When it comes to eDiscovery, complex investigations can involve enormous amounts of electronically stored information (ESI). This includes a wide range of ESI, including email, Slack messages, Microsoft Teams conversations, and other shared documents. Collecting everything at once can increase costs and leave legal teams with more information than they can reasonably review.
A better approach is to learn how to prioritize data sources in complex investigations. By identifying which systems are most likely to contain important evidence, your legal team can focus its efforts on the information that matters first. Collecting this data across multiple platforms can be difficult without a tool such as Hanzo Illuminate.
Data source prioritization helps your team determine where to focus during the early stages of a complex investigation. Instead of treating every system as equally important, you can consider how closely each source relates to the people, events, and issues under investigation.
This approach can reduce the collection and review of unnecessary documents. It can also help investigators uncover important facts sooner, which may influence decisions about the scope and direction of the investigation.
Before ranking data sources in a complex investigation, define what you need to learn. This starts with identifying the conduct under investigation, the relevant dates, and the business processes related to the matter. Connecting each data source to a specific investigative question gives your eDiscovery data prioritization process a defensible basis.
Job titles and formal recordkeeping systems do not always tell you where important evidence exists. You need to understand how the people involved actually performed their work. While your organization might have many different platforms for communication, some employees might focus on one or two options.
For example, one team might communicate mostly through email, while another working group might use a mixture of Slack and Microsoft Teams. If you are prioritizing data sources during a complicated investigation, knowing where to focus your efforts is important, even when your organization has the tools needed to archive data across every platform.
Once you understand the investigation and your organization’s systems, rank data sources according to their likely value. Several factors can guide this assessment:
This assessment gives your team a practical starting point. Sources with high relevance and a high risk of data loss may require immediate attention, while lower-value sources can remain preserved until the investigation shows they are necessary.
Understanding how to prioritize data sources in complex investigations becomes difficult when you do not know what data your organization has. The traditional eDiscovery process may provide a clear view of email and Word documents, but this approach cannot fully keep up with all of the different platforms your organization might use.
Hanzo Illuminate helps your organization create a data map that reflects all the mediums the business relies on. Your team can better understand where relevant information exists before committing resources to broad data collection.
Illuminate also addresses the relationships between modern data sources. The tool allows investigators to examine chats and the links or documents connected to those conversations instead of treating each item as an isolated record. That context can help your team determine which sources deserve deeper investigation.
The right technology should help you identify and isolate the data you need without trawling through irrelevant evidence or requiring you to collect and review everything first. Hanzo Illuminate supports eDiscovery data prioritization by helping your team streamline the process and avoid wasting time on irrelevant documentation. Reach out to Hanzo today to discuss how our tools can help.
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