Extract from Glenn Barden’s article “In the Universe of Known and Unknown Data, Have Websites Become a Forgotten Data Source?”
E-discovery and the technology involved in investigations operate in a constant state of flux. What passes as the norm today is very different from the norm five to 10 years ago, and in a similar manner this will shift again in the coming years. Throughout this time, the data sources that come into scope, and what constitutes an acceptable collection of them, has been ever changing.
It’s fascinating how quickly the industry has shifted from the days when e-discovery teams would spend weeks digitalizing and coding vellum, microfiche and paper documents to where we are today with dynamic and varied processes to deal with a plethora of electronic sources. Among these are websites, which can provide deep insights in discovery, but have been largely forgotten as a source of evidence.
To stay abreast of these changes, it’s important for e-discovery and investigations practitioners to continually study and compare newly emerging data sources to their predecessors to understand the impacts and determine a scale of how pertinent that data is likely to be to the matter at hand. This becomes increasingly difficult as the gap between data ancestors widens over time.
