Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department Opts for Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems announced that the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department has automated its email archiving and eDiscovery request processes with Mimosa NearPoint, which addresses critical customer requirements around archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and storage optimization in a unified solution.

As a result, the large, multi-department California law enforcement agency has reduced the time it takes for staff to respond to eDiscovery requests by 70 percent, improving operations and lowering cost.

The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department is a multi-faceted law enforcement agency composed of approximately 4,000 staff members and over 800 reserve personnel. The Department consists of five organizational functions divided into 20 divisions. The core services provided by the Department are public protection, jail operations, technical services, administrative, and support services. In addition to patrolling the unincorporated areas of Orange County, 12 cities in Orange County contract with the Department to serve as those cities’ police departments. The Department also provides security services for many agencies in Orange County including Orange County, the Orange County Superior Court, John Wayne Airport, Orange County Transportation Authority, Social Services Agency, and Health Care Agency.

As a very active sheriff’s department for one of the most populous counties in California, the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department must process numerous requests for information in support of internal affairs, court cases, and public and internal investigations. Because much of the department’s communications are performed via email, these eDiscovery requests were putting an increasing strain on the IT administrators that support the department’s Exchange email environment. Because they didn’t have an email archiving solution in place, the Sheriff’s Department was performing all of its email discovery manually and a typical request could take as much as 100 man hours to complete as researchers would comb through emails, line by line searching for specific words, phrases, or content to meet the discovery request. In an effort to streamline productivity, the Orange County Department began to evaluate email archiving solutions that would solve the eDiscovery needs of its Exchange mailbox environment.

"We were using an Outlook search tool that could find emails based on a phrase or word, but looking through our server data as well as searching through each employee’s local PST file, custodian by custodian, was taking an exorbitant amount of time," said Doug Blackburn, systems programmer analyst, Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department. "After finding and implementing the comprehensive email archiving solution from Mimosa, now the eDiscovery search process is reduced substantially. The system looks through multiple accounts at the same time and flags items of interest – all with less manpower."

As a result of its new email archiving solution, the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department reduced its eDiscovery response time by 70 percent. Also important was the ability for Mimosa NearPoint to meet its eDiscovery needs without adding any impact to the performance of its Exchange server. Because NearPoint doesn’t put any load on the Exchange server its overall email environment is much healthier.

Key Mimosa NearPoint features of value
to the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department include:

• Next-generation architecture: Mimosa NearPoint’s unique architecture does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange Server or user desktops. This ensures that there is no impact on the Sheriff Department’s production Exchange Server’s performance.
• Efficient eDiscovery: Mimosa NearPoint has several features that expedite the eDiscovery process by leveraging complete content capture. These features include individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search – while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the eDiscovery workflow.
• Continuous capture and smart extraction of exchange data: When an eDiscovery or disclosure request is made, Mimosa NearPoint quickly identifies relevant content, including all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks.

"With the volume of discovery requests that are often part of every day operations for law enforcement agencies such as the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, Mimosa NearPoint delivers the automation, reliability and ease of operation that can make IT teams exponentially more productive," said T.M. Ravi, CEO, Mimosa Systems. "Mimosa NearPoint delivers a unified solution for email retention, protection, search and recovery that has today become a necessary component for public agencies and corporations alike."