Glossary term
Electronic Discovery (e-Discovery)
Subject: Legal, Tax and Reporting, Dispute and Investigation Management
Also known as: eDiscovery, Electronically stored information (ESI) discovery, ESI
Electronic discovery is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting and reviewing electronically stored information, such as emails and chat messages, so it can be produced in a legal case or investigation.
Explanation
The work runs in stages. A legal hold tells staff to keep relevant material. IT then collects data from mailboxes, shared drives, phones and messaging apps, usually with a search filter based on names, dates and keywords. Reviewers, often assisted by software that ranks or groups documents, mark which are relevant and which are protected by legal privilege. What remains is handed to the other side or to the regulator in an agreed format. Volumes are huge, so cost and proportionality are constant issues. The term comes from litigation in the United States, where parties must disclose relevant documents, but other systems use similar processes under names like disclosure. Compliance teams meet it during regulatory inquiries, cartel investigations and internal reviews. Poor preservation can bring sanctions even if no wrongdoing is found.
Example
A pharmaceutical firm faces a regulator's request for communications about a product recall. Legal places a hold on forty custodians, IT collects 600,000 emails and chats, and a review team narrows them with keyword searches to about 20,000. Privileged items are withheld and the rest are delivered in the format the regulator asked for.
Not to be confused with
- Digital forensics
- Forensics examines devices to establish what happened. E-discovery sorts and produces large sets of electronic documents for a legal process.