The NZ E-Discovery Blog  Facilitating proportionate and efficient e-discovery

Reviewing Email Chains

July 24th, 2024

Email has dramatically transformed how we communicate, but emails, or more precisely the never-ending email chains/threads can still cause many issues in the discovery process.

It does surprise me there can still be confusion around email chains.

In some ways, emails were yesterday’s challenge as we now have so many different sources of information as people are using other ways to communicate – often holding key discoverable information.

In speaking to many, they still struggle to grapple with how to handle emails.

Still, we are now in 2024, and emails have been part of eDiscovery for many years now – so too have the tools to identify their relationship to other emails.

Why am I still bringing this up – well it is still coming up ! So much more often than you would think, or it should. Sometimes I do need to check the year we are in, as I am sure I was having these conversations some 10-15 years ago.

Obviously there are so many evolving data sources than simply email, as well as how generative AI may be deployed further in the eDiscovery process, but email chains are still real issues for many, although we do have simple solutions.

Too much focus on listing emails

For me the issue is the pre-occupation of the listing of documents. Yes many still focus on this as a key part of eDiscovery – we should all be using the extracted metadata (as we should have been doing for the past 10 years really).

On most matters, just the metadata should be used, which will be from the top-level email of the email chain. If you have other emails in the chain in your collection of information (and they are relevant) then they will also be listed with the email at the top of the chain

The metadata will be what is there – no more, no less.

I think anyone that has read my posts, will know my view around spending needless money on listing documents (or any needless parts of the process for that matter), when the metadata can be used to list the documents.

If you are going to manually list, then listing the endpoint (or some may call top-level) will suffice. If for any reason this is going to be an issue, I would suggest raising this with the other party, or at the first case management conference, when you are addressing the Discovery Checklist.

Too often when people look at “how we are going to treat emails” – there are much bigger issues for parties to co-operate over than just how they are to list emails. As I have said before we need to be more targeted and do so earlier in the matter.

The efficiency of email chains is in the review

The true advantage of technology to manage to manage email chains is not in the listing phase, but in the review of these emails.

Grouping similar documents together helps increase the efficiency of the review.

If emails within chain are reviewed out of sequence, or by different reviewers there is a chance they may be tagged inconsistently. This leads to considerably frustration and inefficiency as you are often reviewing the same email, but at a different time. It speeds up the entire review process and removes inconsistencies that may crop up.

The technology is not new as it has been around for well over 10 years, which are becoming even simpler and more consistent to understand. Most eDiscovery tools do this. If your tool doesn’t facilitate this – it is probably time to look at a tool that does.

When you next think about emails in the discovery process, think of how to most efficiently review them, instead of just listing them.

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