By John Patzakis In their excellent publication, 2023 eDiscovery Case Law in Review, Winston and Strawn, LLP, one of the top law firms in the US, highlights the challenges legal and eDiscovery professionals face with modern attachments. Modern attachments, also known as hyperlinks, are URL pointers that link to files or emails stored in another location. They are commonly found in Microsoft 365 Mail and Teams. Winston and Strawn reports that “[r]equesting parties are increasingly sophisticated about this issue given the proliferation of Microsoft 365…and thus we have noted an uptick in reques ..read more

By John Patzakis and Chas Meier eDiscovery can be an expensive and time-consuming process when traditional data collection methods are employed. With legacy processes, it can take weeks for electronically stored information (ESI) collections to finally end up in review. Time is money, and utilizing dated processes can dramatically increase costs as well as risk. One of the biggest drivers of excessive eDiscovery costs is over-collection of irrelevant or unnecessary information. This in turn leads to a larger amount of data entering the processing and initial review funnel. In fact, old school ..read more

By John Patzakis and Charles Meier CIOs and legal and compliance executives often aspire to implement information governance programs like defensible deletion, data migration, and data audits to detect risks and remediate non-compliance. However, without an actual and scalable technology platform to effectuate these goals, those aspirations remain just that. Many CIOs attempt to address this daunting challenge by migrating disparate data from around the global enterprise into a central location. However, they quickly find that such attempts to “boil the ocean” are extremely expensive, highly ..read more

By John Patzakis Earlier this year, X1 launched MS 365 data connectors to our X1 Enterprise Collect platform to provide a previously unmet critical need for enterprises to conduct cost-efficient yet highly scalable eDiscovery search and collections of MS 365 data. The response has been tremendous, with X1 seeing record demand. This is because X1 Enterprise Collect provides users the unique ability to search and collect MS 365 data in-place, in a targeted and iterative manner, at speeds and throughput far exceeding other tools, including Microsoft Purview Premium. And now, X1 has released X1 E ..read more

By John Patzakis As we have mentioned many times, nearly every litigation matter involves social media evidence. If your case does not feature such important evidence, it is likely because you are not looking for it. By analogy, Taylor Swift’s music is all around us, but you won’t hear it unless you tune into it on the radio or your streaming music site of choice. Similarly, you have put some effort to tune into the torrential rivers of social media evidence. To illustrate this point, we sought to identify some metrics reflecting the ubiquity of social media evidence in litigation matters. Wh ..read more

By John Patzakis The Best Evidence Rule, as codified in Federal Rule of Evidence 1002, provides that an original writing, recording, or photograph is required to prove the contents of the document. This rule was formulated in a paper document dominated era, and aimed to prevent fraud and inaccuracies that could arise from secondary or duplicate evidence. However, the prevalence of electronically stored information (“ESI”) prompted exceptions to this rule when it comes to computer-generated evidence. Specifically, FRE 1001(d) was drafted to provide clarification for how ESI was to be treated u ..read more

By John Patzakis Recently, a federal district court in Ohio issued a ruling concerning an eDiscovery dispute involving both Teams and Slack, Lubrizol Corp. v. IBM Corp., No. 1:21-CV-00870-DAR (N.D. Ohio May 15, 2023). This decision is important as it provides and serves as a template and guidepost on how to collect and produce messages from MS Teams, a challenge which many litigants are struggling with today. This case involves a breach of contract claim where plaintiff Lubrizol corporation, a major chemical manufacturer, purchased an SAP ERP system, and then hired IBM to implement the enterpr ..read more

By John Patzakis Social media is a critical source of relevant evidence in nearly every legal matter. However, most tools collect such evidence using print/screenshot methods that generate flat file images that cannot be effectively displayed and analyzed in review platforms. Law firms and other litigants faced a critical but previously unmet requirement for social media data to be displayed and reviewed in Relativity in its native format and parsed so that each individual Facebook post, Tweet or Instagram is displayed as a record in Relativity, with its own associated metadata, photos, index ..read more

By John Patzakis Greg Buckles of the eDJ, arguably the top independent eDiscovery industry analyst, penned an important article outlining X1’s support for MS 365 data sources within the X1 Enterprise Collect platform and how it even surpasses in many respects Microsoft’s own Premium Purview services. In his post, Buckles first listed X1’s “top level take-aways” as follows: • X1’s Teams support targets individual custodians and specific messaging threads, displacing any need to mass download Teams chats and channels. o X1 collects and searches Teams content directly without relying on the Micro ..read more

By John Patzakis Two months ago, X1 launched version 7 of our X1 Social Discovery social media and web collections solution. This major upgrade features a new cutting-edge Instagram connector, along with our revamped Facebook support, where all our users now have native post-level collection and parsing to ensure accuracy, key metadata collection, court authentication, and evidentiary completeness of the collected data. As stated by X1 CEO Larry Gill: “Nothing short of those capabilities is acceptable and that is why I can confidently say that X1 Social Discovery is the only solution in the i ..read more