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By Wade Peterson
Extract: The major obstacles to not adopting native file productions are: security, inclusion of metadata, family relationships (e.g., an email and its attachments) and redactions. To overcome these obstacles, I designed a new architecture that addresses them. It is called Encapsulated Native File, or ENF.
An ENF file contains a fully encrypted native file, along with the metadata and all the members of a family relationship. The ENF file architecture has been designed, and preliminary tools for creating ENF files (makeENF) and viewing them (viewENF) have been created. ENF is a file format specifically for the e-discovery industry that is designed to eliminate all barriers to native file productions and significantly reduce e-discovery costs by eliminating the labor of translating native files to two-dimensional renderings. Think of the savings in turnaround time, from collection to review to production, if we take native files and simply repackage them – adding security levels and passwords, and designing a self-contained file with all properties included.
But adoption of this new standard by multiple vendors and our e-discovery industry is needed before we can realize its benefits.