Legal and Technical Terms
Metadata
Information about data. In e-discovery, this includes properties such as creation date, author, attachment links, and file system paths. Preserving metadata is vital for establishing authenticity.
Spoliation
The intentional or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. This often leads to severe judicial sanctions.
ESI
Electronically Stored Information. This refers to any data that is created, altered, copied, and stored in a digital format across any device or cloud platform.
Bates Stamping
A method of marking documents with unique identifying numbers for identification and retrieval during the discovery and trial phases of litigation.
Chain of Custody
A chronological documentation or paper trail showing the seizure, custody, control, transfer, and analysis of physical or electronic evidence.
Forensic Imaging
The process of creating a bit stream copy of an original electronic medium to ensure that every single bit of data is captured without altering the original.
Legal Hold
A communication issued by legal counsel to custodians and IT staff instructing them to preserve all forms of relevant information when litigation is anticipated.
Native Format
The original file format in which a document was created, such as a .docx for Word or .pst for Outlook email stores.