Litigation has changed. Digital evidence is now a key element of discovery and email evidence in particular is crucial in many lawsuits. Technology is so central to the way we work that an ability to identify and collect relevant electronic evidence is a prerequisite for successful litigation.
Unfortunately our approach to electronic discovery has not kept pace with changes in the way we use technology. At a time when employees are carrying personal smartphones rather than company Blackberries we remain focused on corporate email systems. As the concept of “bring your own device” takes hold, officially or unofficially, we still assume that business records exist only on company systems. And as our employees adopt cloud services and online productivity tools we fail to realize that our corporate systems are in effect competing with services such as Google Docs and Dropbox.
At Cernam we are building the next generation of digital evidence technology. We believe the most important source of evidence in the future will not be a company email system, it will be the internet. Cases are already being won and lost based on social networking evidence but this represents just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the type of “personal cloud” services which according to Forrester Research represent a $12 billion market by 2016: Google Docs, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Asana, Do.com and hundreds of others. Is the key document which will win your next case stored in one of these services, in your digital blind spot?
In the era of cloud services, what are you missing? Are the documents and correspondence stored in Dropbox, Gmail, Google Docs or Facebook helpful or harmful to your case? What are the consequences of not knowing? Can you afford to learn about these documents for the first time during trial?
Our goal is to bring online evidence into every context where digital evidence is used today: if a matter is important enough to consider email evidence it is essential to also consider online content. Elevating online evidence requires a new approach to evidence collection. Stop-gap approaches such as screenshots and website printouts do not represent evidence – at best they are a picture of evidence, and often not even an accurate picture. Given the emphasis on metadata and native formats in e-discovery it is clear that evidentially-sound preservation is required and this is what Cernam’s Capture & Preserve technology enables.
For further information see details of our technology or get in touch via the contact button to the right.