Restoration and Metadata Extraction

Best practices for data collection, restoration and extraction during eDiscovery, with special focus on complex foreign languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more.

Data Restoration

During data restoration, all documents are transferred to our secure processing servers. Stratify service personnel closely monitor and track the chain of custody of all devices and information throughout the entire process.

Stratify routinely handles complex document extraction and restoration. For example, it is necessary to recursively unpack documents to make all emails and documents available for review. In the case of compound or complex documents such as email messages that contain PST files, which in turn can contain multiple ZIP files, or documents that contain embedded OLE objects, Stratify recursively unpacks them to their basic elements.

Stratify often engineers solutions to recover and process data from out-dated applications, software systems and databases. We can also repair damaged media and recover passwords for encrypted or locked documents.

Metadata Extraction

The Stratify Legal Discovery™ service automatically extracts and preserves all significant metadata from electronic documents and email messages. These include basic metadata fields such as title, author, date/time stamp, etc., and computed metadata fields like hash values (i.e., “digital fingerprints”).

Links between emails and attachments, as well as thread relationships, are maintained and always available during the review. Stratify can easily accommodate client requests to extract and reveal additional metadata. New metadata fields can be added into the database, and metadata for scanned and OCRd paper documents (e.g., bibliographic coding information) can also be added during the review.

Foreign Language Documents

The Stratify Legal Discovery service supports all European languages as well as complex languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Stratify has developed in-depth best practices for the appropriate collection, restoration and extraction of foreign language data. Inattention to these technical details and how they can impact data restoration and metadata extraction can compromise the review by corrupting the data or making it inaccessible in various ways.

Discovery vendors must be well versed in the complexities and variations of data storage and how languages are represented in different computer systems. Especially when dealing with multi-byte languages, developing the expertise and requisite operating procedures to correctly accommodate multiple locales and the various encoding schemes used within locales and specific programs are critical. In the absence of such in-depth understanding and the procedures to support them data can easily be either corrupted or in accessible in various ways.