Data Capture & Collection
Disclosure of electronic documents is not a dissimilar process to paper disclosure in that it is concerned with a reasonable search of documents. Because the documents are in an electronic format, a filter for relevancy can actually be more efficient.
The main problem with e-disclosure is that of volume. Because electronic documents do not take up much physical space, there often tends to be a much higher volume of documents in existence.
For instance, one 40Gb backup tape may contain millions of documents. A similar paper based exercise would soon become costly and possibly disproportionate.
In order to aid a cost effective search of this large volume of potentially relevant documents, it is vital that the documents are collected in a way that does not change any of the documents’ ‘metadata’.
Metadata is data that a computer system or computer program generates automatically, and is helpful in that it can describe a particular document, and be used to sort documents for relevancy. As the data already exists, a lengthy and potentially expensive, object coding exercise is not required.
Examples of metadata commonly associated with documents are;
- Date and time the document was created, opened, modified, copied, sent, or received
- Identity of the person who created, stored, opened, modified, copied, sent, or received the document
- Who else copied, sent or received a file, email or email attachment
In many cases data collection can be as simple as requesting identified back-up tapes for systems that are thought to contain certain data types. (e.g. monthly backup tapes for the client’s main email server).
Sometimes however, potentially relevant data may be stored on systems that have no formal, or centrally administered, backup process, and this may require the manual collection of documents on-site and in multiple locations.