The automated privilege detection greatly reduces risk, privilege review time and associated privilege review costs. The privilege processor errs on the side of caution and testing indicates that the processor accurately identifies greater than 95% of privileged documents. Another benefit is privilege review can begin immediately.

The engine incorporates six distinct rule sets for identification of duplicate documents which reduces the reviewable collection. The engine maintains placeholders for all detected duplicates therefore document and email tracking and production by custodian is assured.

For example, emails typically have attached documents. The engine extracts every attached document, even documents embedded inside an attached document no matter how deeply embedded they are. The processor accurately maintains these document relationships for review purposes. It is this relationship that often determines the responsiveness or privilege basis of the ESI.

The ESI is immediately reviewable in Native File format. The ESI is also reviewable in TIFF format. This allows the reviewer to view the document as it would print and provides no delays for redaction or production purposes which are inherent in TIFF-on-the-fly schemes.

All ESI received without regard to its data type or included/excluded status is maintained throughout the life of the project. This means if project parameters change during the discovery cycle then the engine simply processes previously excluded ESI for review purposes.

The original file can never be tampered with or changed due to the fact that the ESI takes the form of read-only Binary Large Object(BLOB) when stored inside the SQL database. This assures the chain of custody for the file while protecting against accidental spoilage.

For example, executables (.exe), dynamic link libraries (.dll), database (.mdb), etc. from the ESI review set. The parameters for excluded ESI are project definable. As previously mentioned, the excluded ESI is always maintained in case review parameters change.

Filter parameters are project definable and filtered ESI is maintained to allow for project changes, reducing the discovery review set.

The engine can detect and correctly recover the password needed to process virtually any type of file. This eliminates the need for the corporate legal department to have to retrieve lost or retired employee passwords.

The engine extracts the most useful metadata and embedded data from ESI and makes the extracted data viewable and searchable.

Providing for full text keyword and term search capability.

The log report details custodian, file type, file size, password protection, excluded or included disposition, etc. This report is provided to corporate and outside counsel discovery managers.