Growing Data Footprint Spurs a Refresh of Investigations and E-Discovery Best Practices Across Asia

Summary

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• The volume of data drawn from emerging sources has reached unprecedented levels
• These kinds of data produce particular challenges in relation to their access, management, extraction and analysis
• Driven by litigation arising in the U.S., e-discovery teams in the Asia must adapt to new, creative solutions and workflows
• This will allow legal and investigations teams to better deal with new challenges

The visibility and use of non-traditional, or emerging, data sources reached an all-time high over the past two years, with cloud and collaboration applications experiencing unprecedented adoption by businesses.  Real-time mobile messaging tools are increasingly being used for a mix of personal and business purposes in Asia — WeChat has more than 1.2 billion users while DingTalk has more than 500 million, as well as more than 19 million institutional users.

These developments have driven tremendous growth in the volume and variety of data within most organizations and a subsequent rise in challenges relating to how this data is accessed and managed for numerous functions. In an investigations and e-discovery context, the average volume of data processed jumped significantly in the last year, with emerging data sources accounting for a growing portion of the total. Whilst people are using traditional email much less for internal communications, there has been a greater focus on using Microsoft Teams, Slack and other collaboration tools for meetings, collaborative file editing, and file sharing. There are a range of issues that can arise as a result, particularly in data collection, extraction and review. In China and the Asia Pacific region, these include: