Do you work in an industry that undergoes frequent litigation? If so, you’ll be interested in knowing how using a Laserfiche system enriches eDiscovery, making producing and responding to requests easier for your team.
Enterprise Content Management ECM) systems, such as Laserfiche, enable organizations to work effectively and efficiently with their unstructured records and other content. ECM typically takes a more macro view of an organization’s documents than e-discovery and enhances the ability to retrieve and analyze documents beyond what e-discovery can achieve. In short, you’ll find that Laserfiche classifies unstructured content, provides secure and controlled access to it, and assigns the appropriate retention schedules.
Here are some ways that having a Laserfiche system pays huge dividends in limiting litigation risk and expense:
Enriched Initial E-Discovery Collections
With role-based access rules for content in Laserfiche, attorneys can focus on the content that is accessible by or used by key actors. Your Laserfiche system can be used to find documents for review, and document types that are inapplicable to specific litigation can be excluded based on their document classification. The richness or prevalence of the resulting collection is much higher than brute force collection, improving the performance of other technology like that used in the technology-assisted review.
Lower Volume More Accurate Production
With granular retention periods, documents no longer needed can be disposed of before litigation arises. Further, documents that are not “records” can also be disposed of before the commencement of litigation.
In addition to excluding irrelevant document types, Laserfiche can dedupe files and track key document attributes so that even when a document type has responsive information, only responsive documents within the classification need to be selected. For example, if only invoices from Smith Technology during April of 2020 were relevant, invoices from other companies or outside the time frame could be excluded. This is where the superior functionality of Laserfiche Search really shines. Otherwise, what is essentially a search within a search may be difficult without accurate document-type classifications and extracted document attributes.
Transparency
Because document-type metadata has been assigned to documents, producing parties can give detailed accountings of what they reviewed and what was or wasn’t produced. Also, the receiving party does not have to depend on the accuracy of some black box technology-assisted review program. Questions about the responsiveness of individual document types can be analyzed by sampling within those document types.
Defensibility
The producing party’s use of an ECM for its day-to-day operations lessens any concerns that the collection or production process is somehow engineered to lose or hide relevant content.
Accumulated Intelligence
Special processes such as extracting specific attributes (such as keywords) of some document types for certain types of litigation can be automated and carried forward to subsequent similar litigation. The fact that individual documents were produced in individual cases can be tracked and managed within the ECM. Also, the intelligence accumulated to classify and attribute documents owned by the producing party can be used to analyze incoming productions from other organizations.
Consistent PII (Personal Identifiable Information) Protection
The document classification and attribute extraction process inherent in content management will do a more nuanced job of identifying PII or other sensitive data, even handwritten forms. By contrast, text-restricted TAR systems (a computer utility for aggregating many files into one) may be limited to using text search/replace technology to identify or redact PII.
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