Digging for Lost Emails

Discover how ArcherHall’s eDiscovery experts developed custom software to recover hundreds of gigabytes of lost emails under strict court deadlines.

The Situation

Our client required access to copies of emails recorded on their company email journaling system to use as evidence for their defense in court. Due to technical difficulties with the system, extracting the information needed was becoming a long and arduous procedure. The judge’s concerns about delays in the discovery process mounted extra pressure on the attorneys, who were told to provide the digital evidence as quickly as possible.

The Challenge

The client’s email journaling system had undergone several outages in the past, and the client was having difficulty extracting data needed for their court case. The vendor of the journaling system tried to utilize the manufacturer’s scripts in order to extract the relevant data, but ran into several technical issues. Under time pressure from the judge, ArcherHall took responsibility for the collection of the digital evidence.

The Solution

After taking control of the collection process, our team began to manually extract the emails from the system, but quickly realized that this method would be extremely time-consuming. In order to finish the extraction in time for the deadline agreed by both parties, an innovative approach was required. In response to the encroaching deadline, ArcherHall’s technical staff analyzed the proprietary file format of the journaling system and wrote custom software to extract the emails and convert them into standard and accessible formats.

The Outcome

Using the specially-designed custom software, ArcherHall succeeded in extracting hundreds of gigabytes worth of email data, even recovering emails that were previously thought to be permanently unavailable. We provided the attorneys with all of the data they requested, responsive to the search terms that were relevant to the case. This was all achieved within a few short days, meeting the deadline so that the client could proceed to use the digital evidence in court.

Key Success

Custom software solution under extreme time constraints, resulting in the retrieval of hundreds of gigabytes of previously inaccessible emails which were used by the client as digital evidence in court.

We are a leading provider of computer forensics and e-discovery services for businesses and law firms nationwide. We don’t take chances with your data when litigation is a possibility, and proper handling is critical.