Why Your E-Discovery Strategy Needs to Be Proactive

Related Articles

• Some Observations and Thoughts from ARMA
• Checklist for Evaluating Enterprise Backup Products
• E-Discovery Application for iPhone and iPad May Aid Administrator's Responsiveness

Subscription Options

Subscribe Newswire

Widgets & RSS Feeds

You have two choices when it comes to e-discovery:

1. Wait for a legal action to land on your doorstep and then set up good practices and technologies to find all of the information you’ll need to satisfy any e-discovery requirements associated with it.
2. Set up good practices and technologies to find all of the information you’ll need to satisfy any e-discovery requirements and then wait for a legal action to land on your doorstep.

It’s important to note that the only thing that’s different between these two options is the order of what you will eventually be required to do. If you operate a business in the United States, lawsuits are not so much about “if”, but about “when.”

The ability to support e-discovery—the process of finding, collecting, analyzing and producing information during civil lawsuits—should be a critical focus for any organization in the context of their information management policies, processes and technologies. Reasons for this include:

• Inadequate archiving and data retention practices that create an inability to adequately preserve and/or collect required information—which can then lead to an inability to conduct proper e-discovery—can result in court-imposed sanctions, adverse inference instructions, charges of spoliation of evidence and other negative consequences.
• Poor e-discovery can prevent decision makers from fully understanding their legal position at the beginning of a lawsuit, resulting in poor and ill-informed decisions about how to proceed in particular cases.
• A lack of good e-discovery capabilities, as well as inadequate technologies that support e-discovery, can drive up labor, legal and other costs. For example, some discovery systems produce up to 1,000 times more content than is actually required, increasing discovery costs unnecessarily. However, producing too little content can lead to negative consequences, as well.

Good e-discovery capabilities—as well as the technologies that support e-discovery, such as archiving—can provide a number of important benefits to any organization, including avoidance of litigation, faster response to legal actions, the ability to create better corporate policies, assistance in complying with regulatory obligations, brand protection, and overall defense of corporate reputation.

We have just published a new white paper on archiving that you can download with our compliments here.