Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people have experienced rising inflation and increased costs of products and services in several product and service categories. Price inflation is also true for litigants but long predates the pandemic. The viral element for litigants is data in the electronically stored information (ESI) available for discovery in litigation, compliance, and investigation activities.
The growth and complexity of ESI increase the costs to store and manage data. More data also makes the production and review phases of e-discovery more expensive, namely, identifying relevant documents and finding and protecting privileges in larger and larger datasets.
The e-discovery process itself mirrors the proliferation and complexity of data year over year. The discovery process identifies where potential evidence is stored and collects forensic images of all resident data for processing and review, regardless of whether the data is relevant, privileged, or private to the custodian and without respect to complexity of data types.
The variety and complexity of data also increase overall e-discovery costs. ESI potentially relevant to litigation or investigations is no longer limited to email messages, documents, and spreadsheets. Litigants can find potential evidence on social media sites, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, video cam footage, and smartphones that neatly package large volumes of complex data types, including SMS and social media content.
The e-discovery collection process is less about the legal risk of missing a document or waiving privilege and more about how traditional collection technology operates: collecting forensic images of ESI data stores. Since professionals use smartphones for their personal and work lives, much of the data on their phones contains personally identifiable information (PII) and has nothing to do with legal matters. A Kansas court recently found a request to image employees’ smartphones “overly broad, unduly burdensome, and unduly intrusive, given the disproportionate amount of personal information totally irrelevant to the lawsuit likely stored on those individuals’ cell phones.”
Imagine a time in which you could collect ONLY the data within the scope of a litigation, investigation, or discovery request. You could reduce the burden, time and expense of collection and minimize the time and cost necessary to process, review, and produce documents to satisfy discovery requirements and deadlines. And protect the privacy of (while limiting the inconvenience to) the data custodian. That time is NOW with ModeOne’s revolutionary SaaS framework for smartphone data discovery.
ModeOne Smartphone Data Discovery
ModeOne is a self-service (SaaS) framework that empowers legal professionals to easily manage case facts and obtain and analyze vital evidence stored on smartphones and short-message chat applications using a remote, automated, targeted, defensible, ethical, secure, and cost-certain workflow.
The company’s patented SaaS framework offers the first and only remote solution available right now for same-day collection of targeted, relevant data from Apple iOS and Android mobile devices for evidentiary, compliance, and investigation purposes—anywhere in the world without needing a physical collection kit or onsite forensics personnel. Attorneys help their clients save time and money by targeting relevant data, protect custodian privacy by excluding personal data such as photos, notes, emails, and health-related info (PHI), and allow custodians maximum privacy and uninterrupted use of their phones.
Using ModeOne to expedite smartphone data collection and focus on relevant custodian data decreases processing time and cost. It expedites the time-to-facts and increases document review speed and productivity to help counsel make informed decisions to more effectively direct litigation and investigation matters. Visit www.modeone.io.