e-discovery Brings Ease To Content Searches

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

e-discovery tools can help organizations sift through mountains of information in significantly less time than employees can manage by hand - and save money in the process.

Looking for a return on your investment? Try putting your money into predictive coding tools that filter through information and save your employees not only time, but the headache of looking through documents by hand as well.

According to Search Content Management‘s Lauren Horwitz, Executive Editor of Business Applications and Architecture, e-discovery tools such as autoclassification and predictive coding offer a better way to sift through mountains of data and also bring their users significant ROI. One particular group that gets their money’s worth from the technology is law firms, which need to sort through old files, phone records and e-mail chains to build a case.

“With E-mail Analytics, our clients can easily identify communications of key players for substantive review,” said Craig Freeman, senior vice president, Xerox Litigation Services. “More than 70 percent of the data we host for clients is in email, so using E-mail Analytics to track relevant messages and establish patterns will help keep responses to discovery requests simple and timely.”

That’s great, but the part users really want to hear about is the money. According to Horwitz, the average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.

“If you’re relying on individual employees to classify their records, it’s just not going to work,” said Susan Wortzman, the founder and president of Wortzmans, a consultancy specializing in legal and strategic issues related to digital information. “What we’re finding more successful is using the technology to autoclassify the records so that employee input is minimized.”