Emerging Data

Emerging data sources — chat and instant messaging applications, collaboration and productivity tools, social media and cloud-based platforms — are here to stay, with more on the way. Legal teams must handle and accommodate new collaboration platforms from both information governance and e-discovery perspectives. Future legal matters and investigations will be heavily weighted in these new data sources, and organizations must be able to extract actionable information from them. FTI Consulting provides expert services and proprietary technology that pull data from these digital sources, visually organize it, and integrate it into an organization’s choice of platform for e-discovery, investigation or regulatory response.

How We Help

While a vast array of emerging digital sources are entrenched in organizations around the globe, many companies are unable to control the growth, management and discovery of these new data formats. To compound this problem, third parties typically host the data, but lack standard export workflows or preservation policies, making it difficult to obtain, quantify or assess. And, should the data be relevant for a legal or regulatory matter, few e-discovery applications enable legal teams to organize or review it in context with other information.

The senior experts at FTI Consulting have a deep understanding of these issues, and are adept at delivering discovery and governance solutions for emerging digital sources. In addition, our clients around the world rely on us to help them proactively organize and better manage and protect digital sources as part of a comprehensive information governance program. Our goal is your goal: to obtain more actionable insights faster from across the emerging data source universe.

When you partner with us, we help you develop a strategic and economic approach to collecting, processing, analyzing and reviewing the full spectrum of your emerging data sources. You can view this data alongside more traditional electronically stored information to quickly understand and act upon the content for legal matters, investigations or regulatory responses. We utilize defensible tools and methodologies to ensure that even the most complex new data source is handled in a forensically sound manner.

Our work with global clients has validated that chat is perhaps the most critical and difficult emerging data source to assess. In highly regulated industries such as finance, chat has become the primary communication mechanism and chat logs have become extremely important during investigations or for legal and regulatory responses. And while logs are usually available, they’re only viewable in difficult-to-parse formats that force legal teams to review them slowly and painstakingly — slower than when more traditional, electronically stored information is reviewed. To amend this, we provide a chat data solution that gives legal teams the power to connect directly to the source and transform indecipherable communication logs into easy-to-review conversations. You are then able to integrate chat strings into the normal workflow in your chosen e-discovery platform and save a significant amount of review time while enabling more powerful insights into chat data.