eTera consulting

• Are you an Outside Counsel needing to respond accurately and quickly to a government inquiry?
• Are you a Corporate Legal Department having difficulty identifying and preserving sharepoint data subject to a litigation hold?
• Are you a Risk Manager trying  to identify and remediate potential Personal Identification Information  (PII) exposure that exists in your corporate network?
• Are  you an IT department manager trying to claim back hard drive space but need to be sure the deletions are defensible? 

Challenges

• Identifying potentially relevant ESI across enterprise
• Over collecting potential ESI
• Need to analyze massive volumes of unstructured data in a short time period
• New data sources, sharepoint, email archiving, virtualization, mobile devices

Benefits

• Proactive Data Analysis
  • Data is analyzed on location, in the wild, on live data without interruption to your normal daily operations
• Early Data Reduction
  • Electronic Discovery: data is filtered and reduced prior to collection resulting in less downstream data processing and review = potential 50% cost savings
• Competitive Advantage
  • Early Data Analytics give you fast insight into the data to make better decisions
• No Capital Investment
  • Our SWAT team approach can be ready to go within 48 hours

Early Information Assessment (EIA) is eTERA’s cross-discipline methodology and service for bridging the data responsibility overlaps and gaps between Legal, IT and Compliance stakeholders. Our Early Information Assessment service delivers a proactive, data analytics approach to integrating the management of corporate information as it relates to: 

• Data Mapping
• Government Investigations
• Litigation Hold
• Electronic Discovery
• Regulatory compliance
• Records management
• IT Data maintenance

As the volume and complexity of data continues to grow exponentially within the enterprise, so do the risks and costs associated with managing it. For most companies, this risk is very difficult to quantify efficiently, and management often crosses the internal borders between Legal, Compliance and Information Technology. 

Along with the volume of data, the variety of data sources is increasing as well. While eMail and common network file shares still represent a large percentage the unstructured data; the advent of document management systems such as SharePoint, eMail archiving systems, virtualization, workstations, mobile devices, and cloud-based systems creates an intricate landscape to manage. 

Legal

EIA allows counsel to analyze potentially responsive data in its native state, as it exists on the client server.   Benefits include: 

• No interruption to daily operations normally required to collect custodial data
• Analyze and reduce data PRIOR to collections
• Early data analytics and reduction = significant downstream e discovery cost savings
• Data topology maps and reports provide for productive Meet & Confer conferences and competitive advantage when negotiating  with opposing counsel
• Legally defensible

Risk

EIA allows risk and records managers to perform meaningful data analysis on massive amounts of unstructured data. 

Data that is identified as posing a risk to the organization can be acted upon as needed. In some instances this may be as simple as moving it to a more secure location or deleting non-essential or redundant records. Other times it may mean implementation of structured data retention policies and management over how, why and where business records are created and held. However, once there is a clear understanding of the data, the ongoing enforcement of policies and procedures becomes much simpler.

IT

EIA provides the IT Department with a true “plug and play” application that works on “data in the wild” without interfering with employee normal daily functions.

Reclaiming Your Space

The "storage is cheap" mantra is no longer a valid claim within the enterprise. While physical disk space may not cost much per gigabyte, the actual cost of managing that storage infrastructure is much greater. When you consider that there is often a significant percentage of data that is outside of retention policies, duplicative, or is of a non-business nature, there are plenty of opportunities to reduce the costs and risks associated with maintaining that data. Policies can easily be applied to the data that delete or archive data and records that are no longer required for business or regulatory reasons.

To find out more about how it works, please email John Rubens at jrubens@eteraconsulting.com or call 202.349.0177.