Leading In-Place Early Case Assessment (ECA) E-Discovery Solution: Fusion Zeta™
Assess case merits and costs early in the litigation cycle
Many early case assessment tools fail to deliver important cost and case merit information until a legal matter is well underway. Fusion Zeta™ stands out from the pack, by allowing users to access data before collection and test different search and collection scenarios. Quick Scan estimates potential data volumes associated with custodial and non-custodial data sources, and ties into cost projections for downstream production. Deep Scan indexes and extracts text content from documents so you can filter search parameters and surface relevant information to determine the scope and merits of a case. Fusion Zeta™ closes the loop and incorporates this information into the detailed scenarios legal teams need to negotiate tighter collections and support cost shifting arguments with opposing counsel.
Full array of in-source scanning tools: Gather initial and detailed assessments of case information at the earliest point in litigation. Identify relevant data in place – without collecting.
- Quick Scan: With reasonable anticipation that a matter may arise, Quick Scan provides legal team members with a fast estimate of the amount of information associated with a given custodian or set of custodians or data sources. By summarizing this information by file type and comparing metrics from prior collections or accepted norms, legal teams can immediately get a picture of the scale and likely cost of a case if it proceeds.
- Deep Scan: Once more is known about the matter – key terms, date ranges, or evidence type, etc. – discovery team members can conduct a Deep Scan of data sources to zero in on the unique files that are most relevant to search criteria. Deep Scan performs detailed crawling, filtering and indexing prior to collection, and associates keyword scenarios with collection sizes.
- Federated Scan: Many data sources in an enterprise – such as content and document management systems, Microsoft Sharepoint™ and Exchange™ – already have built-in search capabilities. Fusion Zeta’s federated scan allows discovery teams to efficiently query multiple repositories from a single interface. Behind the scenes, Zeta transforms a query and broadcasts it using the appropriate API and syntax for each repository. Results are merged, and sorted by relevancy. When federated scans are performed against secure data sources, Fusion Zeta™ maps and passes user credentials to each underlying search engine, to ensure appropriate security is maintained.
- Avoid the unnecessary – deNISTing: The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) publishes the National Software Reference Library (NSRL). The NSRL is a comprehensive listing of all of the files known to be distributed with software packages such as Microsoft Office or Windows® 7 or XP. The listing includes the file names, sizes, and “hash” values (A “hash” value is an individual file’s digital fingerprint). Eliminating files contained in the NRSL is called “DeNISTing”, and removes the considerable cost and expense of analyzing 20,000 or more files of negligible value to e-discovery from a typical laptop.
- Transitory or Agentless Scanning: Traditionally, searching and scanning data sources involve pre-installation of an agent to perform actions on the behalf of a managing application. This installation step is performed manually for each computer, or can be automated via a centralized installation server that pushes software to other computers. Many, organizations, especially those that are large and geographically dispersed, object to pre-installation of agents because of the maintenance and support burden they incur. Fusion Zeta™ delivers two choices in scanning mechanisms, a completely agentless one resident on a server which queries devices over the network, or a transitory agent, which silently installs itself on the device, performs scans, delivers results, and then removes itself. By foregoing pre-installed agents, reviews are accelerated and maintenance costs lowered.
Fusion Zeta’s agentless technology computes MD5 hash codes for files on the data source to detect duplicates and subsequent file changes. File signature analysis scans header information to ensure a file is what it ostensibly represents itself to be. The files and metadata are indexed and shipped to the ESI Vault for search analysis by the discovery team.
- Case Scenario and Budget Development: Legal teams can quickly scan their IT infrastructure – including custodial and non-custodial data sources – estimate costs and build different collection and review scenarios with defensible budget figures. Discovery teams can efficiently sift through evidence and arrive at an informed case strategy at the outset of a matter. Fusion Zeta™ also builds scenarios to compare costs, budgets and case outcomes based on configurable criteria to set case strategy, predict costs, create budgets and prepare for 26f conferences.
- Discovery Profile Matrix Report: Provides a visual early case assessment graph to aid in cost-shifting arguments and 26f preparation.