The management of eDiscovery data brings conflicting challenges. Data must be accessible to those who need to see it but kept away from others. Logs recording steps in the process must be transparent but the results of that process and the thinking behind it are intended for a select audience.

On the face of it, encryption is the answer to security issues. Conventional encryption / decryption, however, inevitably brings latency which is at odds with the need for speed as reviewers pass quickly through documents; that is especially so when those “documents” are large media files like audio or video.

According to Ian Campbell, CEO of eDiscovery software company iCONECT, the answer lies in blockchain, and iCONECT has executed a letter of intent with encryption technology company Leonovus for this purpose.

iCONECT’s press release says that the Leonovus technology “digitally scrambles and shreds electronic files rendering the data unreadable”. Unauthorised people see “an illegible pile of digital nuggets”. iCONECT and Leonovus are working together to devise a method of displaying the reconstituted files so that the user sees files in their native format in iCONECT-XERA.

The “nuggets” are stored in different locations and, without access to the blockchain technology, a casual visitor just sees a marker in the data store.

I talked to Ian Campbell about this at Legaltech and the interview is here.

Ian Campbell’s focus in this interview was on the logging mechanism and the ability to replicate logs into an immutable record showing who made what changes. Ian Campbell says that he has met considerable interest not just for this purpose but for production logging and redaction logging.

This is still work in progress and we can expect to see results by Q3 2018.

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