Ediscovery and compliance are no longer reactive endeavors. Organizations must be proactive in order to mitigate legal and regulatory risk, and waiting for the perfect API for all of your data sources isn’t a sustainable option. Legal and compliance teams need a solution to capture the required data from the myriad and ever-growing onslaught of SaaS applications in today’s enterprise technology stack.
This is where combining the information gained through an API with dynamic capture technology’s ability to collect broad amounts of SaaS data provides unparalleled agility for legal and compliance teams when managing new data sources.
Four Benefits of the API + Dynamic Capture Approach
Future proof
With the continually growing SaaS application market and the high percentage of app turnover within an organization, relying on APIs for ediscovery, investigation, and compliance functions will always keep legal teams a step behind.
Dynamic capture technology provides access to data and metadata within complex applications in a way similar to the user’s experience, capturing information included in the user interface without relying on the development of a purpose-built API.
Native playback
Dynamic capture maintains the complexity of the user interface, which often holds relevant data and provides context which would otherwise be lost in a JSON export.
Archived collections can be downloaded and “played” offline in meetings with opposing counsel or during mediation and trial, to directly reflect the experience of the user/consumer, which would be difficult to communicate using text-based discovery techniques. These collections can also be exported in PDF format, which can be easily uploaded to ediscovery review platforms for deeper investigation by outside counsel.
APIs for pre-capture targeting
While dynamic capture can collect data from complex sources, knowing where to start is the challenge. A more robust and scalable option is to capitalize on the information available in the API and use it as a springboard into the data.
Many APIs provide lists of users, tables, access status, audit logs, and other metadata. The responses to these API calls can provide URLs to target as seeds for the capture technology. Users may also be able to review and assess the scope of capture from this information, saving time and money.
APIs to provide enhanced metadata post-capture
Once a page has been captured, users may be able to ask for further information about the data via the API, which may not be present on the site at all, such as lists of users who have access, as well as creation dates, last modified dates, and authors of artifacts, documents, and other data.
This enhanced metadata allows for better scoping, helping reviewers determine when enough information has been collected to satisfy the legal matter, internal investigation, or regulatory compliance.
Conclusion
APIs are a valuable way of connecting with data sources, but with the rapid pace of new SaaS applications being adopted at the enterprise level, waiting for purpose-built APIs for ediscovery and compliance can put organizations at risk. That’s why solutions with dynamic capture technology can bridge the gap between API limitations and complex data sources for a future-proof approach.
Want to learn more about how APIs affect data preservation for ediscovery? Download The Guide to Modern SaaS Preservation!
