IBM launches eDiscovery Manager software to help enterprises find and manage information that may be relevant to litigation.

Editor's Note: This blog has been revised based on new information.

IBM recently launched eDiscovery Manager, a software platform that aims to help IT and legal counsel find relevant information across the enterprise.

The software integrates with other content repositories, such as SharePoint, and competing ECM platforms including Documentum and OpenText, out of the box.

The software as yet does not have out-of-box connectors to third-party e-mail archives. Instead, e-mail archive administrators can export mail in the PST or NFS file formats to a file server, and the eDiscovery platform can then import it from there. Customers can also build their own one-off, custom connectors between the e-mail archive and eDiscovery Manager via APIs.

Given e-mail's prime role in electronic discovery, I'd like to see vendors like IBM make more of an effort on behalf of their customers to work with archives out of the box . E-mail is central to corporate discovery efforts. Courtrooms are littered with companies that have been undone by "smoking gun" e-mails or seen their cases blown out of the water because they screwed up e-mail discovery. Streamlined integration between discovery tools and e-mail archives should be a vendor priority.

That said, the software platform provides important features. It lets authorized IT and legal users create case files, search reams of corporate data for potentially relevant information, cull those reams to weed out irrelevant data, preserve what's left, and present the bundle to legal review tools and even opposing counsel.

It also maintains log files of all the actions taken by users of the system to provide an audit trail, which the opposition is likely to request.

Other e-discovery competitors, including Autonomy's Zantaz Introspect, Guidance Software's EnCase eDiscover, and Kazeon's Information Server, offer similar features.

Note that eDiscovery Manager has to run on top of an IBM enterprise content management platform, either Content Manager or FileNet P8.