The Data Processing phase begins immediately after vdiscovery professionals have collected all electronically stored information. This is the stage in which the raw data is converted into a format that can be made available on a review platform for document review. vdiscovery has data processing systems which combine millions of tiff documents and metadata of loaded files on a routine basis. vdiscovery will restore and extract the forensically collected data and provide a basic file listing of the imaged drive, allowing our clients to focus on specific file types. Once completed, irrelevant or useless data is culled, and the relevant data moves on to be analyzed for the needs of the case.

vdiscovery provides a detailed Statement of Services which sets forth all requirements and specifications to be used during the processing of data. We filter the data by type, custodian, date and/or keywords, helping to reduce the overall size and scope of your dataset. vdiscovery will de-duplicate the data using widely accepted MD-5 and SHA-1 hash values, allowing you to save valuable time and prevent our clients from reviewing the same documents over and over again.

Metadata allows our professionals to better manage the components of a document or file. These components can be changed or lost when a file is mishandled electronically and removed completely if a file is printed to paper. Once metadata has been collected, from both the operating system and software applications, vdiscovery will determine relationships betweens the files or documents by filtering the data by file type, date, keywords, etc. This connection will help determine the complexity of the data processing phase. For instance, Word documents may be easy to process, but an e-mail message may have attachments containing links and or embedded data.

In contrast, tiff imaging (tagged image file format) is a file format for storing images, including photographs. TIFF imaging has become widely accepted and is considered unchangeable, because TIFFs do not contain metadata. Tiff images enable us to create a printable, unalterable version of an electronic document that will later be used during document review. Once the images are created, they can be endorsed with appropriate designations, and deliverables can be produced with the suitable load files.

Sometimes, cases require an “out of the box” solution to a complex problem. While we often apply industry-standard software, we’re also not afraid to create a custom program to tackle a unique issue.

Our software developers are scary-smart. They continually astound us—and clients—with the solutions they create and implement on unique projects. For example,

We have seen single text files made up of thousands of documents each rendering them unreviewable. Not only were we able to split them into a reviewable data-set, but we were able to accurately parse out critical metadata and build a searchable, sortable database.

Our software team is often called upon by our clients to write and build customized applications in litigation-specific platforms such as Concordance and Relativity for use in their own environments.

Like we said, they’re smart. It wouldn’t surprise us if they program in their sleep.