Processing

ESI processing for discovery is one of the areas in which legal practitioners need some level of technology competence to fulfill their duty. Although it is often given short shrift compared to the steps that come before it (preservation and collection) and after it (assessment, review, and production), effective processing is critical to the success of those downstream steps and includes a variety of important decisions to make.

Broadly speaking, there are four main activities that take place during processing: expansion, extraction and normalization, indexing, and objective culling. In this Part, we will discuss the first three of these activities, review how decisions made during them can affect later discovery activities, and touch on some of the tools commonly used to complete them.