Digital Reef Provides Comprehensive eDiscovery and File Governance
by Bill Ives
Digital Reef provides scalable and open software for eDiscovery and digital information governance. It addresses the identifying, analyzing, collecting, and reviewing of electronic documents in place within the enterprise. I spoke with David Butler of Digital Reef about changes in the field and their most recent moves.
Digital Reef looks at eDiscovery in a broader sense and includes it as part of information governance. This moves the coverage of eDiscovery beyond traditional reactive legal roles to encompass compliance and more proactive legal strategies. To support these moves Digital Reef provides a platform that can be configured based on corporate policies. For example, it can help determine if a recent SharePoint implementation conforms to records compliance requirements. In this sense eDiscovery can go across the organization and not be confined to a single legal issue.
Digital Reef creates a Virtual Governance Warehouse (VGW) to support the three stages active file governance: visibility, insight, and control. You can understand and track all file sources and content across the enterprise, apply analytic metadata to create a relevant structure to the content, and then more easily apply control measures for legal and compliance needs. The Data Collection Report shown below supports the visibility stage.
VGW not only discovers and analyzes unstructured content; it makes that information actionable with rich governance control services. File governance actions can be fully automated using the VGW ActionFlow™ policy service, as shown below by the Action Flow Editor and Action Flow Monitor, respectively. Policies can be scheduled to run daily, weekly or monthly, or even executed on-demand.
Digital Reef is also partnering with other firms to address the front and back ends of legal process. It integrates with Exterro Fusion for legal hold notifications. After Digital Reef has gotten the content house in order, users can now generate and automatically load native exports and files for use with review platforms such as kCura Relativity.
David also discussed their new Portable Collections capability that enables users to quickly create large case-specific portable matters that can be easily distributed between eDiscovery data centers of legal service providers, enterprise companies and law firms. The Digital Reef eDiscovery Portable Collections feature creates a “package matter” containing virtual indexes, complete search meta-data and tags, analytic collections and views, and selected files within a case. This package may then be archived and restored later or moved into another Digital Reef environment for continued processing and review. Enterprise companies can now better partner and collaborate with legal service providers to establish proactive early case assessments (ECA) and establish risk strategies without costly infrastructure and expertise investments. Law firms benefit by having review-ready collections.
Another recent Digital Reef partnership is with ViON Corporation, a specialist in designing, delivering and maintaining storage and server solutions to government and enterprise data centers. ViON File Services allow firms to have a comprehensive view into the files currently residing in their network attached storage (NAS) appliances and more intelligently migrate massive collections of unstructured files. The joint ViON and Digital Reef offering is a pre-configured appliance combining hardware, software and training/implementation services.
ViON File Services approaches NAS migrations using three processes: file discovery, file management and file migration. During the discovery phase, companies can see what files are stored, their type, when they’ve been accessed and if there are duplicates. There can be a lot of heavy lifting during legal and compliance activities with the massive amount of content handled during eDiscovery so this partnership can make these processes more efficient.
With rapidly expanding volumes of content through social media and the increasing higher bandwidths increased use of formats such as digital video, legal costs have the potential to explode. The solutions that Digital Reef bring to the market have the capacity to mitigate this risk. It seems to be a growth market and I like their approach.
