Extract from Peter Callaghan’s article “Collecting ESI eDiscovery Report: See How Your Company Compares to the Industry”
The events of 2020 highlighted two major challenges that modern in-house legal teams face. First, there has been an explosion of data sources across most organizations. From team collaboration platforms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex), to mobile text messages, company websites, and social media accounts, companies are faced with new kinds of ESI being generated in real-time throughout their organizations.
At the same time, many of these companies do not yet possess the mature information governance (IG) strategies needed to get a true handle on all this data. In other words, they aren’t always sure what data sources exist, precisely what information is being collected, and where this data is being stored—and this makes it very difficult for legal teams to identify relevant ESI during eDiscovery.
The second challenge in-house legal teams face is in the collection and preservation of ESI from these modern data sources in preparation of a legal matter. Even if they know what information is being retained, successfully accessing, searching, exporting and producing this data is rarely easy. Legal teams simply don’t have the control and insight needed to effectively manage eDiscovery.
