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Mimosa NearPoint: eDiscovery for Litigation Support
eDiscovery: Critical Access to Your Discoverable Information

Surveys have shown that up to 77 percent of corporate respondents have been asked to collect email information and 50 percent have had to supply file system information for litigation eDiscovery. If your organization has not yet been asked to search email or file system information, chances are that it will. Email and file system information are widely used as evidence by the courts. While electronic discovery procedures are evolving, companies are regularly being asked to respond to electronic discovery in much less time than before. Enterprises that rely on simple search tools, backup tapes, and manual processes to retrieve email and file system information face an expensive, time-consuming process that includes search, collection, and review. And, if enterprises cannot preserve or produce all relevant electronic information in a timely fashion, the results can be costly punitive damages reaching millions or billions of dollars.

NearPoint Legal eDiscovery Solutions
The Mimosa™ NearPoint™ eDiscovery Option and the NearPoint Custodian Collector Option provide integrated, easy-to-use, and powerful applications that individuals and workgroups can use to search, preserve, and produce MicrosoftŽ Exchange email and file system information within your corporate infrastructure. Auditors, paralegals, legal counsel, and compliance officers can quickly search through thousands of emails and files, review these items, place them on secure legal hold, and export the results for presentation to opposing counsel or for court-ready production.

The Mimosa NearPoint eDiscovery Option
The Mimosa NearPoint eDiscovery Option is a robust yet easy-to-use email search and discovery application that can be used from the desktops of internal eDiscovery authorities or legal counsel. In the past, email discovery could take days or weeks because of the need to restore files from backup tape and to search custodian local file stores. Now, with the NearPoint eDiscovery Option and its ability to leverage the disk-based NearPoint archive, search times can be reduced to minutes or seconds. Using the eDiscovery Option, new searches are created by selecting target Exchange mailboxes and by defining search criteria. Full-text search of messages and file attachments is supported. The NearPoint Continuous Application Shadowing™ capability provides full message fidelity at capture, so powerful search queries can be created to find all types of Exchange items, including messages, calendar entries, contacts, and notes.

How Mimosa’s NearPoint Archive Solutions Conform to the Industry-Standard Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Information Management – Mimosa NearPoint Archive
Records retention for business reasons, for regulatory reasons, or, most important, for litigation is an important aspect of the overall eDiscovery preparedness model. The preemptive capture and indexing of all potentially discoverable information in a given system can greatly reduce your risk of spoliation, as well as meet the court's expectation of responsiveness. Without preemptive capture, a reactive “crawl” through your infrastructure for each discovery event is required. In a recent Osterman survey, 73 percent of respondents said that i n the event of a discovery request, they would prefer to have the information readily accessible and searchable in an existing archive, as opposed to an after-the-fact reactive “crawl.” Because NearPoint preemptively captures all potentially discoverable Exchange information and applies retention policies in real time, it dramatically reduces the greatest cost of Exchange discovery.

Identification – Mimosa NearPoint Archive, Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
The Identification phase of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model refers to the process of learning the location of all information that you might have a duty to preserve and potentially disclose in a pending or prospective legal proceeding. For email discovery, the Mimosa NearPoint archive captures all potentially discoverable information in real time, so there is no question as to where that information resides. In the case of file system discovery, the Mimosa Custodian Collector Option provides the ability to reactively search enterprise file shares and custodian workstations for responsive information.

Preservation – Mimosa NearPoint Archive, Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
You must ensure that potentially responsive electronically stored information is protected against destruction or alteration when litigation is anticipated or in fact. The NearPoint archive enables you to quickly find and protect email information, file system information, and instant messages via litigation hold.

Collection – Mimosa NearPoint Archive, Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
The preservation and collection phases of eDiscovery often overlap. Collection and preservation work hand in hand to ensure that all potentially responsive information is found and protected for eDiscovery. This information is usually searched for on backup tapes, workstation hard drives, enterprise share drives, portable storage devices such as iPods, and so on. For email and instant message collection, the Mimosa NearPoint archive provides a single point of discovery, since all potentially discoverable Exchange information is captured and indexed in real time. File system information can be quickly found and protected via litigation hold within the NearPoint archive.

Processing – Mimosa NearPoint Archive, Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
The processing phase includes reducing the overall set of information you have collected by setting aside files that are duplicates, as well as files you believe are not going to be relevant because of factors such as type, origin, privilege, or date.

Review – eDiscovery Option
The review phase includes evaluating the collected electronically stored information, frequently for relevance and privilege. Once potentially responsive information is captured and duplicates have been removed by the NearPoint archive, the NearPoint eDiscovery Option allows you to filter and review your information sets to produce the smallest information sets of responsive information.

Analysis – Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
In the analysis phase, important case knowledge can be discerned from the body of collected documents and messages. Effective technology and techniques are essential to effective information and case analysis. Information that is essential to making your case can be quickly and easily obtained in a manner that is both more accurate and much less costly than an exhaustive manual review.

The Mimosa eDiscovery Option provides you with powerful search and filtering tools, such as Boolean search, easy-to-use search within a search, proximity search, automatic conversation thread construction, search by context, search by date, and more. The ability to quickly create sets of “what if” results provides a much richer view of your case information.

Production – Custodian Collector Option, eDiscovery Option
The production phase includes the delivery of your results sets to various recipients (law firm, corporate legal department, service provider, and so on) as your response to the eDiscovery request. Results sets can also be exported to other systems, such as case management and presentation systems, if the need arises.

For file system information, the NearPoint Custodian Collector Option can export results sets in the file's native format. The eDiscovery Option allows for results set export via native PST format, which can be easily imported into most industry-leading case management applications for trial presentation.