IBM Expands eDiscovery Portfolio With New Software to Help With Legal Case Assessment and the Search for Evidence

ARMONK, NY - 24 Sep 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM [1]) today announced eDiscovery Analyzer, new conceptual search and content analysis software to help legal professionals accelerate eDiscovery as they collect and assess evidence, agree upon search terms, and cull information for use in legal cases.

IBM also announced today that Toyota Financial Services, a leading provider of automotive financial services, is using the IBM eDiscovery Solution to address its growing e-mail management and legal discovery requirements.

"We were looking for a way to meet our Sarbanes-Oxley and Financial Services Authority regulatory compliance needs while implementing a system that would help us archive the hundreds of thousands of e-mails and attachments that we manage on a daily basis," said Hemant Sohoni, Toyota Financial Services (UK) PLC. "IBM and Neocol UK provided us with the solution that we were looking for to meet our eDiscovery needs."

IBM eDiscovery Analyzer

IBM eDiscovery Analyzer, together with the recently announced IBM eDiscovery Manager, provide the foundation for an in-house eDiscovery platform, enabling organizations to become more proactive in controlling electronic information and more agile in responding to litigation, while reducing cost by decreasing the volume of information reviewed outside the organization.

Using the scalable IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, IBM eDiscovery collects, organizes, manages and retrieves relevant enterprise information in a security-rich, access-and-change audited manner. It enables a disciplined approach that helps reduce cost and risk while delivering ongoing operational benefits.

IBM eDiscovery Analyzer is designed to help legal professionals and litigation support specialists:

• Quickly identify and eliminate irrelevant and non-responsive e-mails to reduce case matter to a much smaller and relevant data set, helping reduce eDiscovery review costs
  
• Gain early insight into a case, understand key facts, locate key pieces of evidence, identify key witnesses and communication threads, and form early case strategies
  
• Flag, organize and prioritize documents for review, define the appropriate review strategy and optimize resources for review
  
• Gain a clear view of available case matter to effectively negotiate queries and term lists during the Meet and Confer stage
  
• Preserve chain of custody information to ensure security, auditability and defensibility

A single and secure repository for Toyota's e-mail

Toyota Financial Services needed a strategic solution that could be used as a content repository for human resource documentation and correspondence, and support the human resource department for litigation needs. With the combined IBM-Neocol offering, Toyota Financial Services will collect and archive more than 1.3 million e-mails and attachments -- about 100,000 e-mails per day -- in a single and secure repository. Here they will be dynamically accessible and help the company become more agile in responding to litigation requests.

Toyota Financial Services is also using IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino and IBM Content Manager to help increase the operational efficiency of their messaging system and reduce their escalating storage costs, while IBM eDiscovery Manager is used to help accelerate their eDiscovery processes. The company is extending the reach of enterprise content management (ECM) standardization to their corporate legal departments that currently help archive, manage, share and deliver critical business information.

"Our clients are looking for a more effective way to collect, store, manage and retrieve their information," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, product and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "This solution is built upon our complete ECM platform to provide a new approach to the process of eDiscovery. With the added capabilities of the new IBM eDiscovery Analyzer, organizations can now obtain detailed insight into discovered content early on in the process to help improve their legal strategy and reduce cost."

IBM eDiscovery Analyzer will be available later this month from IBM and IBM Business Partners. For more information on IBM's eDiscovery software, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/ediscovery.html [2].

Neocol is an IBM Information Management Business Partner, involved in the implementation and support of ECM technology in some of the largest examples of successful archiving in the world. For more information on Neocol, visit: http://www.neocol.com [3]

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.