If you are a U.S.-based IT or litigation support professional, have you ever received an e-mail message that ended like this: “And there are three people in the Munich office”? If you have not, you may very well receive such a message within the next few months. This article provides practical advice for European electronic discovery projects for litigation support and IT professionals.

Collection

From a technical perspective, there is little difference between collecting electronic documents in the U.S. and within the EU. Products such as EnCase can be used to create either a physical (bit-by-bit) or logical (file-by-file) collection of a hard drive. The primary differences are typically cultural. In some EU countries, a representative from the client’s HR department, the local Works Council, the government or all three may be present while data collection is performed. In many EU countries, the collection schedule must be planned for normal business hours. Holidays, evening and weekend access typically must be scheduled far in advance — and may not even be permitted depending on the country. This reality limits the time window for data collection to about six useful hours per day. A key to improving collection efficiency begins early in the planning process. A project manager from the legal team must work with the client to identify all IT staff who may be necessary to support a collection effort.

Unicode Processing

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