eDiscovery is mainly used to support civil litigation that involves the exchange of any type of electronic information. However, these tools can also be used as a knowledge management tool to mine the current documents within a content repository. eDiscovery tools mine through the content looking to match up information from either a taxonomy or set of training documents, to find similar kinds of information. The tools also match based on metadata that is not found in paper documents and that can play an important part as evidence (for example the date and time a document was written could be useful in a copyright case).
eDiscovery software comes as two major parts, forensic and governance. Forensic eDiscovery is the actual matching of information within a document to different terms. As an example, in a large corpus of documents, one can find a person’s name on a document that may link them to the investigation, or, when mining pharmaceutical documents, find that on a previous drug trial someone had noticed an unexpected of side-effect of a particular compound. The other tools deal with information governance, which is marking the documents, preserving all metadata, and ensuring that they are all searchable, retrievable and easily accessed.
Iknow can bring eDiscovery beyond the legal discipline, the traditional core users. These tools can reduce costs for legal firms by reducing the obvious cost of manually going over tons of electronic documents, but also in pharmaceutical firms, technology firms, and any other organization where there is a need to go over a large corpus of documents to look for specific terms or match documents.
eDiscovery can also reduce the costs of information governance within an organization, by helping to ensure that records are disposed on time and in adherence with regulations. As any organization gains a large enough corpus of content, it can be helpful to go back through and ensure that records were supposed to be disposed of were actually done. Iknow helps organizations on best practices for eDiscovery, using it to improve their usage of their own content and external content.