Suppose your business is involved in bet-the-company litigation and you are aware of critical electronically stored information (ESI) that would help your case. Would you rather receive that data in one hour or one day? Until just recently that choice was not available, and this need for speed, especially when investor dollars are at stake, has kept eDiscovery providers awake at night contemplating a solution.
The eDiscovery process is still relatively new to most companies and law firms, but even novices agree a one-size-fits-all solution is not available. In order to achieve data-delivery at speeds that would be useful to most firms in this situation, the system must simultaneously identify, classify, process and review the data it compiles.
Most lawyers admit they do not understand the technology necessary to move data from electronic storage into viewable formats, but most would agree that simply printing out boxes and boxes of documents is too costly and too inefficient. Lawyers want the ability to quickly scan and access the relevance of documents and store or send them to colleagues securely and easily, without complications. This is where speed matters, because quick document download and review not only increases productivity, it also saves time and ultimately improves the bottom line.
Challenge: fast file transfer of electronically stored data
Exchanging, processing, reviewing and analyzing electronic data can turn into quite a challenge for even the best eDiscovery provider, and these obstacles can take many forms.
For many providers, the prospect of dealing with colossal amounts of electronically stored information is the largest hurdle to overcome. With the sheer volume of stored digital data on the rise and with documents often appearing in disorganized and poorly labeled files, this is an ever-increasing concern.
As recently documented by the 2007 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report, the eDiscovery market continues to escalate. It is presently on track to reach $3.1 billion in 2008 and balloon up to $4.1 billion by 2009. Consequently, more and more firms are, in fact, coming face-to-face with the challenges of eDiscovery on a daily basis.
One of the most common eDiscovery headaches faced by companies involves transferring data as quickly as possible between global offices that may not have the same available technological resources. To solve this issue, firms have turned to eDiscovery service providers that offer increased file transfer acceleration which can speed the process up to 200 times quicker than the traditional FTP (file transfer protocol) approach.
Some eDiscovery software providers would say that they are simply not trained and are ill-equipped to deal with the intricacies of the legal profession. Indeed, it can be difficult at times to decipher the complex requirements posed by the legal environment. On the other hand, legal services providers might chalk up the challenge to not having the correct resources or security apparatus to tailor an eDiscovery response to the particulars of their client’s litigation. This inevitably results in passing on substantial and unneeded risk and costs to the client.
To stay ahead of the curve, eClaris, an eDiscovery consulting firm, recently implemented RocketStream’s accelerated file transfer solutions. Sending a 20 GB file over a DS3 connection with 117-ms latency from
Responding to legal action is more than just being able to store, archive and retrieve digital assets. Electronic delivery speed has just as important a role in the eDiscovery process, the discovery phase of litigation matters. With the steady growth of, and constant changes in, government regulations and mandates, it is imperative that business practices are documented, accounted for and easily retrieved in a swift, secure and reliable approach. Once the information has been reviewed, analyzed and processed, time is of the essence for lawyers who need to transfer and exchange large volumes of electronic data with clients that increasingly are distributed across the country or globally.
For instance, imagine having to quickly, accurately and securely transmit a 10 GB file – a compilation of thousands of pages of stored emails, spreadsheets and IMs – over a 100 Mb/s connection from
Network acceleration solutions are designed to boost the available bandwidth between long distance locations, whether coast to coast or trans-Pacific, as well as speed up the transfer rate of large data files.
TCP vs UDP vs PDP
Terms that once belonged in server rooms and with IT teams, i.e. petabytes, Mbps, pdf files, TIFF or jpeg format – just to name a few – are now common lingo with law firms and consultants. Programs and users may aggregate multiple documents into compressed files, such as the commonly-used .ZIP format. A single ZIP file may contain hundreds, if not thousands, of files. Furthermore, a ZIP file may even contain additional ZIP files, which may contain additional ZIP files.
Almost every industry now transfers vast amounts of data to and from remote servers, and it is no surprise that the scope of large, data-intensive, globally distributed legal documents continues to soar. In response to this increase in data transfer, companies and Internet Service Providers have been connecting users to higher-bandwidth pipes more than ever before.
For the past few decades, most computer users have been relying on the FTP (File Transfer Protocol)-over-TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) approach to move files between computers. While this method is adequate for exchanging small files over short distances, today’s applications generate ever-increasing file sizes. Users are also continuously increasing their available bandwidth pipes, often under the mistaken impression that bandwidth is the limiting factor in transmission throughput.
When networks experience latency, either due to router hops, congestion, or just because of geographic distances, TCP slows down the transfer of data. Although FTP and secure FTP sites are designed to handle transmission of large datasets, they are susceptible to this slowdown, which can reduce throughput to a crawl. In extreme cases, network latency can cause FTP transfer speeds to decrease by over 99%.
Compelling alternatives to TCP exist in a combination of two protocols: various implementations of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and a proprietary implementation of TCP, called Parallel Delivery Protocol (PDP).
UDP is a communications protocol that offers transfer service when messages are exchanged between computers in a network. Unlike TCP, UDP is not inherently a dependable protocol. However, reliable variations of the original UDP now exist and have proven to have far better characteristics for high-performance file transfer functionalities. It is apparent that for global exchange of very large file sets over large pipes, common in many of today’s litigation matters, the new, reliable UDP implementations are far superior to FTP-over-TCP. However, there are occasions when pipe sizes are smaller or firewall issues prevent easy implementation of UDP.
Smaller law firms, branch offices, or home offices may not have sufficiently large data pipes to take full advantage of UDP’s high-powered acceleration. These smaller offices also may not have the IT knowledge or easy access to firewall settings in order to open UDP ports. In these cases, the PDP protocol, which consists of several simultaneous TCP streams, is more appropriate. PDP has the inherent reliability and firewall-friendliness of TCP, while still providing acceleration over TCP in the presence of network latency through these multiple TCP streams.
Depending on network conditions, both PDP and UDP can significantly outperform standard FTP-over-TCP. The choice now is more often between UDP and PDP. In general UDP is faster than PDP for very large data pipes, typically greater than 10 Mb/s, or for transoceanic distances. On the other hand, PDP can often outperform UDP on smaller pipes and over shorter distances. PDP even outperforms Windows Explorer in LAN environments, where latency is typically quite small. Perhaps most importantly, PDP uses standard TCP ports instead of UDP, making it ideal for environments where it is undesirable to open the firewall to UDP.
Staying on top of eDiscovery technology trends
Regulations are continually changing and updating. In order to comply with their discovery responsibilities, legal departments are working closely with IT organizations and technology vendors to find and implement a solution that meets lawful requirements. Corporations that are required to present information for litigation need to ensure their eDiscovery technology vendors can adapt to these changes.
Additional functions such as data encryption, file transfer automation, and lossless data compression complement the raw data acceleration provided by the new protocols commercially available today.
Success in the modern litigation environment requires information technology tools that are immune to geography, easy to use, quick, reliable, and secure. The availability of these tools eliminates the need to wait for physical media to arrive by courier or overnight delivery. Today’s connected world demands, and provides, more.
Dr. Steffen Koehler is currently the chief marketing officer for RocketStream, Inc., a software subsidiary for Voyant International Corp. Michael Swarz, J.D. is marketing director for eClaris, LLC.
