E-Discovery

Electronic discovery (eDiscovery, e-Discovery) refers to discovery in civil litigation which deals with Electronically Stored Information (ESI). According to statistics, less than half of organizations have established workflows for responding to discovery requests for their records.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that became effective in 2006, were the biggest game-changer for e-Discovery. The FRCP includes just the core components of the e-Discovery process. Many state governments have already enacted, or will enact in the near future, their own laws that establish the e-Discovery processes in their jurisdictions.

Besides civil litigation, a good e-Discovery tool also provides the additional benefits, such as prevention of employee misbehavior (through e-mail monitoring), protection of intellectual property and other business data (avoid leakage and loss), regulatory compliance, and optimization of storage use.

Types of documents included in e-discovery are e-mail, instant messages, any types of document files stored on file servers and SharePoint, CRM systems, accounting databases, Web sites, and any other Electronically Stored Information which could be used in a civil litigation. E-mail constitutes a large portion of ESI. NetWrix e-Discovery Suite currently includes e-mail e-Discovery solution. Support for e-Discovery on other type of ESI storage is in the development schedule, such as SharePoint, IM, file server, and others.

Learn more about NetWrix solution for e-Discovery:

To learn definitions of some terms related to eDiscovery, visit eDiscovery terms section.