Electronic discovery, commonly referred to as eDiscovery, is the process of identifying, preserving, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to legal or investigative matters. This process enables organizations to find and manage the large volumes of data in docs while ensuring compliance with legal requirements.

eDiscovery complements the legal hold feature in ensuring data governance by allowing org admins to search for specific keywords across all the docs within their organization, and preserve those documents by placing the respective doc owners on hold.

📣 The eDiscovery feature is a paid add-on, available to customers on our Enterprise tier. To get access to this feature, please contact your account team. If you don't yet have an account team, you can reach out to us via this form.

Start the eDiscovery process

Org admins on Coda’s Enterprise plan can start the eDiscovery process by following these steps:

Go to coda.io/docs
Click on More options in the lower left corner, then select Organization settings
Click into the Data governance tab, and then navigate to the eDiscovery tab.
Start typing the keyword(s) that you want to find, and hit enter.
In the results, you’ll find all the documents that have the keyword(s) in them. The preview column shows a snippet from the doc that matched the keyword you searched for.

Note: You will see all the docs within your organization that matched the keyword(s), including private docs.

Identify relevant docs

You can find useful information such as who the doc owner is, when the doc was created, and when the doc was last active to help you identify relevant docs to your investigation. You can also click on any result to open the doc, even if the doc isn’t shared with you.

To perform a more targeted search, you can use the following filters

In: to find docs within a specific workspace or a folder
Owned by: to find docs owned by specific users
Date: to find docs either created or modified within a certain date range
Exact match: to find docs that have an exact match to the keywords you’re searching for

Once you identify the docs that are important for the legal matter, you can navigate to the Legal hold tab, and preserve these docs indefinitely by placing the doc owners on hold. Then, you can export all the relevant documents. Learn more about placing legal holds here.

FAQs

How can I get access to the eDiscovery feature?

The eDiscovery tool is available as a paid add-on for customers on our Enterprise plan. To get access, please contact your account team. Once you've enabled eDiscovery, all org admins will be able to see and use the feature.

Once I've identified the relevant docs, how do I preserve them?

You can preserve the docs by placing a legal hold on the owners of the docs. Check out this article to learn all about our legal holds feature.