The Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Launched in May 2005, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) was designed to address the lack of standards and guidelines in the electronic discovery market – a problem indentified in the 2003 and 2004 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery surveys. 

As corporations continue to face the challenge of Big Data management with greater demands and inquiries on electronically stored information for litigation, regulatory compliance, or corporate investigations, following this simple EDRM eases the complexities involved in this process. Therefore, whether you are in-house counsel, corporate IT, a vendor or a law firm, the EDRM allows for everyone to understand and follow best practices to manage their eDiscovery from the initial management of electronically stored information to the discovery, productions and presentations. 

Information Management & Identification

• Establish a plan to manage electronically stored information (ESI) from creation through the final stage of disposition 
• Identify and locate potential sources of ESI and determine the scope 

Preservation

• Establish a plan to preserve potentially large sets of information with defensibility, consistency, proper documentation, and diligence
• Identify how to efficiently preserve in a possibility of multiple global locations, platforms and formats
• Prevent the risks of spoliation and sanctions related to destruction and transfer of evidence without interrupting business processes

Collection

• Collect & Analysis Data
• Data Recovery/Extraction
• Hard Drive Imaging & Analysis 
• Extensive file analysis of data stores (de-duplication, metadata extraction)
• Strict and defensible Chain of Custody for all data

Sfile Partners leverage the Sfile HPC Engines to process all sizes of data from 1GB to "Big Data" to rapidly gain insight using our analytic tools and reports.

Processing, Review, Analysis, and Production
Using one of Sfile’s greatest and unique advantages, the processing of ESI at an average rate of over 165 GB/hr in a single batch, partners leverage Sfile to quickly establish the scope of relevant data. ESI Processing includes:

• Extraction of PST files
• ESI analysis 
• Culling
• DeDuplication 
• DeNISTing
• Indexing

Review
With integrated Enterprise Content Management and Document Review Tools, Sfile is an ideal cloud based hosted platform to perform early case assessment and legal review jobs of all sizes from gigabytes to multiple terabytes for one to thousands of users. Our most raved about features include:

• Easy to uses and intuitive online experience
• Integrated native document viewer with no imaging conversion required
• Advanced search and filter options
• Sharing and collaboration features

Analysis
With the ability to perform analysis of all types including metadata, keyword, dates, and a number of email and file filters, coupled with Sfile's unprecedented processing speeds, stake holders are able to get greater matter insight with faster data analytics.

Production
Sfile's integrated production tools and services offer multiple forms of document production capabilities including native file, TIFF and PDF formats. Additionally, our professional services team stands ready to handle even the most complex request with the most flexible and customizable features such as:

• Produced images can be endorsed with bates numbering and other branding text
• Redacted sections of documents are removed from the extracted text within load files 
• Export to load file formats such as Concordance and Summation or a number of other eDiscovery systems

Sfile's partner network of Certified Computer Examiners (CCE) often serve as expert witnesses and offer defensibly sound best practices to assure the confidence required to meet any challenge. Sfile's network of CCE partners stand ready to deliver professional services to deliver:

• Exhibit preparation, including handling and testing of different kinds of exhibition file formats
• Case Management solution to support key litigation functions such as service of pleadings, court orders and discovery productions
• Evidence archiving and hosting with ability to configure system for global data treatment

Offering a full end-to-end eDiscovery solution to control costs, reduce risk and provide a wide variety of flexible technology solutions, Sfile and its partner network provide a proactive and complete approach for managing all stages of the eDiscovery process.

While our focus is not on Data Collection, we do have at hand a readily available and knowledgeable partner network that is partly made up of computer forensic leaders. Now for those of you that didn’t know, Sfile just jumped on the Google Plus bandwagon, so while doing research on Google Plus and Gmail data, we developed a deep interest of how this data is collected from a widely used and web-based mail system.

Therefore during this slow holiday week, we picked a select number of our forensic partner’s brains by conducting a poll to see what forensic tools they use or recommend for collecting client Gmail and we received some interesting feedback.

We found that most of our forensic partners use IMAP connection tools such as Aid4Mail to identify and collect Gmail messages. They have found that tools such as this are reliable, affordable, easy to deploy and easy to use. On the other hand, and depending on the data, some of our forensic network set up the email account as POP3 and then use Outlook to load the emails into a PST file.

We learned that there are two ways that devices and clients can communicate with Gmail, POP (one-way communication path) and IMAP (two-way communication path). However, we also found that even Google itself recommends using IMAP over POP. IMAP provides a better method to access messages from multiple devices and ensures that new mail is accessible from any device at any given time.

We realize that data is never simple and there always different challenges such as access, verification, and authentication. Therefore, we pose this question to you, which collections tools do you use or recommend?

For a referral to one of our trusted computer forensic partners throughout the nation, please contact Sfile.

For Sfile, it quite simply means that we ensure rock-solid reliability, security and performance for all of our users to access, review and share their data at anytime from anywhere.

SAS 70 TYPE II CERTIFIED

This certification ensures that all of Sfile controls, processes and policies that protect the data in our systems have successfully completed a SAS 70 Type II audit. In other words, all of our data residing at CyrusOne is secure under the SAS70 auditing industry standard.

This qualification allows Sfile to handle enterprise-class recoveries, and support users who must maintain compliance with data privacy and data security regulations such as:

• NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology) SP 800.34 (Rev.1)
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
• FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
• SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002)
• GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999)

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Because of the difference in legal protection for data privacy between the United States and the European Union, Sfile is committed to adhere to the efforts of both the US and the EU to develop a common “Safe Harbor” framework to ensure the safe flow of data and its accountability.

SAFE HARBOR

Sfile is fully compliant with safe harbor principles that apply to the collection and use of personal information which is obtained from EU customers through certified litigation support service providers based in the UK. Basically, what this means is that because the European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection prohibits the transfer of personal data to non-EU nations that do not meet its standard for privacy protection, the US has to provide a streamlined framework to comply with both this Directive and the US Department of Commerce.

And what exactly do these principles include?

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Learn how Sfile works with you and your data.

Because most incoming inquiries about our technology are from the most knowledgeable professionals in the industry, we have decided to provide our readers with a basic, but comprehensive, list of frequently asked questions.

We hope you all find it insightful.

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The Challenge
Data to Review: 2.6 TB of data
Size of Review Team: 3 person team
Deadline for Review Completion: 45 days to review

While every matter varies and certainly there are many ways to tailor a review process and workflow, a recent experience with a review job was successfully performed in the Sfile platform by a small team of lawyers in California that we believe deserves special mention.

The following example highlights the methods where Sfile’s advanced capabilities with search and tagging features facilitate the review of large amounts of files and minimize attorney review burden.

This particular matter started with over 2.6TB of data that needed to be processed.  This bulk of data was culled down to a feasible data set through De-NISTing and De-Duplication.  The final set for review was roughly 600,000 e-mail and user files.

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With the full benefits of proprietary technology, Sfile has achieved a single and integrated information management platform that serves many purposes for different types of industries.

Integrated eDiscovery Solution

•     Preserve

•     Process
  • ESI Analysis & Processing
  • Exception reporting and consultation
  • File hashing for de-duplication

•     Early Case Assessment
  • Expansive set of filter options
  • Powerful culling capabilities
  • Conversion of native files to TIFF/PDF during culling

•     Review
  • Integrated native document review
  • Tiff-on-the-fly features, no plug-ins
  • Full redaction capabilities

•     Produce
  • Flexible output and production options
  • Native, PDF, TIFF
  • Standard and customized load files
  • Produce to opposing counsels in a secure and separate hosting environment

Just a friendly reminder on how the Advanced Search Builder ranks search results.

When conducting a search, the default search result sort is Score.  The Score hit displays the highest score count at the top of the document list based on the number of times the searched term or phrase occurs in a document.

In this example, the first two documents have the most search term hits in a single document.  The searched term appeared 116 times in comparison to the other documents.  The percentages are based on a total of 116 hits.

Total Hits    Number of Hits    Percentage

  116                    116                    100%
  116                      96                      82%

With the default remaining at 25 documents per list size in order for users to mentally keep track of the documents they are viewing, Sfile now offers choices for customizing the total number of documents per list. So if you really want to feel productive viewing 100 documents at a time, go ahead!

The Preference icon is located in the top right corner of the repository screen.

Were always proud to enhance small, but useful features such as these, so let us know if you have any specific requests and we'll be happy to work with you. Were always working hard to deliver the most useful features for our users. Make sure to stay tuned for frequent releases of all the exciting features currently in development!

Whether you want to view more information or less, the Sfile review system now allows you to customize and enhance viewing options for certain document types.

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