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Your litigation support software platform should be the one to get you there. Collection from the web and webmail as well as review and analysis of what you find there is possible with today’s tools. Take our AD eDiscovery 4.0 product, for example. One of the (many) amazing things this product allows you to do is collect data directly from a website, suck the data in and then put it into a format you can review as if the website was a collection of electronic documents. For example, say you have a copyright case that hinges on an infringement made several layers deep on a competitor’s website. Or perhaps you are looking on a public forum for prior art or previous publication in defending a client against a patent infringement suit. You can use AD eDiscovery to essentially collect the target website as a snapshot in time or even an iterative set of snapshots. You point the program to the URL and it will collect html files along with associated images including gifs, png files and jpeg/jpgs. It will also collect PDFs, ISOs, ZIP and even css files. You can configure how many files you collect based on maximum file size or how many layers deep you want the program to ‘crawl’. For example, that prior art evidence may be well hidden and viewable only after clicking six different links starting from the home page, so you can make sure you collect those files buried six layers deep. Then, once the data is collected, you can process it and view it in a linear document type format (see Fig. 1 below). This allows you to integrate a website into a case’s evidence corpus just like any other piece of more traditional data. You can search and annotate the website files and even append them to motions or declarations. AD eDiscovery also collects directly from webmail platforms including Gmail. The web email goes directly into a PST file for easy review and analysis. Google docs (tomorrow’s rich treasure trove of smoking gun evidence) are also collectible and viewable in a comprehensive litigation review solution (aka Summation) as a fully integrated part of the AD eDiscovery platform.
So even if the idea of collecting from the web seems daunting or unintuitive, it certainly doesn’t have to be. We’ve already made the leap from paper to electronic files – it’s just another small step up to become familiar with, and master, online evidence. With the right tools you are already ahead of the next plot on the legal evidence review timeline…
Figure 1: AccessData’s corporate website events page being viewed in AD eDiscovery
