Community Loans of America (CLA) specializes in consumer lending. Since its establishment in 1994, this financial services provider has built a network of over 1,000 local branches across 25 US states, operating through partners and subsidiaries.

The Challenge: A Complex Email Infrastructure

In the finance sector, companies like CLA must ensure that their communication storage is legally compliant and fully traceable at all times. This is particularly critical for email communication. However, as CLA grew over time, its email infrastructure became a significant hurdle for eDiscovery processes. Within the organization, no fewer than three different systems were being used for email management. This complexity made it extremely challenging to search for and compile necessary information, for example, during legal disputes and the accompanying research requests from departmental and legal teams.

"When responding to eDiscovery requests, we had to merge data from three systems and figure out a way to present it properly. At times, it even required manual searches on various hard drives. The effort was massive, and all of this often meant that final results were ready only after days, or sometimes weeks," reports Daniel Nicholson, Senior System Engineer at Community Loans of America.

EMA: A Game-Changer for Consolidation

With the shift to Microsoft 365, CLA simultaneously decided to implement EMA and the Case Management feature from ARTEC IT Solutions, a dedicated solution for data management, archiving, and simplifying eDiscovery processes. The task involved centralizing the email systems while accommodating more than 60 terabytes of email data from three different sources. Thanks to EMA's import functions, the email inventory was quickly transferred to the new system. A sophisticated security concept, including digital signatures, ensures that the storage is audit-proof. Additionally, a powerful full-text search feature makes the entire database readily searchable at any time.

"The speed at which we can carry out search queries is a real game-changer for us," explains Nicholson. "Using EMA is also incredibly straightforward and user-friendly because it integrates seamlessly with our existing systems. Our goal is for the legal department to be able to conduct some of the research processes independently in the future, which will lead to further relief and even leaner processes."