It is important that a single time zone is selected so that a chronology can be created across custodians/time zones easily. If additional time zone offsets are displayed during the review, it is important that the review team understand which time zone is/will be displayed on any images for production. Both of these options can and should be explored depending on the matter however, there are a few things to consider in both situations. Having a normalized and standard time zone for all data processed is a critical aspect of data processing, but that is not to suggest that other time zones cannot also be displayed in the review environment or that another time zone cannot be used as the base time zone for processing. Because not all states/countries recognize daylight savings time, another layer of complexity exists. If the daylight savings offset was not included in the offset calculation an additional mismatch would occur. To add additional complication, the email was sent at the time of year when a change to Daylights Savings Time occurs. The result is that there will be two copies of the same email showing different received date/time. If date and time metadata is used to identify duplicates, both copies would be seen as unique. The metadata for Custodians B’s email was offset to Perth time zone settings (Saturday, Feb 21st 2019 at 11pm or UTC -8). The metadata for Custodian A’s email has been extracted and using Eastern Standard time zone settings (3am EDT or UTC -10). In the above example, if Custodian ABC and Custodian DEF have copies of the same email sent from a third party on Sunday, Feb 01st, 2019 at 7am UTC, both copies would not deduplicate. Without normalization, this instruction will cause huge issues for determining timelines of communications for emails sent to and some from the custodian which in turn may affect the review and production of the processed data.Īt the time of deduplication process, date and time metadata are key fields. The Client instructs the Relativity Processing team to handle the data in the “time zone for the custodian”. Their laptops are forensically imaged, and their data is processed for Relativity hosting in the Relativity. Custodian ABC resides in X city, and Custodian DEF resides in Y City. Lets us say two firms (Custodian ABC and Custodian DEF) are key subjects for an evidence in order to processing the data. Let us take an example by considering a situation, what would happen if we were to process data under different time zones. In order to avoid discrepancies caused by custodians who travel between multiple time zones, or projects with custodians in multiple time zones.

The user’s operating system uses regional settings on the user’s system to convert the UTC time to the user’s local time zone. Most electronic data is stored in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). The main and basic considerations of Processing the Data is time zone.

Utc time zones