Spoliation

Spoliation is the act of concealing or materially altering evidence that could reasonably be considered relevant to ongoing or future legal proceedings. It is a criminal offense in US federal law, as well as international law, and penalties can include hefty fines or even incarceration for the parties responsible. In addition, the destruction of information that is relevant to ongoing litigation or criminal proceedings can be interpreted as evidence against those responsible, shifting the burden of proof in favor of the claimant. The duty of preventing spoliation is fundamental to the judicial process, and therefore operates irrespective of whether there are any applicable statutory requirements concerning records retention.

The tremendous range of digital formats such as email, voice, and video, and the sheer proliferation of unstructured information have dramatically increased the risk of spoliation, whether inadvertent or deliberate. Although the most severe sanctions, such as entry of default judgment or incarceration, tend to be reserved for the deliberate destruction of digital evidence, in several cases courts have issued severe penalties for the negligent destruction of data. If pertinent information is inadvertently or deliberately altered in any way, the consequences for the enterprise can be catastrophic.

Ambiguity - The principal challenge in dealing with the threat of spoliation is that unstructured information contains no native instructions or metadata that would signify its relevance to legal proceedings.

Manual Effort - The manual approach to dealing with this problem requires the full-time effort of entire teams leafing through materials page by page to establish relevance in conjunction with a specific case. This method can only operate retrospectively, is incredibly onerous and prone to human error.

Local Volumes - Employees out in the field can store information on their local machines rather than on a central server, which can prevent relevant information from being retrieved.

Confidentiality - Giving detailed instructions to large numbers of employees on exactly what must not be altered risks compromising the enterprise reputation by revealing the subject of legal proceedings.

Legacy Approaches - Primitive techniques attempt to locate material information solely by using keywords which fail to convey the nonlinear concepts behind information. Materiality is entirely dependent on context and without also identifying the subtle implications of the same words in different documents, it is impossible to reduce the risk of spoliation.

How Does Autonomy ZANTAZ Resolve the Challenge of Spoliation?

Autonomy ZANTAZ is a conceptual technology which is able to restrict privileges to alter or delete specific information, without human intervention. It reduces the risk of spoliation by proactively assuring material information remains unaltered and by maintaining the forensic integrity of information when it is ingested or processed. Autonomy ZANTAZ creates an auditable record of all human interaction with data, constructing a single, massively scalable consolidated archive in order to ensure pertinent documents within large volumes of unstructured information are preserved. The technology ensures maximum confidentiality is maintained at all times, and avoids disclosing potentially damaging information to other stakeholders. In this way it preserves the corporate reputation and simultaneously imposes minimal behavioral change on the workforce.