Where does all of this ESI data come from? It comes from any consumer, enterprise or government source of data creation, storage and communication operation imaginable: hard drives, databases, document management systems, websites, email and messaging systems, message boards, social networks and mobile devices, just to name a few.

To help organizations gain some level of control over this data, was demonstrating its eDiscovery solution designed to help organizations and firms get a grip on big data. The company claims its predictive analytics and predictive coding technologies will enable organizations to perform their own in-house collection of evidence while intelligently filtering out the unnecessary items, reducing the amount of data to be collected and stored. [Also see: ""]

During a few sessions at ILTA, however, there was discussion surrounding the risks associated with self-collection. The act of self-collection effectively puts the responsibility of preserving the evidence on the backs of the organizations themselves as they would be handling the collection and management of the evidence directly; consider a victim in an assault case collecting the weapon(s) and other evidence used in or associated with the assault. The risk here is that the organization may not have a full legal grasp of the requirements defining what needs to be collected from which assets during which time periods; a key piece of evidence could be missed.

Furthermore, by collecting the evidence themselves, organizations could mishandle the evidence, in court. Without question, the mishandling of evidence could introduce more risk than simply not capturing the right evidence. When queried on this topic, some legal firms said they were willing to accept the risks of self-collection if the legal firms representing both sides of the case agree to it. However, most said they would prefer their clients use accredited evidence collection services.

There were also discussions surrounding the topic of remote collection, the collection of data performed by an external source such as a cloud-based eDiscovery service provider. In this scenario, a secure connection is made between the evidence collection service provider and the organization whose systems are providing the evidence. Remote collection was deemed reasonable for certain situations where on-site collection was not feasible. However, in these cases, legal firms would require the providers of the remote collection service to leverage and provide assurance that they were utilizing secure collection channels, proven collection methods, trustworthy forensic tools, and end-to-end hash checks on both sides of the collection pipe. [Also see: ""]