• eDiscovery services during litigation and regulatory investigations
• ESI/Information Governance consulting to craft legally defensible data retention and disposal plans

In the coming months, this blog will publish weekly content on eDiscovery and ESI (electronically stored information). We will run from the bare-bones basics up through information found in Continuing Legal Education courses. In time, you’ll be able to download clusters of content in PDF form to share with colleagues, clients, or whomever can help you protect and grow your business.

Let’s get started.

eDiscovery Overview

Discovery is a substantial component of the timeline – and expense – involved with most litigation. EDRM.net is an incredible resource that gets into the nitty-gritty of eDiscovery, but here’s the 30,000 foot take on the process:

• Identification: you’ve been served with litigation, and you need to understand what data may be relevant, where that data is stored, and who has access to it.
• Preservation: basically, this means preserving the meta-data and ensuring there’s no funny-business involved with editing who accessed something, date & time stamps, etc.
• Collection: sometimes remote, sometimes on-site. May be digital files, hard drives, or a wide variety of other storage media.
• Processing: ensure everything collected can be uploaded into software review platform
• Review: this is the process of actually seeing what the documents contain. eDiscovery partners work with clients to define search parameters) and pull only the documents that are relevant to the litigation at hand.
• Analysis: presenting findings in a way that enable litigation strategy
• Production: turning the results of the review and analysis over to the client in an agreed-upon format.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a linear process – it’s iterative. Future blog posts will dive into detail on each of these topics, expand definitions, provide best practices, etc.

ESI/Information Governance Overview

Before you even get to litigation, though, you have data being created. So, what do you do with all of it? What do you keep? For how long? Where? On-prem? In the cloud?

Lots of entities have ESI policies, but, be honest, is yours just something to dust off once you’ve been served with litigation? Do your employees know and follow those policies? Do you have any way to systematically enforce them?

As your data storage grows, so do these hard costs:

• Your direct storage costs
• Associated IT infrastructure cost
• Risk of data breach

And these soft costs:

• Risk of data breach (and the resulting legal, economic, and reputation damage)
• Compensation of IT staff or contractors to manage the bloated data

Okay, I Get It. But Why Would I Choose Proteus?

It’s a fair question. This is a relatively crowded space and you probably have sales reps contacting you regularly from firms big and small.

Most of those firms, though, aren’t guided by practicing, litigating attorneys who are routinely dealing with adverse counsel, judges, and juries.

Many of them are competing over only the document review portion of the EDRM cycle and pointing to their lower cost per hour (or per document). But because they don’t have the extensive litigation experience, they don’t know how to optimize that review, so they over-produce.

Or maybe they’re big names with known logos and overhead gets buried in invoice line items.

We aren’t trying to be all things to all people. We are a leading middle-market provider of ESI consulting and eDiscovery, led by practicing, litigating attorneys, focused on helping you defensibly reduce your data.

We’re stepping out more boldly now because we believe there is a gap in the market. We believe many entities are being under-served or overcharged. We believe you can provide legally and technologically sophisticated solutions at a fair price.

Stay tuned for additional content, updates, and resources rolling your way so you can help protect your organization from legal and financial risk.