Editor's note: Always check laws relating to privacy before indexing or searching content located outside the U.S.

If you haven't heard by now, the amount of data in E-Discovery is getting bigger and bigger. And just like the weight loss industry, the solutions for reducing this bulk come in many varieties. The best solution is always a balanced, proactive program that focuses on people, processes and technology in the right proportions for your overall goals.

This article looks at some promising technology solutions for reducing bulk upstream in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model. A commonly accepted industry statistic is that 70 percent of the cost of discovery is in the review stage, so anything you can do to reduce the bulk before that time - in a safe and defensible manner - is healthier for everyone.

What's that? You say you haven't heard of this "EDRM" yet? The complete story on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model is at www.edrm.net In addition to the creation of helpful standards and guidelines, the EDRM serves as a helpful common language in E-Discovery discussions. We'll use it to talk about the tools reviewed for this article and where they may help you reduce bulk at each stage of the EDRM.

Visit www.edrm.net to learn more about the diagram at right (its use is governed by the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States, see creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us).

In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, the revised FRCP, and the "don't let this happen to you" notable cases involving E-Discovery, many corporations have been improving their information management efforts. Though this is key to long-term control over E-Discovery costs and risk management, this article will focus more on identification.

Basically, identification is understanding where all the potentially relevant data that relates to the dispute or investigation can be found and whether it's accessible or not. Though that sounds simple, it's often one of the more difficult parts of discovery. In addition to interviewing the custodians, there are two ways to get at this data: proactive indexing and crawling.

Proactive indexing falls into the realm of information management and involves actively indexing all data so you can search and identify it easily. Of the systems that do this, Mimosa Systems(www.mimosasystems.com) NearPoint TSO is tailored well to the EDRM. With it, you can easily find the data you're looking for, filtering by key words, date ranges, custodians and more. Because the index is already built, you can quickly perform many later stage steps such as preservation, collection, analysis and processing (mainly culling and deduplication), and even first-pass review

If you're like most people, you have to rely on custodian interviews and IT staff to manually pinpoint the location of the data you're looking for - no small task. This is where systems that employ crawlers come into play. One such solution is by Kazeon(www.kazeon.com) and is called the E-Discovery Suite. What a crawler does is literally crawl your network and remote users, looking for the data parameters you've provided. Less sophisticated systems employ agents, which are small, executable files deployed to each place you want to crawl. Agentless crawlers, such as those employed by Kazeon, don't require this step so you can remotely crawl a desktop anywhere to identify the data you need without having to install a program there first. Once you've identified it, you can index in place, preserve the data in a litigation hold, collect it when needed, process it and perform detailed analytics and first-pass review. Because you're indexing in place, the time it takes to process is minimal and collection can be streamlined, even if you've preserved broadly. Deploying the Kazeon system is simple and generally takes 30 minutes or less.

If you're in a corporate legal setting, one of the biggest headaches is implementing and enforcing litigation holds; the heart of preservation. Fortunately, technology exists to help make things easier when the people and processes alone aren't enough.

One of the best systems for managing preservation and most every other phase of the EDRM is Exterro's Fusion(www.exterro.com). It has a simple yet sophisticated interface to help implement litigation holds, plus detailed cost modeling and case assessment analytics. They've created integrations with many other packages for matter management and review, so you can tap their powerful reporting features to see detailed case metrics and even manage an RFP process.

When it comes to collection, there are a number of existing tools but a newer offering gaining popularity is WorkProducts' MatterSpace(www.workproducts.com). It was built from the ground up with the EDRM in mind and offers a cost-effective solution for everything from identification through first-pass review. It's particularly good at agentless crawling to identify, preserve and collect data, even for remote custodians and plug-in devices such as USB drives. Because of its versatility and range, it's good for law firms, corporations or service providers looking for an all-in-one system.

Making sense of the data you have, before it's been processed, is one of the best uses of analysis. The current buzzphrase for analysis done in this way is "early case assessment," or ECA. ECA can help you frame costs for the matter, provide the ammo you need to argue burden, and provide other useful insights for staging reviews and making other decisions.

A tool gaining favor from both law firms and service providers is earlyCASE(www.earlycase.com). It provides ECA and cost estimation at a low price: free! It's Web-based, and you can pump as much data as you'd like through it in one or multiple sessions. If you upgrade to the pro version, it also provides hashing, deduplication, and more robust reporting. It's simple and does what it does well. It's worth looking at if you want to know more about your data without making a large investment.

As for review, this is a personal preference and case teams have their favorites. For reducing bulk, an effective route is first-pass review with the resulting tags and data pushed into the review tool of choice. The Kazeon, MatterSpace and Mimosa systems all have decent tools for first-pass review. You can search, filter and tag documents singly and in bulk. E-mail threads are represented in each of these products and Kazeon also includes conceptual searching, while MatterSpace uses the Coveo engine for concept and clustering. All these systems allow you to export the processed data complete with the metadata, hashing and tags intact.

Like picking the right diet for your body type and goals, choosing the right front-end EDRM tool can be tricky. Don't just follow the fads or hype. Dig deeper to determine if the solution can do what it promises. In light of the recent Victor Stanley and O'Keefe decisions, ask if the search engine has been tested for accuracy and has been certified for use relative to Federal Rule of Evidence 502. Remember the people and process side of things and find out about their customer base (100 percent referenceable?) and support.

Determining your needs is important, too. If you're in a corporate legal environment and litigation holds are your biggest pain, consider Exterro. If you need that plus the detailed analytics, crawling, collection, processing and first-pass review, the Kazeon or MatterSpace systems are a better choice. Implementing a full-scale archiving system? Check out Mimosa. Many law firms are also considering the Exterro, Kazeon and MatterSpace systems for large matters because of the efficiencies they create before review and ease of deployment.

Richard Melville, director of IS and litigation support veteran at Barris Sott Denn & Driker PLLC in Detroit, puts it this way:

"In litigation these days, law firms are under pressure to reduce costs or even operate as a profit center. To be successful, you need to deploy good technology that's proven and defensible backed by good people and smart processes. At BSDD, we are not afraid to re-examine our processes and investigate new tools that will improve efficiencies. Leveraging technology allows us to compete with larger firms and improve our bottom line while keeping client costs down."

The same diet won't work for everyone, just as the same front-end EDRM tool isn't right for every firm. Decide what's most important to you, look at how it can fit into your overall plans, and get started reducing the bulk.