Master the eDiscovery Process: A Quick Guide on Free vs. Paid eDiscovery Platforms for Law Firms

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is a process that most modern-day lawyers are familiar with. Whether you have an upcoming court case or are undergoing an internal security audit at your firm, going through the eDiscovery process can be a hassle if you don’t have the right tools; combing through, labeling, and categorizing a plethora of emails, phone calls, and other electronic records can be painstaking. Usually, the eDiscovery process has lawyers search their firm’s records through filters based around the date, person, or email address associated with the record.  However, there are several tools out there that actually offer more robust, time saving, and expansive filtering options and improve overall search functionality. In fact, one of these tools actually comes free with Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365’s eDiscovery platform provides you with deeper, more intuitive search functionality. Rather than just being able to search via the aforementioned filters, you can also search by specific terms, email domains, keywords, to and from dates, and more. Additionally, Office 365 conveniently shows you the results of your search in a PST file, generating both a main folder and subfolders within that file, with each email address within your organization getting its own subfolder. The benefit to this is that is allows you to easily view every single piece of correspondence at your firm, along with signatures, dates, etc. The file even comes with an additional Excel file that acts as a ‘legend’, helping you navigate the PST file’s folders and subfolders and acting as a guide to find anything that you need. This is particularly useful for, for example, figuring out specifically who at your firm corresponded with a certain client within a specific date range. Additionally, this can also be effective for HR purposes; if there is a disciplinary situation at your firm, you can use this system to find the specific email correspondence associated with that incident in order to gather more details about the situation.

If you’re looking for an even more powerful eDiscovery platform, Logikcull may be the solution for you. Although it isn’t free like Office 365, it comes with customer support, including instant live chat support. Additionally, Logikcull has advanced search features that are simply not available in free platforms like Office 365. For example, it allows you to look for the term ‘restaurant’ but not the name ‘Steve’; in Office 365, you’d have to search all these terms one-by-one and break down the results yourself. Another benefit in using Logikcull is that the platform is mainly geared towards legal and case work, while Office 365 is mainly for general inquiries and HR purposes. In fact, Logikcull actually exports your results in a format that is commonly used for case work and legal proceedings, and it even automatically documents every email or electronic record with a ‘Document ID’ while also giving you a similar folder, subfolder, and ‘legend’ file just like Office 365. This format, alongside ‘Document ID’, is much more readily accepted in case work and trials.

Here at Rekall Technologies, we always recommend our clients to try Office 365 first (if there isn’t a big case on the line!), but if you have a case where your costs are covered, we’d definitely recommend Logikcull or even a company called CloudNine. Regardless of which platform you choose, be sure to check out our article on the benefits of having a VoIP phone system. Between utilizing a system that records all phone calls and having a robust email archiving solution, your firm will be ready for even the most meticulous eDiscovery proceedings.