Electronically Stored Information—data like e-mails, word processing documents, spreadsheets, instant messaging logs and social media pages—is rampant in business today, making it relevant in nearly every matter that passes across an attorney’s desk. For a big corporation, Electronically Stored Information (let’s call it ESI to save time) can be spread across servers located throughout the world, on laptops, desktops, phones and more. For a smaller company, ESI may be located on local servers, work stations, personal devices, or even on an employee’s computer at home.

No matter the size of the case or the company, vdiscovery uses best practices to identify, preserve, collect, process and produce that ESI. Because you might be asked to defend the integrity of the data, we maintain a sound chain of custody on all media we receive. We always know the status of your case—even if you call us at midnight—because we use some of the best project management software available today. And of course we document and maintain our quality control protocols so you always receive the data you need and requested.

We deliver on the entire lifecycle of your project:


* The above image represents the life cycle of the ediscovery process.

Initial Consultation:
Your Project Manager, who will be your ongoing point of contact, will discuss the project scope, data set size, timeline, potential issues, nature of engagement, and price and confirm in writing. All questions will provide a jargon-free and informative consultation to optimize discovery and review.

Data Identification:
vdiscovery consultants will work with you and your clients to identify all potential sources of ESI such as desktop computers, laptops, servers, PDAs, iPods/iPads, online e-mail accounts and more. We’ll find ESI that someone or something tried to hide, erase or damage. We also investigate web browsing activity, identify metadata, reveal the content of temporary files, obtain data fragments, and establish data usage histories.

Data Preservation and Collection:
Our data forensic specialists are trained in forensic collection and examination and use industry-leading hardware and software technologies, such as EnCase, to collect, investigate and analyze your data.

Early Case Assessment:
We provide tools to analyze your data pre-review and the know-how to help you make insightful and cost effective decisions about review strategy, for example our “relativity pivot” feature reveals trends and patterns and visually displays the results in a variety of charts..

Data Processing:
Once we’ve identified and collected your ESI we reduce the data set size by a variety of techniques including de-duping, filtering, and keyword searching. We then extract the text, meta data, and the native files with tiff images in a review ready format through a series of high speed, carefully calibrated, monitored, and quality checked and re-checked operations. Our advanced infrastructure, technology, and carefully prescribed processes means that you will be able to review smoothly and with the certainty that the data is accurate.

Document Review and Production:
There are many excellent review products available today—and we don’t expect you to know them all. We’ve partnered with the best of them already, and we’ll make a recommendation based on the features you need for your dataset. Once you’ve reviewed your data, we’ll produce the relevant documents in either native or tiff format.