IBM eDiscovery Software Helps Organizations Win the Compliance Battle

ARMONK, NY - 05 Aug 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software designed to help clients meet challenging legal discovery requirements. The new IBM eDiscovery solutions extend IBM’s ECM software platform to enable organizations to proactively take control of electronically stored information across the enterprise, helping to reduce eDiscovery costs and improve responsiveness to litigation.

IBM’s eDiscovery software helps companies manage the entire eDiscovery process by enabling them to automate the collecting, searching and classifying critical information across multiple content sources, while maintaining security and the ability to track changes. The software will allow companies to move from scattered, point-solution approaches to a disciplined approach that controls electronic information, helps support Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) compliance, manages risk and delivers ongoing operational benefits.

“In today’s litigious environment, legal discovery and industry regulations are driving us to address the way we store, manage and retrieve information,” said Rashid Mahmood, Lotus Notes Systems Manager, The Thomas Miller Group. “IBM’s eDiscovery offerings will help us manage the rapidly growing in-house requirements for litigation-driven electronic discovery, while helping us alleviate corporate compliance concerns.”

IBM’s eDiscovery software is the first to leverage a complete ECM platform to transform the process of eDiscovery by proactively managing electronically stored evidence. The new eDiscovery software integrates with IBM’s auto-classification and records management technology to help IT departments manage information for compliance and electronic discovery requests. IBM eDiscovery software also integrates with IBM’s content-centric business process management (BPM) capabilities to help organizations standardize, control and automate legal discovery workflows and enable third-party components as needed.

The cornerstone component of IBM’s solution is the new IBM eDiscovery Manager, which enables organizations to better control the eDiscovery process by bringing key eDiscovery tasks in house. This helps clients more easily manage electronically stored information; provide earlier insights into collected evidence; and prioritize downstream evidence review, analysis and production.

eDiscovery Manager helps authorized IT and legal users search, cull, hold and export case-relevant email evidence. Utilizing IBM’s ECM technology as a base, eDiscovery Manager helps customers address the crushing volumes of uncontrolled, electronically stored information and enable a more productive, agile response to litigation.

“The explosion of electronic content presents challenges for organizations to retain and produce information efficiently and accurately when needed,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president, product and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. “Our eDiscovery offerings enable customers to have insight into knowing what information exists, where it is stored, how long it must be kept and how to locate it.”

IBM eDiscovery Manager utilizes IBM’s email archiving solutions, leverages IBM’s ECM repositories, and supports an easy-to-use interface that is optimized for high performance search and retrieval for improved user productivity. IBM’s capabilities complement each other without significant development and integration costs, allowing for faster deployment of a security-rich, extendable and scalable enterprise platform that can be used to achieve legal compliance, but without the risks and costs of point solutions or placing the burden of integration on business users.

IBM eDiscovery software is an integral part of the IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control. This solution combines software, hardware and services to enable organizations to achieve, sustain and prove compliance with multiple legal and compliance mandates, while reducing cost, complexity and risk. The combination of IBM eDiscovery software and IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control provides the robust foundation necessary to implement a complete solution for evidence preservation.

IBM eDiscovery also supports IBM’s broader Information Governance strategy, which helps clients define, enforce and monitor policies related to the control and quality of information.

IBM eDiscovery Manager will be available at the end of August.

For more information on IBM’s eDiscovery software, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/ediscovery.html.

Each IBM customer is responsible for ensuring its own compliance with legal requirements. It is the customer’s sole responsibility to obtain advice of competent legal counsel as to the identification and interpretation of any relevant laws and regulatory requirements that may affect the customer’s business and any actions the customer may need to take to comply with such laws. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the customer is in compliance with any law.