With the amount of data circulated within a corporation, the process of locating and storing information required by the discovery process is often costly and time consuming. Fortunately, hundreds of companies offer services designed to assist with the electronic discovery process. From the use of specialized hardware and software that forensically analyzes and collects data, to automated document review, there's really no need for legal department to go it alone in the face of a major discovery project.

Increasingly, though, the amount of information is so prodigious that it can become difficult to confirm all of the relevant information has been accounted for, especially with the advent of Big Data. Big Data harvests massive volumes of information and used them to yield predictive reasoning that helps a company or person make a more informed decision. While Big Data can offer an improved decision making process, it also means that exponentially larger stores of information are being housed and can be scattered over hundreds of devices. This makes the collection process even more difficult.

To combat this, Kroll Ontrack, one of the many providers of e-discovery software, has announced that it will become one of the first providers to conduct its service from the cloud. ediscovery.com, as it will be known, will offer legal departments a means to automate their discovery process more proactively, rather than treating each discovery process as a standalone incident.

“Today, e-discovery projects are managed as individual, one-off events, where the people, processes and technologies often change from project to project, fueling unpredictable costs and results,” said Dean Hager, Kroll Ontrack's president and CEO. “Because corporations are often addressing multiple ediscovery matters simultaneously from the same data set, eDiscovery should be managed as an ongoing business process continuously improving with each new matter.”

The cloud offering will be broken down into three services: Portfolio Management, Collect and Review. Users will be able to log into these tools via an interactive online dashboard that will offer pertinent status updates and analysis as the project goes along. Because users will pay on a subscription basis, ediscovery.com will operate in an always on fashion, allowing legal departments to update add new items and locations to be scoured for pertinent data as they go.

The application and service model has provided advantages to many other industries and software types, here's hoping that the inclusion of e-discovery software in the stable will provide tangible benefits for law departments.

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