When you have a case that does not have huge amounts of data to be considered, there are tools that come with Windows 10 and 11 and Office as well as shareware tools that might be used to assess the case. But before using any of these tools, the data for the case needs to be duplicated/copied by the IT department onto a separate hard drive/server so that you do not impact the original data meta data. Remember - this would be useful for a small case where the data is possibly about a terabyte or a little more. I will demonstrate how these tools might be used for such cases.
1. File Explorer - enables you to examine some metadata and also to tag files with comments as well as see comments and other details entered into the metadata
2. DOS commands - quickly gets you a complete list of all files on a drive into a text file
3. Hashtab - identifies duplicates with hash tags
4. OneNote - its audio indexing capability
also: https://haystackid.com/onenote-ediscovery/
5. Directory Lister Pro https://www.krksoft.com/download.php
6. BR's Exif Metadata extractor https://www.br-software.com/extracter.html
7. Microsoft Directory Lister: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/directory-lister/9nblggh6ckjl?activetab=pivot:overviewtab
8. Using Word speak AI to convert text to audio files so some ECA of documents can be conducted when travelling. Listening to documents in a small data case can increase time available for the ECA process when in a small law firm there is a need for a lot of travel.
9. Recuva software for getting back deleted files and files from damaged drives