The American Lawyer Media publication Legaltech News quoted McGuireWoods partner Jill Crawley Griset in a March 6, 2024, story on the emergence of “e-discovery by design,” which allows professionals to preserve, collect and produce evidence within third-party applications that organizations use most.
Some of the biggest providers of enterprise applications are adding e-discovery capabilities into their offerings, Legaltech News reported. But e-discovery professionals are divided on how comprehensive the tools are. Providers tend to only cover a few of the steps on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, according to the story.
“When they’re trying to put this capability into an application, it’s not necessarily going to be as robust as an e-discovery tool, but I think it is something that people are looking at because it saves so much money,” said Griset, who co-directs McGuireWoods’ discovery counsel services group and manages a team of discovery attorneys at the firm’s Charlotte, North Carolina, e-discovery site.
“If you can run a search for documents on the tool itself, and then only export a subset and send that to your vendor, that’s going to be much cheaper,” she said.
Griset noted that many popular tools don’t have discovery capabilities and numerous applications, such as those installed on personal devices, make it difficult to collect and retrieve data. The task will become more difficult as new applications are developed and updates are made to existing platforms.
“It’s totally impossible and it’s getting more and more impossible,” Griset said.