The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments render all relevant ESI discoverable, regardless of format or location, with non-compliance penalties that could run into the millions. This has drastically changed the way information officers, knowledge officers, and corporate librarians manage and store their ESI, and how they must use pan-enterprise search to collaborate with corporate counsels. The Autonomy pan-enterprise search platform automates the retrieval, processing, and management of all information throughout a global organization irrespective of languages, operating systems, and file types, avoiding non-FRCP compliant search techniques.
"Today, enterprise search and eDiscovery are viewed by CIOs and General Counsel as completely separate markets with different vendors," said Dr. Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. "However, the fundamental problems of dealing with huge amounts of unstructured information pose a challenge to both parties and as a result, we expect that it will drive a convergence of these markets over the next few years. Autonomy is in a unique position being at the forefront of this market convergence."
The Autonomy platform supports both pan-enterprise search and FRCP compliance with its ability to:
- Search all categories of information repositories in an organization by supporting more than a 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories
- Provide a vendor neutral approach by searching across highly distributed systems, running on multiple operating systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows NT
- Produce auditable results
- Pass results to a hold function to ensure relevant ESI is preserved and not altered in any way or deleted
- Avoid "jump out" techniques or indexing that compromises important metadata
- Provide a meaning-based conceptual search method as an preferred approach over federated search
- Deliver a fault-tolerant architecture using load balancing and mirroring, with high scalability and security, and a sub-second performance on billions of files
- Seamlessly support an end-to-end eDiscovery suite including investigation and early case assessment, legal hold, real-time policy management, data archiving, EDD, on-line review, and production management
Most of the other search engines available in the market today miss relevant information because of their performance enhancing shortcuts that are designed to improve the response time and relevancy of information access requests from employees. These shortcuts include 'jump out' which misses respondent documents as it stops looking across an index for potentially relevant information once it estimates a document is unlikely to make the top of section of the results list, and partial indexing which only indexes a subset of a document. For example, if a document contained 500 pages of information, the search engine may only index the first five pages to determine relevancy. Federated search can also present risks as it often involves out-dated, end-of-life search products that rarely search all information in the repository. While these methods might make sense for employees trying to find relevant information contained within an enterprise, they guarantee that information will be skipped and missed which is not acceptable for legal search.
"Other enterprise search platforms completely miss the mark with only basic keyword search, or lack the architecture or tools to support critical FRCP requirements," continued Lynch. "Autonomy's pan-enterprise search transcends company divisions, operating systems, language-barriers and file types to ensure all information can be searched for both legal and business purposes while respecting security."
Autonomy will be showcasing its FRCP-compliant pan-enterprise search platform at the Enterprise Search Summit to be held from May 20 to 21, 2008 at the Hilton New York Hotel, New York, NY. For more information, please visit www.autonomy.com<f20a91de145039c2b4105c65cb20be53>.