The Triality LinkedIn Report | Article 1
Your Client’s Most Valuable Case Data Is Not in the Document Review Platform. It Never Was.
By Sean Reddick | Partner, Triality
Ask any litigation partner at an Am Law 200 firm, any corporate counsel managing a multidistrict docket, or any IT director who has survived a major regulatory investigation what the hardest part of eDiscovery is and you will rarely hear “collecting the emails.”
The hard part that blows timelines, creates preservation gaps, and generates the adverse inferences that no one can explain to a client is the data that runs the business. The data not easily put on legal hold. The data that IT can technically access but has no idea how to extract in a legally defensible manner. The data that, by the time someone thinks to ask for it, may be transformed or six months into a migration to a new platform.
That data has a name: operational structured data. Across products liability defense, employment litigation, commercial contract disputes, and regulatory compliance matters, operational structured data is the most overlooked category of potentially relevant information in corporate eDiscovery today.
What Is Operational Structured Data And Why Does It Matter?
Operational structured data is generated, stored, and maintained by the enterprise business systems your client uses every day. It lives in a database rather than a folder. It includes platforms like SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, legacy databases that predate your client’s current technology, and third-party applications that have accumulated years of transactional history. In information technology, this category is commonly referred to as just structured data. The legal significance of this data has nothing to do with how it is stored, and everything to do with what it contains.
This is where most attorneys, legal operations professionals, and even IT managers get the concept wrong: operational structured data is not a separate category from the files and emails your review team has reviewed. This data may have the most important corporate facts relevant to your matter, however, it resides in unique systems and formats.
Email itself follows this pattern, every message has a sender field, recipient field, a timestamp, a subject line, a message body, and attachment metadata. This data is stored in a defined schema within an email database, whether that’s Microsoft Exchange, Google Workspace, or an archiving platform. When your eDiscovery team processes a PST file or queries a mail archive, they are working with operational data. They simply have tools built specifically for that environment.
The same is true of SharePoint repositories, document management systems, and file shares with metadata layers. Every file has attributes such as owner, creation date, modification history, access permissions, and version chain which is stored in a structured format and is often as legally significant as the document content itself.
The distinction that matters in litigation is not technical. It is whether your identification and collection methodology reaches all of the relevant business system records, not just the ones your review platform was designed to ingest.
The Enterprise Data Your Review Platform Was Not Built to Reach
Beyond email and file systems, corporations run on a layer of enterprise platforms that generate, store, and maintain records directly relevant across every major practice area in corporate defense. These systems are purpose-built for business operations, not for legal review. Extracting operational structured data from them in a legally defensible manner requires a fundamentally different approach than collecting a custodian’s email.
Consider what lives in these environments by practice area:
Products Liability: ERP and PLM platforms contain the complete operational record of a product’s lifecycle such as the bill of materials, supplier records, production batch data, quality control checkpoints, deviation reports, and supply chain records. Quality management systems maintained under GxP or ISO standards capture the regulatory compliance history that is often central to the dispute.
Employment and Labor: HRIS platforms such as Workday and SAP SuccessFactors hold the longitudinal employment record of every custodian in a dispute such as attendance and timekeeping data, performance evaluations, disciplinary records, policy acknowledgments, training completion histories, and compensation data. In a wrongful termination or discrimination matter, this business system record either corroborates or contradicts every factual assertion in the complaint.
Commercial/Contract Litigation: ERP financial modules, accounts payable and receivable systems, CRM platforms like Salesforce, and contract lifecycle management tools hold the transaction-level record of every commercial relationship. Purchase orders, invoices, payment histories, contract versions, and approval workflows are native to database environments and are rarely captured in a standard document collection.
Regulatory Investigation and Privacy Compliance: Access logs, authentication records, and system event data stored in SIEM platforms and enterprise directory services such as Active Directory can document who accessed what data, when, and from which location, across thousands of servers and across international jurisdictions. In privacy investigations and regulatory enforcement matters, this platform evidence is often the only objective record of what actually occurred.
When It Gets Overlooked And The Conditions That Make It Worse
Operational structured data is most likely to be missed at precisely the moments when it is most legally significant: corporate mergers and acquisitions, system migrations, business reorganizations, and active litigation where the pace of the matter overtakes the organization’s ability to identify and preserve all relevant data.
Other conditions may also hinder the discovery of operational structured data. The IT personnel who managed the legacy system has moved on. The business users who managed the operational data are no longer with the company. The system itself may be mid-migration to a cloud platform and the records are being transformed, reindexed, or archived may be at maximum preservation risk at exactly the moment legal teams need them most. Outside counsel, working from standard custodian interviews, may not know what questions to ask about operational structured data and systems they have never seen.
The result is not merely a gap, it is a preservation failure, one that can be characterized as spoliation if opposing counsel identifies what was missing and when the obligation to preserve it arose. This is the discovery gap that most corporate litigation teams do not see coming until it is too late.
A Starting Point: Operational Records Questions for Your Next Meet and Confer
Rule 26(f) meet and confer obligations extend expressly to the form of production and the sources of electronically stored information. Operational structured data preservation, collection and production format conversations rarely happen unless someone in the room knows to raise them. The checklist below is not exhaustive, but it gives counsel a concrete starting point for surfacing these issues before they become preservation failures or production disputes.
Operational Records Meet and Confer Checklist
System Identification and Inventory
- What enterprise business systems does your client operate or has it operated during the relevant period?
- Have any of those systems been migrated, decommissioned, or archived since the start of the relevant period?
- Who within the organization — IT, business units, or third-party vendors — administers each relevant system?
Preservation and Legal Hold
- Has a legal hold been applied to relevant operational structured data, or only to email and file systems?
- What is the default data retention policy for each relevant system, and is it currently suspended?
- If a system migration is planned or underway, what preservation steps have been taken for the legacy environment?
Scope, Collection, and Form of Production
- What modules, tables and data fields within each system are potentially responsive to the requests at issue?
- What extraction capabilities are available? UI-based export, reporting tools, or back-end database query?
- In what format will operational structured data be produced, and how will relational context be preserved?
- What audit trail, metadata and chain-of-custody documentation will accompany the production?
Resources and Timeline
- Does your client have internal personnel with technical access and expertise to execute relevant structured data collections in the required timeline?
- Does your client need Triality LLC to assist and ensure that identification, preservation, and collection is done in a legally defensible manner?
Why Early Engagement Changes the Outcome
The operational structured data problem is solvable. But it requires expertise that sits at the intersection of legal strategy, database architecture, information governance, and eDiscovery expertise. This expertise needs to be applied before the first custodian interview and before your meet and confer, not after the first motion to compel.
Triality works alongside outside litigation counsel, corporate legal departments, and IT teams to identify every business system that may hold relevant information, assess its preservation status and extraction capabilities, and design a collection methodology that is technically sound and legally defensible. We speak many languages. We are fluent in business practices, information governance, and eDiscovery. We understand the litigation obligations that drive the legal hold and are equally fluent in the database architecture, API capabilities, and extraction methodologies that determine whether legal obligations are met.
For corporate IT managers, Triality is a partner who can work within your existing infrastructure, coordinate with your DBA and system administration teams, and document the extraction methodology in a format that survives legal scrutiny. For outside counsel, Triality is a resource that closes the discovery gap between what you need to produce and what your client’s IT organization can deliver on its own. For corporate counsel and legal operations leaders, Triality understands legal spend and budgets.
Triality’s return on that investment is not abstract, it can be measured in defensible, referenceable case outcomes.
Sean Reddick is the Managing Partner at Triality, a legal technology company specializing in eDiscovery management, enterprise structured data preservation and collection, and litigation technology consulting. Triality bridges business operations, outside counsel, in-house counsel, information governance, and IT to deliver clarity and confidence across complex litigation and compliance matters.
triality@trialitylegal.com | (877) 569-6049 | triality.co