The Problem: Creating Order in Unstructured Data Repositories
Driven by compliance, discovery and storage challenges, organizations are moving quickly to implement and maintain electronic data repositories, such as email archiving systems, which enable users to store, manage, and search for information across the organization. By organizing unstructured business information in a consistent and structured manner, corporations can achieve the level of litigation readiness they need to respond to discovery and audit requests in a timely and risk-free manner.
Due to the ever-increasing volumes of electronically stored information (ESI), effective management of the ongoing monitoring, search and administration of data has become a major challenge. Solutions that apply corporate data management policies in a consistent and automated manner can save the substantial time and costs associated with document production for a litigation event.
Equivio's Solution: Consistent, Structured and Automated Data Management
While Equivio's solution enables efficient data import into a corporation's litigation readiness system, its key value lies in the ongoing management of data within the repository. This involves the accurate determination of document relevance in response to regulatory, investigative and e-discovery events.
Equivio groups near-duplicate documents and builds email threads. These groupings help ensure the consistent automation and application of rules and policies across like documents. In addition, the similarity groupings assist the organization in its compliance with document requests. The Equivio groupings allow administrators to make consistent decisions regarding the inclusion or exclusion of similar documents or related emails from a target collection. This is crucial for ensuring quality deliverables, as well as eliminating exposure due to inadvertent non-compliance with document requests.
The Equivio groupings also facilitate a more structured and compact presentation of search results. Rather than presenting the results of a search as a long list of individual documents and emails, the retrieved documents can be grouped into sets of near-duplicates and email threads. This ensures a much more compact presentation of the search results, while also enhancing productivity, mitigating data redundancy and reducing complexity.
The Benefits:
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Enhanced responsiveness to regulatory requests. In the absence of Equivio>Relevance, corporations use standard search techniques to identify data relevant to regulatory requests or investigations. Research studies show that search techniques typically retrieve 20-30% of the relevant data. Equivio>Relevance consistently retrieves 80-95% of the relevant data, dramatically reducing the corporation's risk of failing to comply with government documentation requests. In addition, the near-duplicate and email groupings expedite the response to litigation events, governmental inquiries and investigative procedures.
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Consistent treatment. The Equivio groupings ensure consistent handling of very similar documents and related emails. This includes the consistent application of archiving policies, release decisions and treatment annotations, as well as in the collection of e-discovery documents.
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Enhanced findability of data. By allowing the virtual suppression of redundant data, Equivio helps users cut directly to the information they need to respond to a regulatory request or investigation. The focus on unique data enhances data findability, and reduces the risk of missing critical information. | 
