eDiscovery is an important part of your business strategy, it allows you to locate, access, search and produce electronic data for litigation, audits or records requests. However, if you aren’t doing it right, it is pointless. One thing that will help with every organization's eDiscovery strategy is something many ignore...archiving email.

Even though social media and mobile communication have become popular ways to communicate, email continues to be the most popular communication system. According to the Radicati Group, email usage continues to grow: “In 2017, the number of worldwide email users will top 3.7 billion. By the end of 2021, the number of worldwide email users will be over 4.1 billion. Approximately half of the worldwide population uses email in 2017”. Furthermore, Radicati found that in 2017 there will be 120 Billion business emails sent per day and by 2019 there will be roughly 130 Billion, at a growth of about 3% per year.



The above table shows that email is still critical to your business and will continue to be so for years to come. Since email is here to stay and is critical for your organization, what do you do with all of that email? How do you manage your email data? How do you have oversight on email? And what about eDiscovery? How do you perform eDiscovery and sift through your organization’s email?

eDiscovery Explained


Electronic discovery (also called e-discovery or eDiscovery) is a process where electronic data (including email) is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. eDiscovery is generally used for litigation, however, it can be used for audits, internal investigations, regulatory compliance, or other situations where information is sought.

The below image is an overview of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). This model was developed in May 2006, in response to the relatively few standards and lack of generally accepted guidelines for the process of eDiscovery. This model will help you ensure that you have good eDiscovery practices.



eDiscovery on Email Systems

Whether you use GroupWise, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Gmail, and IBM Notes you need to be able to access all business email communication. However, all email systems have an inherent flaw -- there is no central access to all email and email can be spread throughout your organization, whether that is on email servers, or saved on a user's desktop or laptop as a PST or personal archive. In other words, email systems do not make for easy eDiscovery. If you are ever involved in litigation, or a regulatory audit, performing eDiscovery, just by relying on your email system, is difficult at best and may be impossible. And, as shown in a recent Osterman Research study, the ability to perform eDiscovery on email is nearly as important as the ability to satisfy regulatory data retention obligations and the ability to manage email storage more effectively.



This survey also shows that even though most viewed eDiscovery as important, many are not prepared.



As you can see, most agree that it is imperative that you are able to perform eDiscovery for your business email.

How Email Archiving Helps with eDiscovery

Email archiving is an important part of eDiscovery and a good email archiving solution will provide you with the tools to easily and accurately perform eDiscovery. The EDRM (as referenced in the diagram above), shows that collection, preservation, processing, review, analysis, production, and presentation are all essential elements to eDiscovery. Email archiving can assist with all of those elements. And email archiving has other benefits, apart from eDiscovery, including reducing storage on your “live” email servers, increasing IT and end user productivity, and enabling regulatory compliance. In fact, there is a great blog post about the benefits of archiving and the top reasons to archive email. Check out: “Email Archiving Benefits: Top 5 Reasons to Archive Email”

A good email archiving solution will store all email, attachments, appointments, calendar items, tasks, and folders in one central location that helps with the collection, preservation, and processing portion of eDiscovery. In other words, all email information that you need for eDiscovery is in your email archive, all you have to do is get that data out. There are many tools on the market to help you perform eDiscovery on your email archive, such as Micro Focus eDiscovery. And there are even email archiving solutions, like Micro Focus Retain, that give you built-in eDiscovery tools.

How to Perform eDiscovery on Your Email System

To have a good eDiscovery strategy you need to able to locate, access, and search all of your archived email data from one central archive (review, analysis, and production). The data needs to be easy to access and your searches need to be fast. You don’t want to be in a situation where it takes days or months to access your data, nor do you want to rely on an outside party to perform eDiscovery for you. eDiscovery tools need to allow you to search the entire email archive based on keywords, sender, recipient, domain, mailbox, user, REGEX terms, attachment name, message content, date range, tags, and other item types. A good set of eDiscovery tools will allow you to create tags for email messages and search those tags. eDiscovery tools have to allow you to export data to common formats, such as PST or PDF (production and presentation). And, of course, to be able to have complete eDiscovery, you need to be able to redact information that should not be part of the discovery request, such as personal, sensitive or private information (presentation).

Micro Focus Retain Unified Archiving and Micro Focus eDiscovery

Micro Focus offers a solution with built-in eDiscovery tools called Retain. Retain includes built-in eDiscovery tools, at no additional cost. These tools allow organizations to easily place litigation holds, print, forward, save, redact, strikeout, and export message data. Retain exports data to PST, PDF or stand-alone portable archive viewer formats. The portable archive is fully indexed, searchable, and includes a table of contents for quick browsing. Specific named users can be given rights-based access to the entire archive (administrators, managers, human resources, legal teams, etc.), and end-users can access their personal archive to browse, forward, and restore archived items.

Micro Focus also offers a complete eDiscovery solution, Micro Focus eDiscovery. This solution is the industry’s most complete solution for responding to legal matters and investigations. With a wide range of features built into a single electronic discovery software application—including data processing, ECA, clustering, visual analytics, and Technology Assisted Review—you can perform tasks from identification through production, without the added risk and cost of switching applications at various EDRM stages.

Next Steps

Start performing eDiscovery today! If you need an archiving solution that includes eDiscovery, be sure to check out Retain. Get your price quote here:



If you need to perform eDiscovery on your current archive, take a look at Micro Focus eDiscovery https://software.microfocus.com/en-us/software/ediscovery-software

Download the Osterman Research Whitepaper “Key Issues in eDiscovery”