FTI Consulting Launches Custom-Built, Universal Office 365 Connector for E-Discovery

Global News

03
Feb
2020

Editor

FTI Consulting, Inc. today announced that its Technology segment has launched a universal Microsoft Office 365 connector, which eliminates unnecessary steps during the transfer of Microsoft Office 365 email and files to e-discovery platforms and supports efficient e-discovery in litigation, investigations and other matters.

By allowing legal teams to keep documents in their native formats during e-discovery processing, analysis and review, FTI Technology’s Office 365 connector saves time and reduces the complexity of moving documents from multiple sources into a single platform.

“Legal teams need e-discovery to be as simple and efficient as possible in order to manage the growing cost, volume and variety of data types they now face,” said Daryl Teshima, a Senior Managing Director within FTI Technology. “Technology has started to catch up, and practitioners have a breadth of advanced tools and analytics at their disposal. Still, the tools are often disjointed, creating extra steps, time and complications to load documents from their sources into e-discovery platforms. We built the Microsoft Office 365 connector to help our clients address this issue and provide direct access to the major applications that contain their data.”

Of the 81 percent of organizations that have migrated to cloud services, more than half use Microsoft Office 365. With an estimated 155 million business users, it has become the most prevalent business cloud service in use, making it a massive source of documents and information that may come into scope in litigation, regulatory inquiries and investigations.

When legal teams must extract documents from Microsoft Office 365 or other repositories in response to such a matter, they use applications to connect their e-discovery platform to the data source. These applications typically translate the files from their native format into a unique type for e-discovery processing, analysis and review. This process can be cumbersome and adds excess time and cost, while introducing the potential for certain data to be lost in translation. FTI Technology’s connector maintains Office 365 files in their native form, removing excess steps from the process and ensuring that counsel can see every element of a document, including those that are only visible in the original format.

“Working to build client-centric, innovative solutions that boost efficiency and overcome new challenges is central to FTI Technology’s unique approach,” said Tim Anderson, a Managing Director within FTI Technology. “In e-discovery, pulling documents from disparate cloud-based sources can be difficult enough, and we realized that the conventional way of doing it adds unnecessary time and cost. Our clients had a pressing need for a better way to access their Office 365 data, and this new solution is part of what will become a suite of universal connectors that bridge native files from all data environments to leading e-discovery platforms.”

FTI Technology is exhibiting at Legaltech New York, at booth #2018. Mr. Anderson will be a panelist at the conference session, “A New Decade of eDiscovery: Fundamental Shifts in Big Data, Case Law, and In-House Demands,” on February 4 at 2 p.m. ET.