Most attorneys and members of their staff email thousands of times each year for the purpose of communication, sending/receiving documents, etc. You may be a little familiar with one of the most essential eDiscovery tools, email threading, or you may have no idea what it is. As the world continues to evolve around technological advances, you must follow along! We’ll explain email threading and how eDiscovery is vital in litigation support.
First of all, what is eDiscovery? Electronic discovery is a process in which electronic data is located, collected, secured, identified, searched, etc. for the purpose of using this data in a legal case.
What is email threading? Basically, it’s the chain or group of messages that occur, starting with an original message, and including all responses to that message, along with any forwarded messages. You could consider it the entire conversation or “communication chain.”
Why is email threading such an important tool in eDiscovery? In the legal field, it’s an efficient way to review and produce documents or other information that may be key to a civil or criminal case, and also extremely cost-effective. If you’ve ever searched through an email thread looking for specific information, you know it can be frustrating – particularly if the email is comprised of many strings or branches off into another thread. Reviewing all of the pieces of an email thread repeatedly can be very time consuming.
Essentially using email threading in eDiscovery lets you produce the content you need while reviewing fewer documents. Attorneys can actually review a conversation in one document or picture, rather than trying to navigate through massive amounts of content and clutter. Less wasted time – very important to firms with a large caseload.
The benefits of email threading as an eDiscovery tool go on and on, and include cost-savings in the documentation review process, increased relevance of content through the removal of irrelevant content and duplicates, and improved management of documents as well as monitoring (quality control).
Infinite eDiscovery is an Atlanta litigation support company, providing eDiscovery and solutions for all of your needs including consulting, workshops, collections, document coding and more.
