Part 1: How to Prepare for an E-Discovery Investigation

E-discovery investigations require organizations to be able to archive, retrieve, perform legal holds, and manage following the organization’s retention policy.

Early preparation of the e-discovery process can decrease risk and improve your chances of winning your case. It can help prevent clients from holding potential evidence from their lawyers. Having a good understanding of all the emails before the formal discovery process can provide confidence in the evidence before, during, and after the disposition of records.

Global email security providers like Trustifi understand the necessity to capture every inbound and outbound email message for e-discovery and privacy requirements. Trustifi’s e-discovery technology seamlessly integrates into their cloud-based advanced AI email security platform.

How Does Email Archiving Fit in Your Litigation Response Strategy?

Email archiving is a concept that has been introduced previously for organizations. Archiving emails could help or hurt organizations. Most organizations continue to develop retention policies for emails and documents to serve both causes. Some consider keeping email for an extended period as a liability, while others think the more email they hold, the better chances of a defense.

States like California passed the California Electronic Discovery Act in 2009, requiring organizations with guidelines to make electronically stored information(ESI) available to parties involved in litigation. The law provides guidelines around e-discovery and what format the original email needs to be held in.

E-Discovery and Email Archive for the Regulated Industries

E-Discovery has various applications beyond litigation. Companies operating in heavily regulated sectors like finance or energy often have to provide electronic documents during government audits or investigations, causing a system for managing such requests.

It is common for larger companies to face multiple lawsuits per year, leading to the development of formal e-discovery processes. Smaller companies may only deal with a few cases annually.

Information Governance and Management Modeling

Information governance(IG) is the foundation framework for e-discovery. How organizations store their data and how it is part of the IG strategy. Organizations facing considering e-discovery investigations should invest in an IG framework.

Electronic discovery is a process that falls under the IG framework and involves managing corporate information through technologies, processes, and people to ensure data handling for all digital evidence.

• What electronic files do we store?
• How long is our retention policy set for?
• Who has access to all the legal hold files?
• Who has permission to delete legal holds?
• Who is authorized to export email files?

These questions are critical for an organization to understand when following standard practices for e-discovery. Another core component of e-discovery is maintaining a proper chain of custody of the original and previous archival records.

Every e-discovery case has levels of record custodianship. Each level determines access, permissions, and reporting level when handling evidence.

If files become deleted or exported during litigation, the opposing legal team will want to know how allowed the removal of files is. There are four critical components within the legal hold and chain of custody process:

• Identification of the data
• Preservation of the data
• Collection Process
• Processing of the data

How organizations ensure governance around these components is essential to any legal case. If any organization cannot preserve the data or possibly collects the data unlawfully, or if the organization allows third parties to review the data with approval, this could cause the judge in the case to throw out the evidence.

What are the Steps in the E-Discovery Process?

Preparing for litigation involves several steps. Best practices in electronic discovery can help companies handle requests. A complete plan allows businesses to respond to e-discovery requests in a third of the time it takes for an insufficient response.

• Collect data: Per e-discovery rules and agreed-upon periods.
• Process: Examine the email and attachments, validating if the content is the original evidence.
• Data transfers: Data processing and chain of custody of relevant documents and emails.
• Detection and search of keywords and terms across all electronic records.
• Review Process leveraging technology-assisted review for relevant records.
• Cases ended regarding all legal matters, including the disposition of all electronic evidence.

What is the Role of the Email Security Provider in Supporting E-discovery?

Email security platforms like Trustifi have a strategic role for organizations needing to archive emails. Clients leveraging Trustifi’s advanced cloud-based platform have various adaptive control options to support their e-discovery requirements. Trustifi’s one-click management console, clients can enable the following email archiving capabilities without affecting email flow.

• Powerful Search Engine embedded with artificial intelligence.
• Retention Management: Enforcing the assigned retention period, including the minimum retention period.
• Data Redundancy – Copying data to dual cloud storage platforms.
• E-Discovery Tools to manage the process of discovery.
• Restore Deleted Emails.
• Advanced UI for the e-discovery team.
• Data Export for third-party e-discovery litigation firms.

These tools align well with data preservation, collection, and processing.

Compliance Mandates for Email Archiving

Many national and global compliance regulations require email archiving, encryption, and e-discovery.

These regulations include:

CCPA: Under the California Civil Code Section 1798.81.5, an organization or business meeting specific requirements and processes for any California resident data must implement and maintain reasonable security processes and practices appropriate for its information.

FERPA: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) does not require educational institutions to adopt specific security controls. They are necessary to protect the data with industry best practices and available functional capabilities.

GDPR: Article 25 of the GDPR requires data protection by design and default for all business (IT) processes for products and services; the law makes personal data more secure, and data leaks more unlikely. Many lawyers argue that this new law requires all emails to be encrypted by default.

Compliance Management with One-Click Compliance™

With Trustifi’s One-Click Compliance tool, administrators can easily set the platform to screen, archive, and retain emails to ensure they automatically comply with more than ten regulatory compliance guidelines.

System administrators must only select which regulations the company desires for compliance from an on-screen list. The system’s AI-powered optical character recognition filters then scan each user’s emails, automatically encrypting any outgoing messages that include sensitive data in adherence to a specific compliance regulation.

Why Trustifi?

Organizations need an adaptive and fluid cybersecurity platform to quickly adjust to the changes in attack vectors and other cyber-criminal activities. Trustifi’s email security solution is a platform designed for clients to enable swiftly more adaptive control with a single click to help them stay ahead of constant changes in the cybersecurity threat landscape.

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest-to-use and deploys email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor built to stop fileless malware, ransomware, and data exfiltration.

As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to world security regulations, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.