The Modern Archivist

Best Practices: Stopping “Precrime”

In the movie Minority Report, the fictitious Department of Precrime taps into the gifts of three people to identify potential crimes before they happen. The Department of Precrime is intent on stopping the crime from happening by intercepting the perpetrator before the crime occurs. In the movie this was impossible due to false positive prediction flaws in the system and (and Tom Cruise’s acting limitations); however, these reasons do not prevent the idea of stopping precrime from being of particular use to today’s enterprises.

Indeed, stopping electronic precrime is an integral part of an information governance strategy that is linked to eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, and internal investigations. This requires a scalable application that is well integrated into the organization’s IT infrastructure, and cannot be accomplished by standalone review and analysis tools that require manual collection. Forward thinking organizations are proactively monitoring email for compliance and halting offending email communications before they are delivered. 

ZL’s software proactively scans the organization’s email and content using our classification engine to identify potentially infringing documents for review. For email, this happens before the offending email is sent.  For file systems, we use our newly released Manage in Place GRID^TM application to give users vision into the documents before they are used in a courtroom or Senate investigation.  The ability to stop precrime fits into ZL’s information governance and eDiscovery solution set by giving insight into the documents housed within an organization, allowing early case assessment, and driving automatic document preservation and collection.