When preparing for litigation or dealing with compliance requirements, organizations need to be able to quickly access, retrieve and deliver specific files from a mountain of enterprise information. If data is not properly managed, recovering stored data becomes difficult, perhaps impossible, putting the enterprise in jeopardy of violating compliance rules, damaging its brand equity and facing hefty fines.

Enterprises can manage the ever-increasing amount of data-in documents, spreadsheets, presentations and e-mails-with an in-house solution to maintain fast access, accurate and cost-effective visibility and control over business-critical information to meet the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other mandates.

Here are 10 details to look for in an in-house e-discovery solution:

1. Make sure the solution covers the full breadth of the e-discovery process as defined by the industry's electronic discovery reference model standard. The solution needs to cover everything from information management, identification, preservation and collection to processing and early case analysis-handing over only the smallest legally defensible set of data to the legal review team.

2. Insist on an open integration platform that supports various e-mail, storage, archiving, and content- and document-management systems. Migrating data from a Novell server to an EMC Celerra, for example, would require an e-discovery system that can read files from both servers. The solution should be able to read data from shared file servers, desktops and laptops (Macs and PCs), from content-management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum, as well as from storage systems, including EMC Centera, NetAPP, Hitachi and IBM.

3. Implementation should not impact employee productivity. The solution should feature flexible job scheduling to allow processing to occur after hours or when it would have the least impact on network users. Being able to perform litigation hold without disrupting the production environment of knowledge workers is essential.

4. When locking down documents for litigation hold, be sure the system works in conjunction with existing records-management policies in order to ensure coordination with ongoing IT data-management functions, such as data backup, migration and file expiration/deletion. Implementing an effective litigation hold strategy requires close coordination with corporate records-management policies so that documents related to an active legal matter are not inadvertently deleted.

5. Creating a data topology map should be possible identifying electronically stored information by a full complement of variables, including system location, custodian, access time, size and content type. Performing prediscovery profiling of data is also necessary, so information can be managed, potential liability can be assessed and response to legal requests can be swift.

6. The solution should make available all relevant and responsive electronically stored information to legal, human resource or audit teams prior to the completion of the collection process. Even while collection and preservation are ongoing, calling up saved, indexed and relevant information should be possible.

7. The solution should be able to interact with electronically stored information without changing the data. Preserving the integrity of existing data is important. Software should not be able to alter document properties when copying or moving data files, because those properties are important to maintain legal defensibility.

8. Check to see if the solution can execute forensically sound collection policies while providing defensible and comprehensive audit logs. Audit trails show where data originally resided, what search terms were applied to collect it and when copies were made. Attaching unique digital signatures to files before and after they are collected can prove that none of the actions performed altered the original content.

9. The solution needs to provide sophisticated search capabilities. Besides being able to search on common metadata and simple text strings, sophisticated natural language-based searches should be able to differentiate between Will, the name, or will, the legal document or will, the auxiliary verb.

10. Be sure the solution is easy to deploy and maintain. The solution should be able to access, categorize and report on information quickly.

Ursula Talley is vice president of marketing for StoredIQ, Austin, Texas.

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