IDM Success Story – Forensic Data Acquisition
The Challenge
The client, a large investment company with multiple locations housing hundreds of employees across the country, received multiple subpoenas. The regulatory investigation requested the production of specific documents from more than seventy named custodians over an eight year period.
The Solution
Intelligent Discovery Management (IDM) was engaged to develop a multi-faceted collection strategy that would allow for a fast and comprehensive acquisition of potentially relevant data sources. The project required:
- Completion of the collection within two weeks to meet production deadlines
- Forensically sound collection of every potentially relevant data source
- Full Chain of Custody, documentation, and defensibility of the data collection
- Minimal impact to the day-to-day operations of employees
- Control of costs to manage a restricted budget
IDM quickly went to work coordinating calls and scheduling meetings with the company’s IT staff members across the country. The purpose of the meetings was to identify every physical and electronic location where potentially relevant data might exist.
Using the compiled IT infrastructure information, IDM was able to extrapolate an accurate cost prediction and determine the resources necessary to complete the task within the limited time frame. Upon approval by the client, IDM dispatched multiple Forensic Acquisition professionals to the various locations across the country to collect the multiple data sources in a highly documented, complete, and secure manner.
As the acquisitions took place, the collected data was inventoried on a rolling basis and reports provided to the client for review. This ongoing communication allowed the client to keep track of both the collection progress and the related costs as the project moved forward.
The End Result
Working closely with the client, the company’s IT staff, and its attorney’s IDM captured responsive data from more than one hundred individual custodian desktops/laptops, six file servers and over one hundred email inboxes from five different mail platforms, over the course of fourteen consecutive days. Our client was incredibly satisfied! They were able to meet their production deadline with complete confidence that the source data was collected in a forensically defensible and complete manner – all while staying under the initial allocated budget.
As an added benefit, IDM made several suggestions to improve upon the client’s existing infrastructure and data retention policies that could aid in the event of future document requests.