To many, electronic discovery is simply about finding documents that are stored in an electronic format, converting them into TIFF or PDF files and using them so that they can be presented in a court case. While this is a part of the entire e-discovery process, this is by far not the only thing that electronic discovery service providers can do for you. Here are some examples of additional services that can be provided:

- Computer forensics

In a perfect world, every document that needs to be available for the discovery process would be easily found and accessed. However, in many real world scenarios, this is not the case. Due to the fact that computer systems are getting more and more complex, finding the necessary data for discovery is not always easy. Some of the documents may have been deleted, or the medium used to store them could have been damaged. Computer forensics experts specialize in analyzing data storage systems and attempting to recover data which has been deleted, damaged or altered.

- Document storage advice 

When a company is involved in a civil lawsuit, the term “document” can refer to any relevant data, not just correspondence or contracts. Data that could be requested may include internal corporate documents such as plans, models and drawings, voice mail messages, contents of email servers, access and transaction logs, databases, etc. Electronic discovery experts can provide you with some very useful advice on how you can increase the chances that any relevant documents will quickly be able to be found, that important documents are preserved and backed up – thereby reducing the chance that data would be destroyed either deliberately or unknowingly, plus also putting together procedures to put a “legal hold” on certain documents. This legal hold is extremely important when a company believes that they're about to get involved in a court case as it locks relevant information in place and prevents any modifications to it.

- Document retrieval and review 

This is one of the main features of any electronic discovery service. Before documents can be presented to be used in a court case, they must first be located. Firms that provide e-discovery services have specialized software that can comb through millions of records in a short time to pull only the most relevant ones, even if the documents are stored in different data formats or located on different systems. Once documents are located, the analysis can go even further, such as by eliminating duplicates or analyzing the contents of the documents in order to give it a relevance score. All of this will make the job a whole lot easier for any team members that would need to complete the process by actually examining the documents that were found. Since they are more likely to be relevant, less time is spent during the review process.

Bradley Morton is a law student interested in the legal discovery process and hoping to one day be an attorney. He believes that technology has the power to revolutionize legal proceedings, through things like electronic discovery.

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