Is Your eDiscovery Tool Missing Something?

Over the past couple of months, I have been getting an increasing volume of inquiries from law firms and corporate legal departments asking what is an acceptable  percentage of Electronically Stored Evidence (ESE) for today's advanced eDiscovery tools to miss.  My immediate response is that they shouldn't miss anything.   However, after further reflection, this is actually a pretty good question.  And, a question that today's advanced eDiscovery tool vendors need to be prepared to answer accurately and honestly with a answer that litigators and the courts can understand.
Being in the middle of the paradigm shift in eDiscovery with all of the new eDiscovery technology for Early Case Assessment (ECA), concept search, advanced transparent key word search, de-duping, near de-duping, email threading and all of the new computer forensics tools and document review tools, sometimes I forget that it may not all work as advertised.

So, although this wasn't really on my radar screen this week, I am now planning to do some research into how the eDiscovery tools are actually performing and what the percentage of missed documents might actually be.  The areas that I plan to cover are as follows:

1. What file types cannot be processed by the new Early Case Assessment (ECA) Tools?
2. What types of embedded files can and cannot be detected and unraveled by the new Early Case Assessment (ECA) Tools?
3. What What file types cannot be processed by the legacy eDiscovery tools?
4. What types of embedded files can and cannot be detected and unraveled by the legacy eDiscovery tools?
5. What type of exception reporting is provided by all of the eDiscovery tools?
6. Do these exception reports list all files that the tool could not process or could they actually miss files?
7. What methods (automated / manual) are available to address the exceptions / missed files?
8. What best practices  are available to ensure that no Electronically Stored Evidence (ESE) is missed?
9. What is the most recent case law dealing with this topic / issue (e.e. Rule 702 and others)?

I will post what I find over the next week.  And, as always, I would encourage the army of eDiscovery Bloggers to pitch in and comment on this topic as appropriate.

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