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Table of Contents

• What is Electronic Discovery Software?
• What are the common features of Electronic Discovery Software?
• What are the benefits of Electronic Discovery Software?
• How much does Electronic Discovery Software cost?
• Key considerations when purchasing Electronic Discovery Software

What is Electronic Discovery Software?

Electronic Discovery Software, also known as eDiscovery software, enables legal professionals to retrieve relevant information on cases or clients from email, public folders, and documents. It achieves this by performing searches across headers, body text, and file attachments.

Electronic discovery software manages, organizes, and analyzes electronic documents and data during litigation, investigation, regulatory compliance, and other legal proceedings. This saves time when handling large data volumes and ensures accurate search and retrieval, maintaining the authenticity of evidence during legal proceedings. The tool also creates a centralized directory for all legal documents to ensure appropriate data storage and security governance.

What are the common features of Electronic Discovery Software?

• Dashboard: Visualize key metrics and statistics related to the eDiscovery process. This includes charts, graphs, and diagrams that show the volume of documents, data sources, processing status, review progress, and other metrics.
• Document classification: Sort and organize relevant documents into categories based on their content, metadata, or context to legal proceedings.
• Keyword search: Search through a large number of emails, text files, spreadsheets, and other digital records to identify and retrieve specific information using key terms that are relevant to an investigation or research.
• Comments and notes: Use comments and notes to annotate and manage shared documents during the review and eDiscovery process. The feature allows adding insights, asking questions, or providing observations to the reviewed documents.
• Optical character recognition (OCR): Convert scanned document images into machine-readable text. This process involves analyzing the images for characters, letters, and words and converting them into editable and searchable text.

What are the benefits of Electronic Discovery Software?

● Facilitates early case assessment: An eDiscovery solution replaces the manual document discovery process from physical files or disparate digital sources with a searchable and shareable database. This reduces the research time and allows users to quickly access reference relevant data required during case investigation and provide on-time resolution.

● Enhances data governance: eDiscovery tool helps ensure compliance with state and federal rules regarding electronic data storage and sharing. For example, the audit trail feature tracks real-time user activity and maintains document versions to share with relevant clients without compromising its integrity.

● Automates data mapping and classification: With automated data mapping and classification, an eDiscovery platform helps store, manage, and prioritize electronic data for litigation, regulatory compliance, and investigations. The mapping and classification are done based on data sources and relevance to the legal proceedings. This data processing provides a clear overview of the legal team’s data structure, which is crucial for eDiscovery planning and execution.

How much does Electronic Discovery Software cost?

Most electronic discovery software products on the market are priced “per user and per month,” and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $2 to $250+*. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as data visualization and advanced user management.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of August 10, 2023.

Key considerations when purchasing Electronic Discovery software

● Assess electronic document conversion capabilities: An ideal electronic discovery tool should support multi-format files and enable converting one form to another, such as a doc file to PDF or MP4 to MP3. Look for eDiscovery solutions that support file formats mostly used by the business to collect, store, analyze, and share data.

● Evaluate the software scalability: Legal firms have a never-ending influx of data that increases over time. That being said, the selected eDiscovery software should increase the document processing and storing capacity based on the data load without significantly degrading the performance and efficiency of work.

● Identify the sources to capture data: Data for legal proceedings can be captured from emails, text files, images, and database management systems. This makes it essential to identify the supported data sources and ways of capturing data, including automatic classification and OCRs offered by eDiscovery software.