Those working for a mid- to large-sized company -- say, one with more than $500 million in revenue -- are probably familiar with the problems of e-discovery. The enterprise may routinely face five or more litigation matters each year, and have terabytes of unstructured information to sort through in order to find relevant information and place it on litigation hold.

Worse, that unstructured information is growing dramatically, at a rate of up to 80 percent a year in many enterprises. Unmanaged and unplanned e-discovery tasks increase risk and headaches for legal, IT and business unit organizations. Outsourcing e-discovery to litigation services firms makes sense if the enterprise doesn't have much data or rarely faces litigation, but it doesn't make good financial sense as the organization grows. That's particularly true in highly regulated and litigation-prone industries such as banking, insurance, energy or utilities.

Here are 10 tips to choosing an e-discovery solution that can be up and running quickly, solve problems and pay for itself within months:

1.) Ensure the solution covers the full breadth of the e-discovery process as defined by the industry's Electronic Discovery Reference Model standard. The solution needs to cover everything from information management, identification, preservation and collection, to processing and early case analysis -- handing over only the smallest legally defensible set of data to the legal review team. Otherwise, multiple solutions will be cobbled together from multiple vendors. Not to mention the compromised audit liability that point solutions present.

2.) Insist on an open integration platform that supports various e-mail systems, storage systems, archiving systems and content and document management systems. Migrating data from a Novell server to an EMC device, or vice versa, for instance, demands technology that can read files from both. The solution should be able to read data from shared file servers, desktops and laptops including Macs and PCs, from content management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum, as well as from storage systems including EMC Centera, NetAPP, Hitachi and IBM.

3.) Ensure implementation can be executed without impacting employee productivity.  Flexible job scheduling allows processing to occur after hours when employees aren't around, and it's essential to be able to perform litigation hold without disrupting the production environment of knowledge workers.

4.) When locking down documents for litigation hold, be sure your system works in conjunction with existing corporate records management policies and is coordinated with ongoing IT data management functions such as data backup, migration and file expiration/deletion. Implementing an effective litigation hold strategy requires close coordination with corporate records management policies so that documents responsive to an active legal matter are not inadvertently deleted.

5.) Create a data topology map that identifies electronically stored information by a full complement of variables, including system location, custodian, access time, size and content type. It's critical to be able to perform e-discovery profiling of data to quickly respond to legal requests.  

6.) Make available all relevant and responsive electronically stored information to legal, HR or audit teams prior to the completion of the collection process. Saved, indexed and relevant information should be easily accessible.

7.) Interact with electronically stored information without changing the data. It's critical to preserve the integrity of existing data. Don't let software alter document properties when copying or moving it, because those properties themselves are important to maintain legal defensibility.

8.) Execute forensically sound collection policies while providing defensible and comprehensive audit logs. These audit trails show where data originally resided, which search terms were applied to collect it and when copies were made. Attaching unique digital signatures to files before and after they are collected proves that none of the actions performed altered the original content.

9.) Provide rich and sophisticated search capabilities. Are you able to search and identify terms and natural language concepts within files, as well as within e-mails and their attachments? Besides being able to search on common metadata and simple text strings, are you able to perform sophisticated natural language-based searches that can differentiate between Will, the name, or will, the legal document, or will, the auxiliary verb? Accuracy provides the smallest legally defensible set of data to be reviewed by the legal team -- significantly reducing e-discovery time and cost. 

10.) Finally, be sure the solution is easy to deploy and maintain. If weeks or months transpire while getting a system working before it can even begin accessing, categorizing and reporting on information, you're at a huge disadvantage. Look for a self-contained, out-of-the-box appliance, combining hardware, software and storage, that can provide results within 24 hours.

Bringing e-discovery in-house is a big step. Many organizations find that in doing it, they're able to save themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars, dramatically reduce the time taken to respond to legal requests, and better organize their internal processes and data storage. But finding the right solution is key. An incomplete solution that only addresses part of your needs -- and only responds to yesterday's list of legal requirements -- causes more headaches than it's worth. Take the time for thorough evaluation, and make decisions carefully.You'll be glad you did.

Ms. Talley is vice president of marketing for StoredIQ.