1. A method for processing electronic documents for e-discovery, comprising: identifying one or more custodians; collecting electronic documents for one or more of the custodians; receiving a plurality of the collected electronic documents; storing the plurality of collected electronic documents in a file container created based on a file system; identifying one or more user inputs; identifying one or more filtering criteria based on the user inputs; retrieving metadata from the file container, the metadata indicating forensic information about the plurality of the received electronic documents; filtering the metadata according to the one or more filtering criteria to generate a filtering result including filtered metadata, the filtered metadata corresponding to a portion of the received electronic documents; calculating one or more statistical characteristics of the portion of the received electronic documents based on the filtered metadata, the one or more statistical characteristics including a total number of the portion of the received electronic documents associated with at least one of a number of different document types, a number of custodians, and a number of domain names; displaying and updating, in a user interface, as the filtering is carried out, a graphical representation of the one or more statistical characteristics of the portion of the received electronic documents; and selectively extracting one or more of the portion of the received electronic documents from the file container according to the filtering result and based on the graphical representation, wherein the user interface also displays a graphical element showing a size of the electronic documents before collection, a size of the electronic documents after collection, and a size of the electronic documents after filtering.
1. A method for processing electronic documents for e-discovery, comprising: identifying one or more custodians; collecting electronic documents for one or more of the custodians; receiving a plurality of the collected electronic documents; storing the plurality of collected electronic documents in a file container created based on a file system; identifying one or more user inputs; identifying one or more filtering criteria based on the user inputs; retrieving metadata from the file container, the metadata indicating forensic information about the plurality of the received electronic documents; filtering the metadata according to the one or more filtering criteria to generate a filtering result including filtered metadata, the filtered metadata corresponding to a portion of the received electronic documents; calculating one or more statistical characteristics of the portion of the received electronic documents based on the filtered metadata, the one or more statistical characteristics including a total number of the portion of the received electronic documents associated with at least one of a number of different document types, a number of custodians, and a number of domain names; displaying and updating, in a user interface, as the filtering is carried out, a graphical representation of the one or more statistical characteristics of the portion of the received electronic documents; and selectively extracting one or more of the portion of the received electronic documents from the file container according to the filtering result and based on the graphical representation, wherein the user interface also displays a graphical element showing a size of the electronic documents before collection, a size of the electronic documents after collection, and a size of the electronic documents after filtering. 7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising receiving the user inputs from a user through the user interface, wherein filtering the metadata includes: storing the filtering results in a queue waiting to be processed, the filtering results identifying the portion of the received electronic documents.