With so much business content today being stored electronically, organizations must use a method of finding and securing data, including email and office documents, that meets eDiscovery requirements for successful defense of any litigation issue. The smallest company can face financial and market devastation from litigation, legal fees, court costs and settlements, and with electronic documents given the same merit as paper documents, IT departments must be prepared to meet the time-sensitive demands of discovery.
When creating a corporate strategy for Electronically Stored Information, consider these key elements for eDiscovery:
Identification, Preservation, Collection
An advanced information management archiving systems can satisfy both archiving and eDiscovery requirements, provided the functionality is sufficiently robust. This system needs to handle email and file data according to granular policies, that will search by hundreds of criteria and across all content in files, emails and attachments, to identify, preserve and collect data, regardless of its location (which includes the archive itself, live information store or PST files). Data can be identified by header, content, content in an embedded attachment or by its metadata, and then if it is not in a secure location, take the appropriate action to make it secure.
The role of IT Management
IT management has realized that it is not feasible to “archive everything” prior to the legal team making a request on them. “It is so easy to find data that has not been archived, PSTs can remain hidden for years on someone’s laptop” says Dave Hunt, CEO at C2C, “companies need to accept this and work accordingly.” With many systems, data must be offloaded to an archive before eDiscovery actions can be applied, which excludes critical, potentially required information in PST files scattered around the organization, individual mailboxes, public folders, file servers, and more. As a first objective, IT departments must assure their company’s officers that data can be discovered, preserved and processed whether it has first been archived or not.
Also, if data can be culled when it is found to be of no value, this reduces the risk of content being found or being repeatedly analyzed and processed. Information management systems that insist all data be ingested into an archive before it can be analyzed, preserved or culled create havoc by indexing, fingerprinting, and creating pointers to data that is of no interest or even required to be destroyed by legal advisers.
Legal Holds on Data
When matching data is found, it is imperative to preserve it. This can be either through notifying the custodian (owner) that relevant data has been found and informing them of their duty to make it safe, or by automated collection, which takes away the onerous task on the employee. With IT and Legal departments being overworked, it is easy to see why the automated processes are popular.
While internal or external investigations are taking place, sets of grouped or tagged items will need to be placed into a ‘legal hold’ state so that they can’t be deleted, either intentionally or by mistake. Applying a ‘tag’ to important data reduces retrieval times, which is crucial as it will ensure the organization can meet tight deadlines for the presentation of the data as it is demanded.
“In cases of civil litigation, electronic data of all kinds can be used as evidence both for and against an organization,” said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “Nowadays 90% of all eDiscovery investigations require email to be produced as evidence. A company needs to manage its email appropriately to meet these eDiscovery requirements; otherwise it is extremely unlikely to be able to supply records when they are requested as evidence. This leaves you in the unenviable position of being unable to defend yourself, which will also leave you facing the significant financial penalties associated with non-compliance.”
By Guest Blogger: C2C Systems
