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: E-Discovery In the Trenches

Chain of Fools

By Jerry Bui

With so many parties involved in the E-Discovery process these days, can anyone claim to have a clear & precise picture on your project's chain-of-custody? Your case is likely to have a different vendor for Evidence Collection, Processing (Culling and Deduping), Text & TIFF, and Review & Production. If pressed, can your vendor tell you where/how a specific produced file was collected and what treatment it received along the entire chain of evidence? I think they would be hard pressed to answer this without significant research. They would need to call every single vendor that was involved in the process, and it's likely that a painstaking analysis of all the various logs still won't yield a conclusive answer as to where, when, and how the file in question was derived. The truth of the matter is that this container metadata is often dropped to the floor as it is handed off between vendors.

As the case manager, it is your job to enforce the integrity of the chain-of-custody. Ensure that all logs are transcribed accurately with source information and that all the culling parameters are captured (search expressions, date ranges, and deduplication fields). Ideally, the vendor will have the ability to store this in a field (as container metadata) in the appropriate load file. The recipient vendor should be made aware of these fields and should be instructed to store this in their subsequent output file. In the end, the review & production platform should be configured so that these fields are exposed to you and your end users.

Full post as published by E-Discovery In the Trenches on April 21, 2007 (boomark / email).