Email Archiving and eDiscovery: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Not too long ago, email archiving and eDiscovery solutions were considered separate, albeit necessary, components of enterprise email management. Moreover, eDiscovery was perceived largely as a service that companies sought outside the organization.

Then things changed. The recession brought the need to carve costs out of IT expenditure, take control of eDiscovery risks, and reduce overall litigation spending. Industry analysts and experts began talking about "in-sourcing eDiscovery." Fulbright & Jaworski’s 2009 Litigation Trends Survey reported almost half of the survey participants were already in-sourcing some aspects of the process. In December 2009, Gartner came out with a report, symptomatically entitled E-Mail Archiving and E-Discovery: What to Do Next, which confirmed a similar key finding: adopters of email archiving solutions are looking to expand the uses of their archives for eDiscovery tasks. Recent announcements from traditional email archiving vendors have all been revolving around support for eDiscovery and litigation readiness.

All this goes to prove that when, a few years ago, we redesigned the M+Archive architecture to combine email retention with eDiscovery, we were way ahead of the curve. And our clients have appreciated and benefitted from this. And they’re saving money.

How do I know this? Nothing more than some really quick back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what clients I’ve recently spoken to tell me. I see the following patterns:

• Every single one of them has used M+Archive for eDiscovery, even if they originally purchased the solution to address email retention;
• The investment in the M+Archive indexing server paid for itself after a single discovery request, which took minutes as opposed to days;
• Legal costs were reduced on average by a quarter just because the subset of data presented for review was highly accurate.

Granted, these are my unscientific observations; still, they are pretty compelling. What’s even more compelling is that the latest release of M+Archive will enable them to save even more. Enter M+Analytics.

Last week, I saw M+Analytics in action. This is a really slick case management system that’s part of our email archiving solution. It allows authorized reviewers, internal auditors, or legal professionals to collaborate on eDiscovery requests using the M+Archive central repository. So don’t forget to sign your internal auditing and legal teams up for the upcoming walk-through of M+Analytics.

According to data collected and analyzed by Michael Osterman, eDiscovery today represents about 35% of the cost of litigation. With an early case assessment system, such as M+Analytics, in place, the cost of processing and reviewing of data can be reduced considerably. In fact, one of my projects for this year is to track clients’ litigation cost savings directly linked to M+Analytics.

What prompted this posting, however, wasn’t the research suggesting a convergence between email archiving and electronic discovery technologies. Rather, it was the enthusiastic praise for M+Archive from a client with whom I had lunch two weeks ago. We didn’t go into an abstract ROI discussion, we didn’t talk about the granularity of the policies or the flexibility of the archiving jobs. It was much simpler than that: "The Terabytes of archived data are growing daily, we can find whatever we need in seconds – WOW!"

At the end of the day, it’s the validation from the clients that counts the most.

– Roumiana Deltcheva