Any eDiscovery practitioner will tell you that the changes in data sources and types on our cases have been vast over the past two years. We are now often dealing with multimodal communications where a conversation starts in email, switches to IM chat and then WhatsApp or SMS. We also have to consider alternative forms of communications such as video meetings and calls where conversations that would have previously been undiscoverable as they would have happened in person, are now there and often rich data sources.

This all brings around a change in the way that we process and present data to case teams. As we now are able to piece back together chains of events more completely, our roles are aligning with the case teams and their investigations rather then being support to them. 

What has been evident over the past two years is that the eDiscovery solutions providers have had to change the way that they handle these data types and working with the practitioners, develop tools and workflows to handle these more complex cases. 

We have seen improvements in the way mobile data is presented, reviewed and produced. Turning a previously auxiliary data source - used to see who people were talking to and not necessarily what they were saying or how that impacted the wider disclosure exercise - into a key source of information with production of short segments of much larger chats being disclosable in a proportionate way.

Instant messenger chats can now be processed and reviewed in a way that makes it simple to work through for reviewers and again, production is much more achievable without the need for mass redactions or recreating parts of IM logs - both of which I have seen done in the past.

Unfortunately though, not all eDiscovery solutions are working at the same speed and what is possible for one provider may not be for another. This is why having a strong network of eDiscovery professionals is essential. "Consultant first" is an approach that holds a lot of weight in our world as a Consultant will work with you to meet any problems head on and overcome them. They are the people who spend time doing research into the new issues we are all seeing and the ones you would want by your side if you ever encounter them.

I firmly believe that the days of button clicking eDiscovery are behind us and we need to ensure we can all work with the data we see, regardless of whether our software solutions have caught up yet!