From text messages to social media data, information held on a mobile device is admissible in court, but collecting and analyzing such data is far more difficult than doing so from desktop computers. In many cases, the inability to properly control and review mobile device data is posing significant compliance and legal risks for companies.
Given the growing need to tame mobile device data, e-discovery service providers are racing to create mobile-focused solutions and processes. QDiscovery is one of the latest to release a mobile e-discovery-related service, with its recent launch of QMobile Insight. Here's a look at what the service offers, the technology it uses and how QDiscovery strives to set itself apart from a growing field of competitors.
What it is: QMobile Insight is a service for general counsel and law firms that collects and reformats mobile device data so it can be used in proprietary e-discovery platforms like kCura's Relativity and Exterro's e-discovery suite.
David Barrett, CEO of QDiscovery, explained that the goal of QMobile Insight is to allow e-discovery practitioners to "utilize the full functionality" of e-discovery platforms and apply advanced analytics with mobile data "just as they would any other file."
He added that such functionality is rarely possible without reformatting the mobile data, and that typically, it is "downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet or dumped off into one PDF file. So you've got all the data, but you can't really do much with it."
In addition to reformatting mobile device data, QMobile Insight also offers its clients a customized dashboard for Relativity as another way to perform analytics on their mobile device data.
Under the hood: Like other e-discovery service providers, QMobile Insight collects mobile device data using Cellebrite, a manufacturer of data extraction and analysis technology. Once in possession of the data, QMobile Insight's custom scripting software renders it into formats that can be used in common industry e-discovery platforms. The mobile data that QMobile Insight can reformat includes text messages, emails and social media data that is saved to the device's hard drive or physical storage.
Barrett noted that as of yet, QDiscovery has been able to keep up with the types of mobile data in the market, but that it's keeping an eye out for any new ones "on the horizon."
"We can never say never because things change rapidly," he added.
Competition: QMobile Insight joins a host of established and new e-discovery service providers offering mobile discovery and forensics abilities in the legal marketplace. Planet Data, for example, uses Cellebrite as well as its own developed platforms to review, process and analyze mobile device data, while e-discovery provider Nuix, who partnered with Cellebrite in 2013, also offers similar mobile discovery and processing capabilities.