Mastery over eDiscovery, the legal discovery process in which relevant electronically stored information is identified, preserved, collected, processed, reviewed and produced between parties in a legal proceeding, is becoming a crucial competency for the modern practice of law. If we zoom out to a 30,000-foot view, eDiscovery is really just the analysis of the substance and contents of human communications through electronic means.

Where email has been the dominant platform for electronic conversations, in just a few years, platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Bloomberg, and WhatsApp have become increasingly popular. The recent mass movement to remote work has increased that usage exponentially. More than 500,000 organizations and hundreds of millions of individuals now use collaboration platforms, messaging apps and ticketing systems to communicate. With new applications always in development, the scope of what’s fair game in discovery grows wider every day. This presents a formidable challenge for legal professionals who are tasked with collecting, organizing and making sense of these complex, varied data formats.

That said, it is easy to get lost in the technical weeds when approaching eDiscovery too granularly, focusing on data types and documents as opposed to the totality of communications and the legal narrative they support. If we focus too narrowly, we can miss the big picture.

It can be very intimidating to approach communication analysis broadly when faced with electronic conversations between hundreds or thousands of custodians across dozens of platforms. The traditional approach has been to immediately cull the noise by reducing data volumes into more manageable review sets.

Data visualizations can play an integral role in seeing and understanding communication networks and relationships that can help inform the creation of search terms and review and production strategies.

CDS Vision provides a dedicated “Communications Analysis” dashboard to explore custodian’s electronic interactions and relationships. Reveal who is talking to whom, how often, and what they’re talking about. Find and focus on the custodians and conversations at the heart of your matter.  Vision Communications Analysis provides a smart and efficient way to identify key custodians, build more targeted search terms, remove noise and streamline review.

Read Part 5 of our blog series on Demystifying eDiscovery for Greater Productivity.