EDD: Issues, Law, and Solutions: redaction

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Weapon of Mass Redaction

BEYONDREDACTION NOW AVAILABLE IN READYSUITE V4.4

Millions of archived Official Records and other electronic documents are available to the public, and thousands more are added every day. Billions of non public records could cause problems if information contained within were to be released. BeyondRedaction is a giant leap forward in what has traditionally been a laborious process rife with potential for errors

BeyondRedaction in ReadySuiteworks by reading the word dictionary created by BeyondRecognition’s Global Glyph Catalog (GGC) and applying positional logic to where each and every user designated word or pattern appears on every page of every document.

Users can expect speeds of 150,000 pages / 600,000 words per hour in TIFF Images and/or 30,000 pages / 116,000 word per hour in PDF documents. The text elements associated with the image redactions are also removed either from the associated text file (in TIFF) or from the text layer of the PDF document. This methodology assures the user that no redacted information can “leak” out and completely obviates the need to re-OCR redacted documents.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and legal document review services will gain huge savings in labor hours as well as vastly increased precision in the protection of sensitive information.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

ReadySuite’s latest improvements, product briefing and a white paper

ReadySuite 4.2 Now Available

Today we released version 4.2 of ReadySuite, which includes upgrades to the image and text viewers, the addition of redaction capabilities within the image viewer, and improvements in the parsing and output of EDRM XML and Summation DII load files.

ReadySuite users can take advantage of a number of new features and enhancements made to the image and text viewers. Users will now have the ability to edit TIFF and PDF images inline using the image viewer, utilizing various image clean-up, redaction, and rotation options. When saving changes to documents, users can choose from 'Auto-Save', 'Prompt', and 'Read-Only' modes. Other upgrades to the image viewer included new save and print options, improved image display, and easier page navigation.

Further upgrades include new word-wrap and encoding options in the text viewer, support for reading and writing more fields and data types from EDRM XML load files and Summation DII load files, and new customization options. You can find the entire list of updates and improvements at our development blog.

Each new version of ReadySuite is developed to address your needs – and improve upon your requests. So please... keep sending us your suggestions for improvements!

You can purchase a one-year subscription of ReadySuite for $1,179.95 at our online store. If you haven’t bought it already, a free 14-day trial of ReadySuite can be downloaded here.

ILTA Product Briefing

On Friday, June 1 at 12:00 ET, we will be presenting a product briefing to our friends at ILTA. Please join us if you can. In this session, we’ll cover how ReadySuite, the affordable and easy-to-use litigation software is designed to help you control the quality of your productions and manage various document related tasks, including:

Quality check + validate productions

Convert among industry standard load file formats

Merge, manipulate, and validate load files

Converting among multiple image formats such as TIFF and PDF

Applying or removing endorsements from image sets

Generating searchable text and PDF files using OCR

Batch printing image sets to high capacity printers.

To join, register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/683306953.

Learn More About Quality Control in e-Discovery

Last week, we released “The Need for e-Discovery Quality Control in the Age of Digital Data,” a free white paper that discusses the current state of quality control in the e-Discovery industry, areas for improvement and a possible solution.

The white paper covers the buildup to the need for better quality control in e-Discovery processes. It includes an overview of recent cases where e-Discovery quality became prominent in the outcome of the matters. It also shares possible solutions for law firms, in-house legal teams and discovery vendors to solve the challenges of managing quality in their own processes.

To download the white paper, click here.

Sedona Principles 2nd ed.

1. Electronically stored information is potentially discoverable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 or its state equivalents. Organizations must properly preserve electronically stored information that can reasonably be anticipated to be relevant to litigation.
2. When balancing the cost, burden, and need for electronically stored information, courts and parties should apply the proportionality standard embodied in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) and its state equivalents, which require consideration of the technological feasibility and realistic costs of preserving, retrieving, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information, as well as the nature of the litigation and the amount in controversy.
3. Parties should confer early in discovery regarding the preservation and production of electronically stored information when these matters are at issue in the litigation and seek to agree on the scope of each party’s rights and responsibilities.
4. Discovery requests for electronically stored information should be as clear as possible, while responses and objections to discovery should disclose the scope and limits of the production.
5. The obligation to preserve electronically stored information requires reasonable and good faith efforts to retain information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation. However, it is unreasonable to expect parties to take every conceivable step to preserve all potentially relevant electronically stored information.
6. Responding parties are best situated to evaluate the procedures, methodologies, and technologies appropriate for preserving and producing their own electronically stored information.
7. The requesting party has the burden on a motion to compel to show that the responding party’s steps to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information were inadequate.
8. The primary source of electronically stored information for production should be active data and information. Resort to disaster recovery backup tapes and other sources of electronically stored information that are not reasonably accessible requires the requesting party to demonstrate need and relevance that outweigh the costs and burdens of retrieving and processing the electronically stored information from such sources, including the disruption of business and information management activities.
9. Absent a showing of special need and relevance, a responding party should not be required to preserve, review, or produce deleted, shadowed, fragmented, or residual electronically stored information.
10. A responding party should follow reasonable procedures to protect privileges and objections in connection with the production of electronically stored information.
11. A responding party may satisfy its good faith obligation to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information by using electronic tools and processes, such as data sampling, searching, or the use of selection criteria, to identify data reasonably likely to contain relevant information.
12. Absent party agreement or court order specifying the form or forms of production, production should be made in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form, taking into account the need to produce reasonably accessible metadata that will enable the receiving party to have the same ability to access, search, and display the information as the producing party where appropriate or necessary in light of the nature of the information and the needs of the case.
13. Absent a specific objection, party agreement or court order, the reasonable costs of retrieving and reviewing electronically stored information should be borne by the responding party, unless the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business. If the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business, then, absent special circumstances, the costs of retrieving and reviewing such electronic information may be shared by or shifted to the requesting party.
14. Sanctions, including spoliation ﬁndings, should be considered by the court only if it finds that there was a clear duty to preserve, a culpable failure to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information, and a reasonable probability that the loss of the evidence has materially prejudiced the adverse party.
Copyright © 2007 The Sedona Conference®. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted courtesy of The Sedona Conference®.
Go to http://www.thesedonaconference.org/ to download a free copy of the complete document for your personal use only.