E-Discovery

E-Discovery is the structured search, review and provision of electronic information for legal, regulatory or internal investigations. This includes emails, chats, files, social media content and other digital communication data.

The process typically follows defined phases: identification of relevant data sources, preservation against alteration and deletion (legal hold), collection, processing, review by business and legal teams and finally handover to courts, authorities or opposing parties. Triggers are litigation, regulatory inquiries or internal investigations. Traceability is decisive: the origin, completeness and integrity of the data must be verifiable.

Good e-discovery processes reduce costs and speed up proceedings considerably – provided the data basis is searchable and cleanly archived. E-discovery is thus an operational use case of functioning Data Governance: those who know which data is located where and which rules apply to it can answer requests quickly and with legal certainty.