Novelis

In addition to escalating service provider costs for eDiscovery, internal policies required electronic data for terminated and retiring employees meeting certain management criteria be preserved with metadata unaltered during collection. The corporation’s needs demanded the law department have the best tools in the market and people knowledgeable in the legal complexities of eDiscovery.

“The most highly respected and most often mentioned solution at industry trade shows was EnCase eDiscovery, so Novelis purchased it, along with training passports for the Novelis eDiscovery team. This enabled the team to get up to speed quickly and build a defensible, repeatable in-house process,” said Susan Jackson, Legal Counsel, Novelis. As part of this process each team member received their EnCEP™ (EnCase Certified eDiscovery Practitioner) certification. The company now preserves electronic data and saves case files in accordance with their electronically stored information policy. EnCase Information Assurance is used for the acquisition of user-created information and collects from different data sources forensically.

The company can collect and preserve whole disks or target specific files and directories, as needed, while preserving metadata and audit integrity with EnCase’s trusted Logical Evidence File (LEF). If further review is warranted, either for a business purpose or in response to litigation, data is culled in OpenText™ EnCase™ Information Assurance and relevant information is exported and loaded into other eDiscovery review platforms.

“In just nine months of using EnCase Information Assurance, the company has saved more than $1.5 million in service provider fees,” Jackson noted.

EnCase Information Assurance has proven to be a good solution for the corporation, as many plaintiffs’ lawyers attempt to use eDiscovery to leverage settlements. Novelis can now focus on evaluating a case based on its merits alone, instead of being bound by the daunting costs of hiring outside counsel and third-party service providers to deal with the overbroad requests of plaintiffs’ counsel.

In the future, the eDiscovery team will continue to use EnCase eDiscovery software to its full advantage, allowing Novelis to focus less on service provider costs and more on the merits of the cases filed.