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The Current Market

eDiscovery tools Summation, Relativity, Intella and Nuix all have their place in the litigation support arena. As a technology agnostic myself I tend to try and find the best tool for my client in terms dependent on the size of the case and other factors such as if the data involves more than just documents and emails.

I was discouraged to discover that there was no solution for small to medium-sized cases. The answers I found would not cope with additional reviewers, more data and other factors.

GoldFynch eDiscovery Tool

A few weeks ago I came across Goldfynch and thought I would review some of the features involved in the tool. The website promises Cloud-based eDiscovery, Bank Grade Security, OCR processing, Pay as you go pricing (averages $6/GB/month), No contracts, no commitments and Unlimited users. I started to wonder if it also did the review for my clients too! The company slogan is “If you can use a search engine you can use GoldFynch.” Interestingly GoldFynch is owned by firm search engine firm Mazira who built the tool from the ground up to be intuitive.

GoldFynch is free to trial for the first case limited to 512mb of data. This means reviewers can train using this tool before the case being initiated and pricing is scalable.

Limitations as of 2018

Unfortunately, at the time of writing AD1, XWF, E01, AFF and other forensic container formats were not supported. These formats are used so a litigator can be sure of the integrity and original path of the files has been preserved when the items were captured at the source.  The collection, documentation and preparation of the ESI, therefore, requires a computer forensic expert to prepare the dataset before upload. Additionally, if you have ESI in more exotic formats such as NSF Lotus Notes or Android Mobile SQL Emails the files may need to be converted which takes some time and skill.

The server location may be relevant in multijurisdictional cases, and the cloud processing server is based in the USA currently. I have conversed with GoldFynch, and they are looking at opening servers some other jurisdictions including Europe as the firm develops.

Platform Review

I signed up for GoldFynch cloud platform free 512mb trial and decided to try my hand at processing a sample case with public domain data. The sample dataset included PST, PDF, TIFF, OFFICE and JPG files. The website states, at the time of writing, that PDF, PST, MBOX, MSG, EML, DOC, DOCX, RTF, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, POTX, ODT, TIFF, JPEG, ZIP and RAR files are supported. In fact, I discovered that GoldFynch supports 7z (7zip) and a plethora of other data types not listed.

The datasets were compressed as Zip and 7zip file types. Uploading the data was as easy as selecting an ‘Upload Now’ button in the ‘Files’ tab of the web-based interface.

The upload on my enterprise 50mb broadband connection for the dataset took about 20 minutes. Processing took just under an hour to complete for 556.5 MB of data or 11,861 files. This performance isn’t bad if you factor in the wasted time of software setup, tweaking and moving data to a physical data centre.

If you want to add or remove users, this can be done instantly using the ‘Sharing’ tab. The number of users that can be added to the case is unlimited.  The user is sent a registration email when a valid address is entered. There are three types of user Owner, Admin or User each with their own set of permissions which the new user can be assigned as to avoid unintentional modifications to the case by a reviewer.

When the files are uploading PDF’s and images are automatically OCR’d (made searchable), assigned unique Bate’s numbers and scanned for issues. In the test, GoldFynch’s scanning engine identified seven attachments that required passwords to open and previously non-OCR’d documents were flagged in the search.

Decrypting these files is as comfortable as adding passwords to a bulk password list before or after processing event. These could also be exported out and cracked by a computer forensic examiner.

The ‘Overview’ tab displays a chart as so you can see how much data has been uploaded to a case and the status of the processing of the items.  The Activity sub-tab allows the reviewer to go through the changes regarding tagging the reviewers of the case have made.

The ‘Search’ tab allows examiners to run keyword searches against the dataset. The right-hand column provides for reviewers to filter by file type and date as to quickly find the responsive data. Data can be tagged as CONFIDENTIAL, IMPORTANT, IRRELEVANT, NON-RESPONSIVE or PRIVILEGED. Admin users can easily assign their own bespoke tags.

The advanced search allows for multiple queries to be compounded so that you could easily find results containing just the term ‘GUNS’ equal to or after the 01/01/2018 as shown below.

The ‘Doc Review’ tab has redaction, tagging, download and directory browsing features as found in most review tools. New items are populated fairly quickly, and the interface is intuitive.

The ‘Production’ tab allows the user to export tagged files using a wizard. Paid versions allow export in TIFF, Load File and even Relativity or Concordance formats.

Summary

Goldfynch is a transparently priced tool that could be very useful in small to medium size cases. The power of a cloud-based tool means a forensic expert or IT technician to collect and upload data to the cloud and assign reviewers of that data non-dependant of location. The functionality covers all the fundamental requirements for a review tool and is easy to use.  I am sure new features will be added, without the need for a software upgrade as the service evolves.

Thanks for reading!