Proportional and Defensible Dropbox Data Collection Using FTI Technology’s Connect Solution

An Australian client required support for a complex e-discovery matter involving a substantial volume of data stored within Dropbox, which the company used exclusively enterprise-wide for document management, collaboration and storage. The case required a defensible and proportionate collection of potentially relevant documents for processing into Relativity for legal review. FTI Technology’s emerging data sources experts were engaged to provide an efficient solution while upholding defensibility.

Situation

While Dropbox served as a highly effective collaboration and storage platform for the client, its functionality is not designed for e-discovery capabilities. Because the platform lacks advanced filtering, search, download and targeted export features, legal data collection from the platform at scale is highly challenging. Only a fraction of the client’s five terabyte Dropbox repository was relevant to the matter, however the system did not allow for a targeted data export. Attempting to download and review the full population through Dropbox’s native interface would have posed significant time, cost and proportionality challenges.

Our Role

FTI Technology deployed its proprietary emerging data platform Connect to address these challenges. Connect is purpose-built to facilitate secure, targeted and defensible data collection from cloud-based and collaboration platforms such as Dropbox.

Through Connect’s scalability and flexibility, FTI Technology experts provided the client with:

• An initial metadata extraction to provide full visibility into the entire dataset, including file names, custodians, dates and file types, without conducting a transfer of the actual documents.
• Pre-collection filtering by search terms, date ranges, custodians and file-type exclusions to defensibly and significantly reduce the scope of data to be collected for review.
• Validation of the relevant subset of data within the Dropbox environment.
• Bulk download of only responsive files in a format ready to transfer to the review platform, ensuring no excess or irrelevant data was processed or transferred unnecessarily.

Our Impact

The combination of FTI Technology’s expertise and the capabilities of the Connect solution reduced the total data population set for extraction from Dropbox by 97%. Without Connect, it would not have been feasible for the client to conduct a targeted and defensible collection within the constraints of the matter. The ability to pre-filter data before collection aligned with legal obligations and proportionality principles and resulted in:

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