The Surprisingly Simple Way to Handle Email eDiscovery for Your Small Law Firm
Traditional email apps make email eDiscovery clunky (and in some cases, impossible). The simple solution? Get a powerful-but-affordable eDiscovery app. Here’s why.
Email is a huge part of modern business.
eDiscovery is the latest development in the way you practice law. And email eDiscovery is one of its most important components. Businesses today talk to each other via email, so your firm needs to have the tools to handle it.
But, traditional email apps don’t do enough for email eDiscovery.
You’re familiar with apps like Outlook that handle your email. They’re great at sending and receiving email, and they have cool features to make your day-to-day emailing easier. But when it comes to eDiscovery, they have severe limitations. What if you want to tag certain emails (or parts of emails) so that you can find them easily, later? Or, if you want to redact information? Or, ‘produce’ emails and send them to opposing counsel for review? Outlook can’t do these things.
So, what’s the solution?
Get a dedicated eDiscovery app that can handle your email.
Let’s take the app GoldFynch, for example.
Here’s what it can do that a regular email app can’t:
Processing email attachments so you can search their content
To build a case, you’re going to need to search your email. But, a common error is to overlook the attachments that come with these emails. With most email clients, you can search for keywords in the body of your email. But if there’s an attached Word file or PDF, its content doesn’t get searched. And that’s content you can’t afford to miss. GoldFynch processes attachments and makes their content searchable. So, you can find keywords, dates, etc., in the email body as well as the attachments, all in the same search.
Preserving metadata that can help you win cases
When you create a document on your computer, the app you’re using (e.g., Microsoft Word) records a bunch of information about it. Things like who created it, when they created it, when it was last opened, etc. This ‘data about data’ (i.e., metadata) is a digital footprint which tracks the history of the document. All files have metadata embedded in them, but you won’t see it unless you know where to look.
Here are examples of email metadata:
- Who created the email, and when it was created.
- When it was sent.
- Whom it was sent to (‘cc’ and ‘bcc’), when they received it, and whether they read it.
So, when you want to find an email your client sent to a colleague last January, your software scans the ‘date’ metadata field of all your emails. This information is valuable, right? It can help make or break your case. But metadata is fragile. Even a simple thing like forwarding an email modifies its metadata. That’s why you need an eDiscovery app like GoldFynch. It knows how important metadata is to email eDiscovery, and makes sure to preserve it.
Tagging and searching privileged email so you can keep out sensitive information
When you’re dealing with large numbers of emails, you’ll undoubtedly get some with sensitive information. For example, things that need to stay between only you and your client. Or trade secrets that they can’t allow competitors to get their hands on. So, when you ‘produce’ emails to send them to opposing counsel, you’ll need a way to keep out privileged information. eDiscovery apps let you redact information and mark whole emails as ‘privileged.’ In GoldFynch, it takes just a click to tag an email. Which makes it much easier to keep them out of production or review them later.
Keeping things organized with easy Bates stamping
A key part of producing documents in giving each page a Bates stamp. Traditional email apps don’t let you do this, and that’s a problem. With eDiscovery apps like GoldFynch, Bates stamping is quick, easy and automatic, and you do it with a single click.
Giving you unlimited storage space
Email apps like Outlook download your mail onto your computer. It makes it easy to read them at your leisure, but it means that you’re limited by the size of your hard drive. eDiscovery apps like GoldFynch, however, work in the Cloud, which means unlimited space. What’s the Cloud? Well, it’s a bunch (thousand) interconnected servers (high-performance computers) that work together to give you storage space and processing power. And the more people there are in the Cloud, the less the costs for each. That’s the beauty of cloud economics. So you get cheap, unlimited storage and computing power. Learn more about Cloud-computing.
So, how do you get your emails onto GoldFynch?
It’s as simple as dragging-and-dropping a PST file into your internet browser. What’s a PST file? It’s not as complicated as you think. Find out more here.
GoldFynch does more than just email eDiscovery.
It’s a complete eDiscovery package and has some cool features for small law firms like yours.
- You don’t need to set up anything. It runs in the Cloud, and you use it through your web browser. Plus, your trial case is free. So, you can start working immediately. No sales calls or emails. And no credit card.
- You can work from anywhere. All you need is an internet connection.
- It’s easy to use. Just like all the other powerful-but-simple apps you use.
- It’s secure: Your data is backed up on multiple Cloud-servers with bank-grade security and encryption.
- You get the best technical support: Its designed, developed and run by the same team. So, the technical support isn’t outsourced. Which means prompt and reliable service.
- Most importantly, it’s affordable. Just $27 a month for a basic case. That’s much less - every month - than the nearest comparable software. And hundreds of dollars cheaper than many others.
Intrigued? To find out more about Goldfynch:
- Visit GoldFynch.com
- Take a look at GoldFynch’s pricing