Is Dark Data Derailing Your Discovery? Step Into The Light With Everlaw

Dark data may sound ominous, but in reality you already deal with it every day. Anyone who’s participated in discovery in the past decade knows that document review involves far more than just documents. In today’s digital age, eDiscovery encompasses image files, audio recordings, and everything in between. This is what we mean when we talk about dark data.

So, what’s the big deal about dark data anyway? The answer is simple: it’s not searchable the way the rest of your eDiscovery data traditionally is. That means that if you’re still conducting your eDiscovery the same way you always have been, relying on searches to find the most important documents for your case, you’re ignoring a potential goldmine of information in dark data. Today’s important business exchanges take the form of chats and voicemails, and if you’re not equipped to handle that data, you’re going to miss some interesting and relevant information. Your eDiscovery software must both recognize the various types of dark data and make them easily searchable and reviewable.

Enter Everlaw. When it comes to shedding light on dark data, no one shines brighter. Not only are they intimately familiar with all the forms of dark data out there, their platform handles them in ways that have raised the bar for eDiscovery.

What Is Dark Data and How Do You Deal With It?

Gone are the days when eDiscovery revolved largely around run-of-the-mill text-based documents like Word files, PDFs, or emails that resided on someone’s hard drive. Today’s typical discovery dump includes many, if not all, of the following types of file formats, each of which presents its own unique challenges when it comes time for review.

• Audio and video files. The obvious challenge with these kinds of files is that there’s no text to search. Short of spending hours listening/watching, there’s typically been no way of even knowing what’s in the recordings, let alone isolating the most crucial ones. Everlaw changes all that by incorporating automatic machine transcription that uses sophisticated algorithms to extract the speech and convert it to text.

Now you can read a running transcript of the recording right alongside the native file, which you can play directly in your review platform. Better yet, those automatic transcriptions are fully searchable, so they’ll be caught up in whatever term searches you run across your discovery set. Now you can know exactly which media files mention your client or contain your key terms.

• Foreign language documents. The age-old method for reviewing foreign language documents has been to tag them “foreign language” and let them languish in a folder with other non-English documents until someone with language skills is brought on to sort through them. The obvious problem with that approach is that these documents can contain critical information that you need to know immediately. Everlaw automatically recognizes foreign language documents, identifies the language, and translates them to English. These machine translations allow any reviewer to handle foreign language documents on a first pass and determine if they’re relevant or important.

• Chats. Chat is one of today’s most popular means of communication, and has transcended casual conversation to become a legitimate way to conduct business. It is problematic, though, because each chat program has its own unique format and many systems can’t support them. But Everlaw can. Whether you’re dealing with Slack, Google Hangouts, or something else, Everlaw will detect the conversations and render them in a chat-like interface, complete with chat bubbles and timestamps, to give you a true sense of the exchange.

 

 

While they may seem informal, chats often contain some of the most telling information, and failing to capture them could lead to missing out on crucial evidence.

• Cloud data. Not all relevant documents reside on your client’s servers like they used to. Cloud storage is now commonplace, meaning that crucial data is missed if you look beyond hard drives and servers. Everlaw knows where to look and can extract information from all the biggest cloud storage providers, including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Reviewing cloud data with Everlaw is a simple matter of clicking a button and inputting the necessary credentials.

Coming Out of the Dark

Dark data is easier to create than ever before. While you’ve read this, your client probably started a Slack chat or uploaded something to the cloud. Every modern case involves some form of dark data. Ignorance of technology is no excuse — lawyers have an ethical duty to be informed about the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.

That doesn’t mean you need the IT skills to access them yourself — that’s where Everlaw comes in. Unlike most vendors, they automatically look for dark data and make it useful. With most other ediscovery platforms, though, you probably don’t even know that you have potentially crucial data that’s being passed over.

With Everlaw, you not only know your dark data is being supported, you can even see in a nutshell what your dark data burden is in a particular case, thanks to their useful visualization tool that breaks down your discovery data by file type.

While the amount of dark data varies from case to case, with newer cases having more of it, you can expect on average that 5-10% of your eDiscovery files will not be searchable by traditional means. In a case with a million files, that’s 100,000 files with potentially critical information that you might be missing.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for handling dark data. Every file type and every case presents its own unique problems. The good news is that Everlaw can handle them all. The modern lawyer needs to understand that dark data exists and find the right solutions for it. With Everlaw on your side, you can rest easy knowing that all your crucial discovery data has been brought to light.