Back to main story: Sloppy e-discovery can cost you millions

Early warning system. Create a standardized way to alert business and IT staff to pending litigation. This ensures that electronic information relevant to the litigation is collected and preserved within a reasonable time frame via a litigation hold.

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Comprehensive search. Search tools should find all relevant electronic files, including e-mail, documents, PDFs, blogs, wikis and, in some cases, voice mail and video. Anything that's electronically stored and relevant is subject to the discovery process.

Culling and deduplication. Your tools should be able not only to search but also to return only the most relevant hits through various context-sensitive policies and deduplication. This ensures that attorneys don't spend their time, as well as the company's money, looking at the same e-mail or document multiple times.

Litigation hold. The tools should let you build a policy for the collection and preservation of discoverable electronically stored information (ESI). The best tools have audit trails to prevent tampering or spoliation, that is, the alteration of the ESI or its metadata. The tools also should have a mechanism for releasing the litigation hold once the suit has ended.

Destruction policy. Proactive tools let users build policies for destroying ESI that no longer has a business function or is no longer subject to a lawsuit or other regulation. Data retained unnecessarily could prove a liability should another lawsuit rise, because that data then would be discoverable.

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