Education brings IT and Legal groups together for legal risk management

Synopsis Part 1: Top three issues facing legal counsel, CIO policy challenges and intelligent collection
Synopsis Part 2: Education brings IT and Legal groups together for legal risk management

Electronic data discovery interview -  David Baskin, VP of Product Management, Recommind, (Part 2 of 2)

David Baskin, Vice President of Product Management, is responsible for the development and delivery of high quality technology products to address the most challenging enterprise search, information management and eDiscovery needs of enterprises, professional service firms and law firms. Mr. Baskin has played a key role with the EDRM Project (www.edrm.net), a highly influential industry group tasked with creating and maintaining standards for the eDiscovery industry.

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

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate the IT people on important legal concepts and vice-versa?

David Baskin: I realize there are distinct functions within each group that never overlap.  These two groups working together are like ordering food at your favorite restaurant.  IT is often servicing the request of Legal, who wants to dine on the data.  However, Legal must be educated well enough to know what they want.  Pairing technology is akin to wine with food, let IT figure those out.

We often ask our clients to bring IT and Legal together for a conversation.  We use our experienced staff to help coordinate between the two groups on legal issues, retention policies and key technology concerns.  For example, we don't expect GCs to understand storage area networks (SAN) and host bus adapters (HBA), but we do want them to know that the equivalent to a post-it note on a contract is meta-data properties like blind-carbon copy on emails.  We also encourage our clients and prospects to educate themselves using whitepapers, publications and blogs.

Finally, we also speak at events like LegalTech regarding the experiences we obtain from working closely with law firms on legal process and legal technology.  For example, Craig Carpenter, Vice President of eDiscovery Solutions and General Counsel at Recommind spoke at LegalTech on "The Future of eDiscovery is Here: Computer-Expedited Document Review"

Joshua Konkle: There appears to be some gap between what legal teams require to support ediscovery and the capabilities available today in data management technology.  What advice do you have as a vendor trying to assist their clients in addressing litigation readiness challenges?

David Baskin: The first piece of advice is to bring Recommind in for a demonstration or proof-of-concept.  We believe, through our customer interaction, that general counsels want to have better controls on the complete life cycle of a discovery or investigation.

With Recommind our clients can act according to these general issues:

1)    Discovery/Investigation comes in the door
2)    Collection/Preservation of documents must take place

i.    Desktops
ii.    File shares
iii.    Email/Attachments
iv.    PDA

3)    eDiscovery or extraction of all information in those documents by Recommind Search/Crawl technology
4)    Culling of necessary information from the overall set of documents by the MindServer search tools
5)    Categorization of all the information by Recommind's MindServer intelligent classification engines
6)    Availability for review and auto coding of Recommind's Axcelerate eDiscovery product

i.    Remove all non responsive documents
ii.    Identify all privileged documents
iii.    Identify all responsive documents
iv.    Make available for production

Recommind provides products, services and answers at each phase listed above.  We realize each client has different needs and not everyone requires a soup-to-nuts approach.  Our products and services can address individual phases supporting outside counsel, eDiscovery consulting firms, corporate legal groups and legal technology divisions of major companies.

If you would like to communicate with him directly, he can be reached at info(at) recommind.com or by calling Recommind Headquarters at 1 415 394 7899.

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