Patent ID: 7716196

Claim:
An article of manufacture including a machine-readable medium having instructions for culling a litigation discovery file set stored thereon that, in response to execution by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform operations the comprising: electronically collecting a plurality of data files from one or more sources; generating the litigation discovery file set from the plurality of data files; traversing a directory of the litigation discovery file set to cull the litigation discovery file set; identifying at least one of the collected data files that is a program application file by: computing a first hash code corresponding to a file in the directory; comparing the first hash code to one or more second hash codes associated with standard application program files, enterprise application program files or user-specified application program files, or combinations thereof; wherein the second hash codes are stored in one or more databases, the one or more databases are separate from the litigation discovery file set and the second hash codes are independent of the plurality of data files; modifying the litigation discovery file set by: removing or flagging the file in the directory if the first hash code matches one or more of the second hash codes; maintaining metadata associated with the flagged file in the directory of the litigation discovery file set; and restoring the directory of the litigation discovery file set to a pre-culled state with the metadata associated with the flagged file.