So instead of saying we exclusively do data discovery for litigation, I could say, more correctly, that we do business consulting in addition to data and document management for Litigation Discovery. At an event, this is normally where the questioner mutters their excuses and disappears to the restroom, lol.

Litigation Discovery is about understanding the meaning of data, not from its inherent content, but from the definitions and descriptions stored as part of that data’s structure. Strictly speaking this is meta-meta-data – metadata means literally ‘about data’  – so meta-meta-data is about the data that describes the data itself.

However we can draw the same distinction between metadata discovery and metadata access as we did between their ‘data’ counterparts. Having metadata access does not imply an ability to discover.

Lots of companies and products in the Business Consulting especially in the Document Management space which have some level of metadata access capability. If you know what database tables you are after, they will pull back some basic descriptive information about said table. Rarely will that include things like relationships to other content.

A single Document Management option tool won’t help you; clients need options

Of course you could ask a suitably knowledgeable person – they will be able to help you – but at a price – maybe a direct cost – or  an indirect cost because they are not doing what they should be doing while helping you. And of course each time you need to ask a ‘discovery’ question, you are back at square one.

So that’s what we do at EDDM Consulting. Of course there’s a bit more to it than that. But this is my floor.

We are  Document Management specialists, providing end-to-end Document Control solutions, including consultancy, and resources