At the LegalTech New York 2012 conference we announced a new version of its EnCase® eDiscovery software with the ability to collect electronically stored information (ESI) from more cloud-based data services and a new collected data re-use feature for searching evidence collected for previous cases.

EnCase® eDiscovery is the technology and market leader for legal hold, collection, processing and analysis, first-pass review and early case assessment. The new capabilities are available in EnCase® eDiscovery v4.4 and help corporate IT and legal teams to confidently assert that they have searched all of the potentially relevant ESI in their possession, custody or control.

The Collected Data Re-use (CDR) feature allows e-discovery teams to search already collected evidence residing in an EnCase Logical Evidence File (LEF) from a previous matter. This reduces legal risk, cuts e-discovery collection time and reduces the impact on custodians.

EnCase® eDiscovery also has a new connector framework that adds direct data collection from more than 30 leading e-mail archives and content repositories from vendors such as IBM. Also included is support for optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from image files and PDFs and index them along with other collected data. This expands the company's near de-duplication feature to compare text extracted from image files via OCR with other text files.

The ability to collect from cloud sources means EnCase® eDiscovery can collect ESI from the widest range of desktops, laptops, servers, tablets, mobile phones, enterprise repositories, cloud services and other sources. New in v4.4 is support for all IMAP and POP3 Internet e-mail services such as Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, in addition to existing support for Microsoft Office 365 online document service. The software also collects from Microsoft SharePoint servers.

"With the proliferation of end points and data storage locations, and increasingly, the cloud, enterprises today face a significant risk of not finding relevant ESI they are required to produce for a case," said Alex Andrianopoulos, Guidance Software vice president of marketing. "This release reinforces EnCase® eDiscovery's leadership position and demonstrates our commitment to reduce cost and mitigate legal risk for in-house teams."

EnCase® eDiscovery 4.4 will be generally available in March 2012 from Guidance Software sales force and its resellers worldwide.