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Data Processing
Practical Law Glossary Item 8-521-0027 (Approx. 3 pages)
Glossary
Data Processing
In e-discovery, the method by which collected electronically stored information (ESI) is prepared for review.
Processing software varies, but most tools:
- Build an index that counsel can use to search all ESI at once by:
- extracting text from native ESI; and
- using optical character recognition (OCR) to generate searchable text for ESI that does not contain extractable text (such as TIFF images and unreadable PDFs).
- De-duplicate ESI.
- De-NIST ESI.
- Convert ESI to file types that are most effectively displayed and reviewed in a document review platform.
Some processing tools can also perform:
- Clustering.
- E-mail threading.
Counsel often use processing tools to isolate ESI that they reasonably expect is irrelevant to the litigation, so that they can exclude it from the universe of ESI that they ultimately move to the document review platform for review.