CIOs and their IT departments learn legal concepts to solve data retention problems

Synopsis Part 2: CIOs and their IT departments learn legal concepts to solve data retention problems
Synopsis Part 1: Improving legal counsel's mood with electronic data discovery tools

Electronic data discovery Interview - Aaref Hilaly, Chief Executive Officer, Clearwell Systems  (Part 2 of 3)

Aaref brings extensive technology, entrepreneurial management, and Fortune 500 consulting expertise to his position. Prior to Clearwell, he was Co-Founder, President and CEO of CenterRun, which he led from inception in 2000 to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems (NYSE:SUN) in August 2003. CenterRun was a leading provider of application provisioning software and today forms the basis of Sun's data center automation product suite.

By Joshua Konkle writing for DCIGInc.com
www.dciginc.com

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate the IT people on important legal concepts?

Aaref Hilaly:  Clearwell provides Webinars with industry experts, white papers, case studies and other resources to help enterprise IT understand the issues. When dealing with IT, our focus is on the tasks that they have to do, i.e. identification, collection and preservation. For the rest of the eDiscovery process, we strive to provide solutions that eliminate the headache for IT - take legal off their backs.

IT recognizes the value Clearwell brings in reducing the time, cost and workload of processing, review and analysis. Ultimately, IT wants the legal team to take control of the process. Many of our customers have avoided millions in spending on additional headcount or outside service providers by eliminating IT from the equation. 

Joshua Konkle: One of the most frequently asked questions by CIO's and others worried about the cost of data management is "how long do I have to keep my data, really?"  What do you say when you get asked that question?

Aaref Hilaly: Every enterprise has a different data retention policy that fits the needs of their organization. We have seen several organizations take the approach of storing everything - as it has gotten progressively cheaper to do so. The belief is that once an email is sent, it lives forever, and therefore, you are better off knowing about it. Similar to a game of poker, it helps to know what cards you are playing with.

Ultimately, it makes sense to save data in a scalable archive--even if IT deletes the data, it can still be found somewhere on another machine, and thus used against the company if litigation or an investigation arises. We encourage our customers to leverage archiving technology to take a conservative approach to data retention, enabling legal and IT to have an accurate picture of what evidence really might be used in a case.

That said, archiving really is the first step, and only 50 percent of the big picture. Once a data retention policy is in place, and an archive is implemented, the legal team needs an automated and cost-effective way to rapidly access and analyze electronic evidence. This highlights the second step, which is to implement intelligent electronic data discovery software on top of the archive, automating the entire process from collection and preservation through processing, review and analysis.

Part 3 of DCIGs interview with Mr. Aaref Hilaly will appear later this month.

If you would like to communicate with him directly, he can be reached at www.clearwellsystems.com or in his Mountain View, CA office at 650 526 0600.

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