A company can use Discovery Accelerator to search across their Enterprise Vault archives and quickly find documents and messages that meet criteria for inclusion in a particular inquiry or legal case. All types of archives can be searched: user and journal mailbox archives, file system archives, SharePoint archives, and public folder archives.

Although Discovery Accelerator uses the search facility available in Enterprise Vault, it adds the necessary security that is vital in legal discovery. To ensure that search criteria and results are secure, Discovery Accelerator stores details of all the searches performed, the criteria used and the items found. These details can be viewed but cannot be changed or deleted from the system.

Discovery Accelerator's online review system provides an orderly and efficient process for checking all the items found by searches. Using this system, permitted users view items found by the searches and assign review marks depending on the item's relevance to the case. As reviewers can see the marks applied by other reviewers, they can quickly select only the items that they need to work on, avoiding duplication of effort. The case administrator can track the progress of all reviewers for a case.

Using lawyers to review large numbers of items can be very costly. With Discovery Accelerator, a hierarchy of reviewers can be created for a case, with different levels of reviewers able to assign certain review marks. In this way, less expensive, non-legal staff can perform an initial review of search results, leaving only the relevant or questionable items for lawyers.

The relevant items can then be assigned an appropriate Bates Number and published, typically in a PST file, for presentation as evidence in court. Once an item has been published as evidence in a particular case, it is secured, together with its review history, in the Discovery Accelerator system; no further marks can be added by reviewers and the item cannot be re-published in that case. If required by the court, a report can be produced, showing the review process applied to a particular item.

To ensure that items in a case are not deleted, an administrator can assign legal hold status to the items associated with a case. This means that the items cannot be deleted manually or automatically (by Enterprise Vault expiry deletion).