eDiscovery Daily Blog
For a Positive Outlook to Discovering Emails, You Need a Closed Outlook: eDiscovery Best Practices
Does that statement seem confusing? Let me explain.
Let’s call this a “tip of the day”. As you may know, at CloudNine (shameless plug warning!), we have an automated processing capability for enabling clients to load and process their own data – they can use this capability to load their data into our review platform or they can even process data for loading into their own preferred review platform if they want. So, we can still help you even if you already use Relativity or a number of other popular platforms.
Regardless of that fact, most of our users are using the processing capability to process emails, usually from Outlook Personal Storage Table (PST) files. Let’s face it, despite increased volumes of social media and other types of electronically stored information, emails are still predominant in eDiscovery. And, for those users, we get one issue more than any other when it comes to processing those Outlook emails:
They still have Outlook open with the PST file opened when they attempt to upload that PST file or when they try to create a ZIP file containing the Outlook PST.
The resulting ZIP file that is created (either by the user or by our client application if the data is not already contained in an archive file) will almost invariably be corrupted or empty. Either way, this results in a failure during processing of the loaded data – because, that data is simply corrupt.
So, my tip of the day is this: Before attempting to create a ZIP (or RAR or other type of archive) of a PST file (or before you upload it to a platform like CloudNine for processing), make sure that Outlook is closed or at least that the PST file is closed within Outlook. For a positive outlook to discovering emails, you need a closed Outlook.
Does that make sense now? :o)
So, what do you think? Is email still the predominant source of discoverable ESI in your organization? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.