Spherical Indexing and Ediscovery: a Primer for Early Case Assessment

I. The Challenge.customers. Conversely, a face-to-face interview of
Early case assessment and pre-discovery differ inknown custodians may not yield all parties (unknown
their commitment to chain of custody and legalcustodians) with whom an employee has
review of data. Early case assessment andcommunicated.
pre-discovery activity overlap in the collection phaseII. A Solution.
of electronic discovery reference model (EDRM); theGetting to the center of a matter by way of
difference is what you do with the data.custodian and concept searching will improve your
Pre-discovery has more gray area as it relates to thelegal risk management on a case-by-case basis.
impact on legal review and production. Early caseHowever, many mid-sized organizations continue to
assessment offers more definition because it mayface challenges in terms of cost and complexity
help you avoid going to trial or suffering a fullwhen they want to evaluate email. Estorian
disclosure discovery. Using early case assessmentLookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and
tools or solutions enables an organization becomeevaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity
defensive before the meet and confer meeting.delivering, making it a valuable solution for the
Being prepared before a meet and confer meetingmid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more
can be challenging, but the rewards are lessemail than they realize, often exceeding 1-2
discoverable data, therefore less reviewed data.Terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage
Electronic discovery interview series responsesthirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the
suggest that the rise in electronic discovery cost iscourse of 365 days will yield 1.35 Terabytes of email.
directly related to the rise in data being reviewed."Spherical Indexing" receives much of its strength as
Therefore, preparation ahead of a meet and conferan index through the SQL tables it is based on. At
meeting can reduce your electronic discovery reviewfirst glance it may seem overly complex to manage
requirements, subsequently reducing your totalTerabytes of data using SQL, but the current foot
discovery budget. For more information onprint for full text indexing is 12-20% of the original
eDiscovery go todata storage. Therefore, a one terabyte archive
For example, Electronic mail early case assessmentwould result in about 120-200 gigabytes of index
will expose connections between users (custodians)data, with the average being about 120gigabytes. An
and subjects/activities (concepts) during specific timeindustry acceptable size for an index is between
frames. Since email is directly tied to corporate10-15% of the source data. However, be sure to
identity; there is no mistaking or missingcheck your indexes, some only include a full text
communications between employees, partners andoption and not a concept based search component.