Early Data Assessment Details

Data can be sent to Nextpoint either on usb hard drives, or transferred to a case-specific file room (NOTE: Data sets requiring downloading to the Nextpoint office will require additional time before processing can begin).

During processing, date and time fields are pulled from the intrinsic properties of a given document.  If date and time from the original operating system is needed, a forensic copy must be collected and sent to Nextpoint.

Nextpoint is not responsible for forces beyond our control such as data/drives lost in transit or drive mechanical failures.  Data sent to Nextpoint must therefore be a copy, no single copy data will be accepted. As such no copies or backups will be made to prevent data loss.

Nextpoint will store the processed data, work product, index, and database files for a period of 90 days starting with the opening of the project. After 90 days, a Nextpoint Data Associate will contact you in order to determine whether the data will remain in active storage for a cost of $5/GB/month, archived to a usb drive for a cost of $150, or be deleted. Projects that are archived will be returned to you and can be restored to active status if new files need to be processed. The active storage hosting fee will then be charged.

Quality of data collections vary wildly, due to this, corrective actions may need to be taken and will cause delays in processing. When possible, collected PSTs should be under 10 GB in size. Corrective actions on larger files may be billed at an additional hourly charge. In cases where multiple attempts have been made to fix data files to no avail, Nextpoint will ask for a recollection.

Archives with zero extracted files or mismatched expected file count will be addressed on import in a quality control pass. Individual file processing and indexing errors will not be addressed, only reported upon.

Files may be password protected. Password protected archives prevent documents from being extracted. Password protected individual files may prevent indexing of that file. It is most efficient to provide any possible passwords prior to processing. A password bank of those provided passwords will be used to decrypt the files identified as encrypted during processing. Un-encrypting files after processing may incur additional hourly charges.

The following reports will be provided upon completion of processing:

Archive Extraction Errors– File listing of the archive error files within the report scope which includes details about the error messages received and general descriptive information regarding the error file.

ESI Filter Report – This shows how a data set was reduced via the filtering and culling settings within the system. If the number of archives in the Report Header of this report is subtracted from the Post Duplicate Removal Total Files count, this is the number you would receive when running any of the other reports using the Project Level Deduplication setting.

File Type Frequency – This report groups the files within the report scope by application type. Within the report the pie chart shows the top X% of the file types within the report scope and the table below gives a listing of every file type identified, the number of these files, and the associated size.

Document Timeline Report – Shows the files contained within the report scope on a timeline. Date Sent is used for emails and Last Modified Date is used for efiles. Attachment counts are added into the overall emails counts within the report. The visual shows a line charts by month or year with a different color line per Custodian and the table provides a workable listing broken down by Custodian, month/year, efile, emails, size, and percentage of files within the scope. This report is helpful for understanding trends within the data related to collection and work product details.

Sender Domains Report – A listing of the sender domains as well as the associated email addresses per domain contained within the report scope. the chart details the top 10 domains within the report scope and the table details all domains available within the scope as well as the associated email addresses and items sent by the domain/sender.

Recipient Domains Report – A listing of the recipient (To, CC, BCC) domains as well as the associated email addresses per domain contained within the report scope. The chart details the top 10 domains within the report scope and the table details all domains available within the scope as well as the associated email addresses and items received by the domain/recipient.

If search terms are provided, an additional search keyword report will also be provided.

Keyword Term Hits – Contains all project search terms the files in the data set are responsive to. When using a Keyword Group or Search Term scoping setting users have the ability to isolate terms to only report back on the terms or terms within the Keyword Group selected as the report scope. The search counts included are based upon the scope of the report.

Nextpoint will assign custodians upon request. Please note that the custodian of a piece of data is not intrinsic to that data, rather it is an employee or other person or group with ownership, custody, or control over potentially relevant information. For example, an individual custodian’s electronically stored information (ESI) usually includes their mail file, whereas a group custodian’s ESI may include a shared network folder.

Due to this, custodians cannot be assigned without direction as to how the data was collected. Email archives collected and combined into a single PST file with multiple folders can be split among multiple custodians after processing has been completed. Assignment of more than 10 custodians in a single import may be billed as an additional hourly charge.

Master date of the document is the date used for filtering and date restrictions. Master date will be generated from the date sent of parent email for emails and their attachments and the last modified date for efiles.

When applying date restrictions, the kept documents are inclusive of the chosen date (master date as described above).

By default, Nextpoint will process all date ranges and file types received. It is possible, though not recommended, to filter by date or file type upon import. These filters would preclude those specified files from being entered into the database and full reprocessing would be necessary to go back and add them at a later time.

Nextpoint’s default setting is to suppress inline email attachment images from becoming separate stand alone documents. The inline attachments will be added to the Filtered columns in the Project and Import Snapshots. Please note, inline attachments are embedded in the body of an email. Examples of inline attachments are images within a signature line of an email, or any other item that is not properly attached to the email like a screenshot. If getting text for embedded screenshots through OCR is desired, this setting should not be selected.

For most matters, Nextpoint does not enable filtering of NIST documents. If it is found that the data is collected from client’s computers, this option can be turned on to removed non-user generated files.

Nextpoint dedupes email families and loose files globally across all custodians. To do so a MD5 hash value is generated, for emails, from Date Sent, Sender Name, Sender Email Address, Recipient Email Addresses, Display To, Display CC, Display BCC, Subject, Body, Attachment Names, Attachment Size and for loose files the bit stream of that file.

Upon import into the review platform, more custom deduplication is available based on message id of emails (while checking for differences in attachment count and BCC fields) at an additional hourly charge.

Imaging of documents imported after the EDA process are done by the Nextpoint Review application and generally follow the guideline of printing the document in its last saved state. If specific, by document type, imaging settings are needed, this can be done for an additional hourly charge.

Regardless of the timezone chosen at the time of processing, Nextpoint will image the date sent of the email with its original time and offset.

Upon processing each document will have its text indexed for searching.

If keywords searching is desired, syntax should be supplied in dtSearch syntax. Consultation on terms and syntax is available for an additional hourly charge.

Please note that the words below are considered stop words by default. This is to ensure proper functionality of the index. If you require one of these words to be included in a search, the default settings can be modified to accommodate the term.

Search Stop Words:

a	came	him	much	still	very
about	can	himself	must	such	was
after	come	how	my	take	way
all	could	however	never	than	we
also	did	i	not	that	well
an	do	if	now	the	were
and	each	in	of	their	what
another	even	indeed	on	them	when
any	for	into	only	then	where
are	from	is	or	there	which
as	further	it	other	therefore	while
at	furthermore	its	our	these	who
be	get	just	out	they	will
been	got	like	over	this	with
before	has	made	said	those	would
being	have	me	see	thus	your
between	he	might	she	to
both	her	more	should	too
but	here	moreover	since	under
by	hi	most	some	up