Make sure you validate the claims of any ediscovery vendor
January 25th, 2012 by Pat 
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Vendors will use a lot of marketing jargon and claims to sell their own solutions, and tout them over the competitor’s solutions. If you are in the market for an ediscovery solution, or are comparing the various ediscovery companies offerings, make sure that you validate the various claims as made by the salespeople. Organizations should be particularly vigilant in validating claims around the vendor’s capabilities with regards to search, and search functionality. Make sure you validate the non functional requirements of each vendor solution, including but not limited to the following points. Determine the search speed and metrics, and compare these against a benchmark. Commonly held speed metrics would suggest that a few archives can search through billions of records for a random key word in less than a minute. The archive should also be able to perform proximity searches, meaning that functionality exists to search for a word within 6 or so words of another word. Archive should also be able to return the same results if the word order is reversed, and obviously be able to prove search completeness. Therefore some form of proof should be shown that the archive has searched through 100% of the intended target data. After short listing of ediscovery vendors, it may be appropriate to undertake a proof of concept to validate any claims made by the vendor.
