File Discovery Gets Easier

When the suits march in and stack a pile of legal papers on your desk, life gets complicated. Some vendors' new products help to address this problem.

EMC, the storage powerhouse, starting providing some filtering and discovery help years ago. After all, the more intelligent your storage requirements, the more new storage you have to buy. Their EmailXtender product, for instance, helps sift through millions of e-mails for the ones lusted after by hostile lawyers.

Recently, EVault (.com) announced their new EVault Insight products for Electronic Discovery Services. One of their targets, law firms, have not always been at the leading edge of technology. Why did a law firm want to find documents quickly when they billed customers by the hour to find those documents? But smart law firms updated, forcing others to upgrade. Compliance regulations now force most medium to large companies to prepare for the same electronic discovery demands.

Finding documents is only the first step. Most lawsuits or compliance investigations demand files in PDF or sometimes TIF format. EVault handles that conversion for you. They also claim their easy to use interface reduces the training needed, so those cheap legal interns can do the grunt work (it has always been thus in the law business, and technology perpetuates the tradition).

Of course, a completely organized, indexed, managed, and closely monitored data pool wouldn't need such services from EVault or EMC. Those types of data pools tend to be run by Santa Claus or Snow White, however, since they don't exist outside children's imagination or fairy tales.

Leverage these new compliance products from EVault and EMC to improve your budget to keep up your own compliance and content management abilities. The old adage "you can't manage what you can't measure" now extends to file systems. Your department can't claim compliance until you can index, find, report, transform to PDF, and send to the lawyers.