It’s official now, Google Vault which does eDiscovery for Gmail is now now available to existing business customers.    However, it is not yet available for Government customers.

See the announcement from Google here.

After enabling Vault on the Google dashboard, you can log into ediscovery.google.com and use it to place legal holds.

Another feature that Google Apps has is the ability to make custom internal websites with forms to distribute to users that can track and specifically require acknowledgement from custodians about the legal hold and need to preserve data.

Enterprises use product like Legal Hold Pro to do this, and this type of functionality can be produced inexpensively and quickly with Google Apps Sites and Forms.

Jeffrey Goodwin

Founder

eDiscoverySquad, LLC

www.ediscoverysquad.com

The post Official announcement by Google on Vault availability for legal holds appeared first on eDiscoverySquad Litigation Support Services.

In a recent discussion last week with Jenni Williams, Channel/Client Relationship Manager for Google, I learned that the processes of setting up a procedure to amend the terms and conditions for Google Apps customers to cover Google Vault is nearly final and the only loose end before the large scale roll out begins.

Ms. Williams said that there are no API’s for Google Vault yet, but this will be an area to watch as eDiscovery kicks into high gear for Google.   There are already a number of data management tools such as Google Active Directory Synch – GADS , Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange  - GAMME, which can move ESI related to user identities, email, calendar, and contacts.  GAMME can use IMAP to connect with a wide variety of email providers, such as Microsoft® Exchange Server (2000, 2003, 2007 or 2010) or IMAP server (any RFC 3501-compliant IMAP server, including Microsoft® Exchange, Novell Groupwise, Cyrus, Courier, Dovecot, SunMail, Zimbra, and Gmail), or work directly with .PST files.

Both GAMME and GADS also support a command line scripting ability and can be launched in the back ground.

Prior to Google Vault, Google customers had their email routed through Postini for eDiscovery.   However, gradually the features of Postini have been migrated into Gmail, and the Google Vault addition will be the final step to begin the process of migrating users away from Postini.

Watch for more developments to pick up in this specialized area.

Jeffrey Goodwin

Founder, eDiscoverySquad, LLC

http://ediscoverysquad.com/about-us

The post Google expected to roll out Vault (for Legal Holds) to existing business Gmail users very soon appeared first on eDiscoverySquad Litigation Support Services.

In my prior company (life) we developed intellectual property for operating systems primitives in windows, and network security protocols such as IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), e.g. VPN.   We had “bake-off’s” sponsored by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) that blesses all of the standards that make up the Internet, to prove the worthiness of the security protocols in a way that was open to the most sophisticated cryptologists and hackers in the world.

Similarly, the legal argument for open source eForensics is a good one in that provides transparency to these experts to examine and soundness of the algorithms, operating system primitives, network protocols, and crypto libraries used to produce digital evidence.

This type of scrutiny will never be obtained in a closed and proprietary system.

This paper from Brian Carrier from Purdue University, lays out the legal argument for the use of open source tools in the field of eDiscovery and eForensics by applying “Daubert” guidelines.

Open Source Legal Argument for eForensics and eDiscovery

In Mr. Carrier’s paper, he discuss the major concepts in eForensics as they apply to eDiscovery :

Acquistion, Analysis, and Presentation.

The analysis phase includes:

- Inculpatory Evidence: That which supports a given theory ( e.g., emperical log files that show Volume Serial ID’s of each hard drive, complete discovery of the the file system, disposition of each file extracted/copied)

- Exculpatory Evidence: That which contradicts a given theory (e.g., shows that data acquistion was not properly performed)

- Evidence of tampering: That which can not be related to any theory, but shows
that the system was tampered with to avoid identification (e.g., spoliation)

In terms of admissibility of evidence, The Daubert process identifies four general categories that are used as guidelines when assessing a procedure:

- Testing: Can and has the procedure been tested?
- Error Rate: Is there a known error rate of the procedure?
- Publication: Has the procedure been published and subject to peer review?
- Acceptance: Is the procedure generally accepted in the relevant scientific
community?

Just as there is a “Chain of Custody”, that produces log files at the point of origin to log all of the data to be captured and it’s disposition, subsequent verification and encryption — there is also a similar set of analysis to show the operating system primitives that are called to produce this chain of custody.

These points of reference lay the groundwork for defensible eForensic tools not only for data acquisition, but also for eDiscovery processing, searching, culling, and file transformations for productions to opposing counsel.

We welcome your input on this discussion.

Jeffrey Goodwin
Founder, eDiscoverySquad, LLC

The post The Legal Argument for Open Source eForensics & eDiscovery appeared first on eDiscoverySquad Litigation Support Services.

http://www.virtuallegaltechshow.com/r5/cob_page.asp?category_code=110812&initial_file=agenda.asp

At 2 p.m., there is a course that takes a deep dive on cloud security and remediation.  Here is a summary:

Attend this session to discover how to:

• Facilitate SaaS subscriptions through an escrow arrangement
• Identify scenarios by which contingency plans should be contemplated
• Engender trust between the buyer and seller
• Overcome the risk objections to doing business
• Optimize the subscriber-provider relationship
• Become a valued trusted advisor to your clients

Ironically, this applies to Cloud based Litigation Review and eDiscovery software as well !

One of the important points to consider is a backup and remediation plan in the event of a failure of the data center or software running in the data center.   Normally these are recovered in 24 hours, but to be safe it’s good to keep a backup of all meta-data and coding, with local links to documents that have been loaded in the case.

While this is harder to do for really large cases involving multiple parties working simultaneously on a large database, it’s pretty easy for small to medium sized cases involving fewer participants by loading the fields in the review database into a spreadsheet and modifying the links to the documents to be on your local hard drive putting you in charge in the event anything goes wrong in the Cloud.

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