Download a PDF version of BlueArc's LDiscovery Case Study
LDiscovery counts on BlueArc to drive its growing business in electronic discovery. Employed by major corporations and law firms to make sure they have the best information at their disposal before heading to court, LDiscovery combines its employees' deep knowledge of forensic science with the unparalleled throughput, scalability and performance of BlueArc's Titan 2000 network storage system to do a better job, faster and at a lower cost than the competition.
Based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Philadelphia and Chicago, LDiscovery is a leading service provider of digital forensics, electronic discovery, data recovery and preservation, network and regulatory compliance audits, and corporate investigations.
With electronic information and services growing ever more indispensable to businesses and the law firms that represent them, the evidence found within storage media can make or break a case. LDiscovery leverages a staff of technical and legal experts that are all former law enforcement officers who helped to establish the best practices in these areas.
"BlueArc really stood out. Scalability was very easy. The functionality was great. The throughput is as good as you're going to get, and that was extremely important."
"In electronic discovery, you need to have tremendous throughput. You're looking at terabytes of information, looking at it again and again. You have to go through large amounts of data very quickly. If you can't, the wait can be excruciating for you and the client."
"Other solutions seemed interesting, but if you bought into them, you had to buy into proprietary applications, and we weren't comfortable with that. With proprietary applications, our experts cannot explain how they work. Our experts look at BlueArc and absolutely understand it, which means they can work with it and, if called to testify, explain all results."
"Ultimately, our clients are interested in our doing the job right, at a reasonable cost, and they want it done as quickly as possible."
-- Leonard Deutchman,For LDiscovery's clients, the most important concerns are speed, accuracy and the all important chain of custody. For that reason, the most important element of their business in terms of IT is a storage solution that provides scalability and throughput. Scale is critical because the electronic discovery process actually creates data on top of the original files where the investigation is focused.
A typical engagement may begin with the company analyzing one terabyte of data, but as forensics experts perform specialized searches, new data is created, often reaching 4 times the capacity, or 4 terabytes, for the single investigation. The new data is created as each activity extracts new metadata, including information about file paths and context, which will be critical when the evidence must pass muster in court. Throughput is important because the faster that LDiscovery can enable its experts to work a discovery, the faster and less costly the service is for the client. Speed and accuracy are the company's core competency.
LDiscovery uses BlueArc's Titan 2000 network storage system as the backbone of its operations. As the company takes on an engagement, it carefully examines its clients' data and keeps forensic images of files up to law enforcement standards. Every bit of evidence that LDiscovery investigates is harvested and gathered as if it were a criminal investigation, ensuring that the results of the discovery will provide its clients with the best evidentiary ground to stand on in court.
"I can't believe how quickly you can turn this stuff around," is a statement that Leonard Deutchman, General Counsel and Managing Partner for LDiscovery, has heard many times from customers. And in the electronic discovery business, this is high praise. As Deutchman elaborates, "Ultimately, our clients are interested in our doing the job right, at a reasonable cost, and they want it done as quickly as possible."
LDiscovery selected the Titan 2000 as the heart of its discovery infrastructure over various alternatives. The company went with BlueArc because of all the vendors in the marketplace, BlueArc delivered the optimal platform to build its own sustainable competitive advantage based on a combination of highly skilled, highly specialized professionals and a storage infrastructure designed to capitalize on its employees' unique skill set. Deutchman explains:
"We have a combination of investigative and legal expertise that I don't think any other company could offer. We do a better job and we charge less. The reason we can do this is because we have experts in this field from the computer forensic side and use tools that other vendors are incapable of using, because they don't have that expertise. The leanest, most culled data set goes into our tool, and it reduces the price of the processing."
Complementing LDiscovery's investigators' expertise are the Titan 2000's unique capabilities. According to Deutchman:
"BlueArc really stood out. Scalability was very easy. The functionality was great. The throughput is as good as you're going to get, and that was extremely important. You need to have a lot of different things in electronic discovery. You need to have tremendous throughput. You're looking at terabytes of information, looking at it again and again. You have to go through large amounts of data very quickly. If you can't, the wait can be excruciating for you and the client."
As Deutchman makes clear, delay is the number one concern for LDiscovery when it begins a project for a client. Hence, the company's major storage requirements of scalability and throughput:
"We needed a solution that can accommodate enormous volumes of data and a search function that is extremely fast. We need storage for archival purposes, but a case can create one to three terabytes of information relatively easily, even if the initial discovery is not that large. Every time you create an image or a search, you are creating a lot of data."
Another important factor in the company's decision to go with the Titan 2000 system was it wasn't a "black-box," as Deutchman explained: "Other solutions seemed interesting, but if you bought into them, you had to buy into proprietary applications, and we weren't comfortable with that. With proprietary applications, our experts cannot explain how they work. Our experts look at BlueArc and absolutely understand it, which means they can work with it and, if called to testify, explain all results."
Considering the success LDiscovery has had with a strategy that allows its highly skilled staff the flexibility to apply their own expertise to discovery, BlueArc's simplicity, performance and functionality have been critical.
The story of LDiscovery and BlueArc is about a company leveraging the ultimate technology available to enhance its value proposition and thus create a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. LDiscovery has been successful because it brought together very experienced professionals from law enforcement and computer forensics to work on behalf of its clients. The company realized that experience is a powerful advantage that is not easily matched by training non-professionals and technicians on proprietary or off the shelf discovery software. By teaming with BlueArc, Discovery has taken the next step, solidifying its advantage in expertise by giving its employees a storage infrastructure that scales and performs at a level unavailable from competitors. The Titan 2000 enables the company to let its investigators do what they do best faster and more flexibly, and that is why they continue to win clients and out-grow their competitors.