Electronically stored information (ESI)
Definition
The US legal term for any information created, stored, or communicated digitally. ESI includes emails, accounting databases, spreadsheets, instant messages, ERP records, voicemails, and metadata. The term appears in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(2) and governs discovery obligations.
Related terms
- Audit trail
- A log maintained by an accounting system, ERP, or cloud application recording who accessed, created, modified, or deleted each record, with timestamps....
- Chain of custody
- The unbroken documentary trail of who held a sealed exhibit, when, and under what seal, from the moment of collection through analysis...
- Hash value
- A fixed-length digital fingerprint produced by running a file through a cryptographic algorithm such as SHA-256 or MD5. Identical files produce identical...
- Legal hold
- A directive from legal counsel instructing relevant people within an organisation to preserve documents, data, and physical items that may be relevant...
- Metadata
- Data about data. In document forensics, metadata includes file-creation timestamps, last-modified dates, author fields, revision history, and embedded GPS coordinates in images....
Explained in
- Digital Evidence in Financial CasesThe US legal term for any information created, stored, or communicated digitally. ESI includes emails, accounting databases, spreadsheets, instant messages, ER...