Discoverable ESI is about much more than the traditional email and office files. But what else should you collect? This recent article from Forensic Discovery provides a good basis and a pretty extensive list of what to consider collecting, based on what you use in business.
Their article What Should You Collect for eDiscovery? Start with What Your Business Uses discusses that when considering what type of ESI to collect for litigation, start by considering what applications you use in business. If your business is using them, there’s a good chance your client’s business is using them too, which makes them potentially discoverable for litigation. They also provide a list of some of the common sources of ESI in business today and even that list is pretty extensive. Here are a couple of examples from the list:
- Office and Email Files: This has been a traditional source of ESI in many cases for years. But where the office and email files are coming from is changing – for many organizations today, it’s coming from cloud-based Office solutions, such as M365 and G-Suite. Even the traditional sources are changing.
- Mobile Devices: Who doesn’t have a mobile device these days, or correspond with work colleagues over text about business items? Mobile devices are regularly discoverable these days for text messages and can be discoverable for a variety of other sources of ESI, including photos, videos, geolocation data and more. Here’s one case that illustrates its importance.
There’s plenty of other ESI sources people use in business, including one category which could justify its own blog post. How many of them can you think of? Check out their article here to find out how many you thought of and whether you can think of any other common sources of ESI!
So, what do you think? Does your organization have a process for handling each of these sources of ESI in discovery? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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