IBM Intros eDiscovery Manager

IBM (News - Alert) has launched a new software solution, eDiscovery Manager, designed to help enterprises retrieve electronically stored information in the case of legal challenges.

 

According to IBM officials, eDiscovery will help clients to automate the collecting, searching and classifying critical information across multiple content sources, while ensuring security and the ability to track changes are not compromised. The eDiscovery Manager is part of IBM’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite of products.

 

“E-discovery” or “rediscovery” are terms used to refer to the process of searching electronic data to locate specific information for use as evidence in legal cases. E-discovery can be carried out offline on a single computer or over a network.

 

Solutions like IBM’s eDiscovery Manager are acquiring more importance since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December. The new amendments call for companies to preserve records of employees’ electronic communications be it email, documents, images, calendar files, databases, spreadsheets, audio files, Web site logs, VoIP calls, etc. These records are to be presented as evidence if the company is ever involved in civil litigation in federal court.

 

IBM’s eDiscovery Manager is a component of the IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control, a combination of software, hardware and services that let enterprises achieve, sustain and prove compliance with multiple legal and compliance mandates.

 

Aaron Brown, program director of IBM Content Discovery, was quoted in an InternetNews.com report saying that eDiscovery Manager uses IBM's e-mail archiving solutions and leverages the vendor's ECM repositories, so that it "controls information at its source when it is created.”

 

The eDiscovery Manager works with IBM's Classification Module and content management repository while providing an easy-to-use interface for clients, Brown added.

 

It supports IBM's broader Information Governance strategy, which helps clients define, enforce and monitor policies related to the control and quality of information. IBM’s eDiscovery Manager runs on Windows and AIX, IBM's version of UNIX. IBM is moving AIX to open source.

 

Brown said in the report that functions like deletion policies and accurate logs of access and searches have been inbuilt into eDiscovery Manager. Explaining how the software worked, company sources said that when the legal department needs information relating to a case, they provide the parameters such as the subject, a range of dates, and keywords to the IT department, which then conducts a search using eDiscovery Manager's search-based interface.

 

The product collects relevant information and puts a litigation hold on it, which marks that information as undeletable. The IT department checks the information gathered and then exports it to the legal department.

 

Pointing out that the point solutions or outsourced third-party solutions are expensive and inadequate in the long run, Brown said in the report, "We let you handle capture, retention, archiving and content management to manage your content proactively because the information has already been retained, classified and managed."

IBM is one of the few vendors that can offer an enterprise-class solution for eDiscovery, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com in the report.  Together with other products in IBM's ECM suite, eDiscovery Manager lets enterprises sort, classify and archive information for easy retrieval. "This is not the end application for the legal team, we're just focused on proactive management and collecting and identifying the information," Brown explained.