Data & ESI Collection
There are vast, redundant amounts of data that can suddenly be involved within your litigation. At Mountain States Imaging, we have prepared our eDiscovery solutions to handle them all. What kinds of electronically stored information (ESI) exist?
Email Accounts
Perhaps the most well-known form of ESI that has been used in litigation is email. Files like .PST’s (Personal Storage Table) that are generated by Outlook are backups or Emails, Calendars, Contacts, Attachments and much more. Imagine a .PST that’s 5GB’s in size. That one file could contain approximately 300,000+ pieces of information, and most litigation contains review of much more than just 1 PST file.
Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft SharePoint are all similar web based email accounts that can also be relevant to your litigation and can be trickier to get a hold of. Where Outlook generates a simple file, some of these web based email clients take a little more work to generate a similar file.
Hard Drives & Computers
Computer hard drives have become an extremely large part of litigations. Where small email files can range from 1-10GB, computer hard drives can be hundreds of GB’s. That’s a possibility of millions of images that could possibly be relevant to your litigation.
Social Media
Social media is on the rise, and lately, a lot more cases have begun to utilize social media at times for litigation. Sites like Facebook & Twitter can be extremely hard to export and create a data file for, but Mountain States Imaging and Viewpoint have an outlet to streamline this process.
Paper Files
Although we live in a digital world, there is still an extremity of paper out there. “Old-school” linear reviews consisted of turning every page and reading each page one at a time. Hundreds, thousands of boxes can take thousands of man-hours to review. MSI has a state-of-the-art scanning department that can efficiently digitize paper to be brought into eDiscovery.
See more about our scanning services here.
There’s an easy way. Mountain States Imaging considers data sources as connectors, and we tie them direct into our Viewpoint processing module. We can take email accounts, hard drives, social media and paper – and easily “ingest” them directly into our Viewpoint eDiscovery platform repository. Our data center in Denver, CO has been designed to create the most defensible solution to store data. Once data is collected into our repository, the originals are preserved and are never moved, edited or arranged throughout the rest of the eDiscovery phases. From there, we can ingest this data to prepare for the processing phase where the data will start to be organized and drastically reduced based on redundancy, date ranges and file types.
Learn about what we do after we’ve ingested the data by taking a look at processing.