a large volume of unstructured data very quickly.

“Lawyers need a way to get a good visualization of who was talking to who, how much they were talking, and what topics they were talking about in certain time frames,” says Michele Lange, director of legal technologies for Kroll Ontrack. The software generates graphs that illustrate the web of communication and enables users to “slice and dice the information to, for example, draw a spider web of everyone that talked during a certain week from among six key people,” she says.

Indeed, Socha says similar products that speed data review—the process of examining files to determine if they are relevant and should be handed over to opposing attorneys, or whether information is privileged and shouldn’t be seen by the opposition—has spurred the recent growth of the industry.

Another technology that has aided evidence review is tagged image file format, or TIFF, a format for storing images or “snapshots” of computer files, documents, photographs, and more. By converting native files in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or e-mail formats to TIFF images, it becomes far easier for those reviewing information to quickly scan, using a TIFF viewer, for relevant evidence using just one format. Similar efficiencies can be gained by extracting metadata from files—the “data about data” like the date a file was created and its author—and placing it in a separate database.

For example, if an employee files a discrimination lawsuit, an organization could identify coworkers who might be cited in that suit, then create “snapshots” or TIFF images of all of their files that exist on hard drives and an internal network, Moskowitz says. “That is a frozen snapshot in time, and nothing you do later will affect it, including going back in and revisiting e-mail, which changes the metadata attached to it,” he says.