Entries categorized under “Litigation Readiness”

Whether we are talking about email, IM, Text, VOIP or any other communication stream, recent cases have challenged the presumption of corporate privacy, privilege and ownership. Proper policy and training seem to be the answer for domestic corporations who use a SaaS email provider or other US based Text/SMS provider. When dealing with world-wide infrastructure, a corporation must engage specialized counsel and actively monitor cases and publications like those of The Sedona Conference Working Group 6: International Electronic Information Management, Discovery and Disclosure. Although the rules seem to be changing, companies can make informed risk vs. cost decisions to minimize their potential exposure if they are cognizant of the issues and do not just pretend that they do not exist. (read more)

As corporations slowly face the consequences of unmanaged information assets, they have started to form ESI retention policies, acquire email archives and other enterprise technologies needed to track and dispose of newly created communications. It is much simpler to enable policy, process and technology to handle the go forward content than to deal with years or decades of accumulated unstructured content. Most public corporations have existing preservation requirements to deal with on top of possible long term retention regulations. (read more)

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality. (read more)

Last week's announcement that yet another vendor has made adaptations to its deduplicating system to support archive retention as a new system feature can mislead companies into drawing the conclusion that if this appliance works for backup that it is suitable for archiving as well. Many companies are frugal when it comes to storage purchases so if they can buy a disk-based appliance that addresses both their archiving and backup needs, they may be tempted to do so. (read more)

Enterprise and holistic investigation, as concepts and strategies, generate many questions, concerns and risks. Our investigator, legal and security community is made up of 50+ professionals. Our community helps develop working Investigation Playbooks to intersect pressing investigative issues. For example, our community collaborates with us to develop Investigation Playbooks to manage retention policy, business continuity and information security issues. Some of our community members includes KPMG, ARC Group NY and individuals, such as Steve Harper of Crucial Security and Randy Barr Chief Security Officer at WebEx. (read more)

So when you are shopping for a solution to your growing messaging environment, remember to make sure that the solution you pick will not turn into the retention nightmare down the road. Ask the hard questions about retention management, migration strategies and storage formats. (read more)

Back in the dark old days of purely paper productions, which is only 8-10 years ago, no one wanted to open the Pandora's box and talk about email and other ESI. Instead, they asked the custodians to simply print out everything relevant and deliver it with the rest of the 'records'. Imagine the inefficiency of a senior vice president staying late to print a year's worth of manually selected email. Then the vendor made three or more copies for internal, external and expert review. The story gets worse from there, but that is supposed to be old news. I remember a client telling me, "We don't ask about email and they don't ask about email. Get it?" (read more)

A conceptual engine essentially lets the ESI talk for itself. Rather than a person creating a search from their preconceptions of what criteria will retrieve all items related to a given request, the systems analyze and present the items back as folders, dot clusters and other visual diagrams to help the user make sense of the complex relationships. All of this sounds like just what the attorney asked for. "Give me everything relating to this deal." (read more)

Knowing that one can search digitized conversations, the next question is can users effectively search everything within the enterprise system from unified federated search? There is little doubt that the archiving systems are aggressively pursuing acquisitions, partnerships and development to enable ingestion and indexing of every conceivable data stream. All of them started with email back in the late 1990's. For example, Symantec doesn't have audio, but jumped ahead with early products to handle IM, file shares, Sharepoint through merger and acquisition. (read more)

In this age of rising eDiscovery costs, many small players seem to be getting left out in the cold. Implementation of a traditional full featured enterprise archive happens in response to combined IT and Legal pain that finally exceed the threshold and cut lose the capitol budget to reign in bloated Exchange environments and service provider profits. But selecting the right solution for a large public company or governmental agency is an entirely different process from the immediate needs of the SMB market and smaller state or county entities. Recent changes in the dominant archive platforms seem to acknowledge this reality as some of them raise the minimum target sale and focus their channel on large enterprise sales. (read more)

As corporate counsel becomes more savvy and comfortable with the 'reasonable' standards of due diligence, they have begun to take control of the spend. The first question that many a General Counsel asks is "Why don't we just do this ourselves?" Your vendors will have a polished set of answers sprinkled with names like Morgan Stanley, Qualcomm and Merrill Lynch, all designed to use the Sanction Scarecrow to keep their golden goose producing. The smoke and mirrors have lost their effectiveness in the face of new guidance from the Sedona Conference, EDRM, conference panels and waves of webinars. (read more)

This is delivered by marrying efficient resources, high-speed review applications and proactive project and process management. We also use higher level strategies, such as our Dynamic Data Analysis™ (a blending of statistical, conceptual and legal analysis), to both identify relevant documents as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and to simultaneously reduce the total amount of data required to be reviewed. (read more)

The legal (but somewhat impractical) issue is pretty straightforward here---what industry you're in will determine the regulatory and legal requirements for you. Since relatively few industries are subjected to substantial regulatory/legal requirements for preservation, the question of retention of most records is, often, a balance between the benefit of end user access, aka knowledge management, contrasted against the burdens of data retention expense and potential legal production obligations. (read more)

The greatest challenge we experience is the requirement to educate IT and legal teams on the downstream impact of their technology decisions (e.g., an application may be a dream to manage for the IT team but could be very poor for review and production purposes). Our challenge is getting both teams to factor in functionality for all stakeholders and the impact of downstream costs, such as review, legal risk, analysis, etc., to their overall Return On Investment (ROI) calculations. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

For example, a few years ago DiscoverReady had a conversation with a lawyer who needed high-level help understanding the basics of eDiscovery. Three months later, he was listed on his firm's website as the eDiscovery practice leader. DiscoverReady recommends legal counsel be aware of self-proclaimed experts and stay deeply involved in the eDiscovery process. (read more)

Frankly, I agree with Steve that EMCs work on solution frameworks is paramount. That work is primarily focused on structured content and structured processes. However, the frameworks aren't really new to the area of managing unstructured content. Microsoft first released accelerators in 2003 under the umbrella of "Office Solution Accelerators", then in late 2004 renamed the program to Solution Showcase for the Microsoft Office System. In either case, the situation remains bleak for managing unstructured content created by non-deliberate processes. (read more)

Unlike electronic data, physical case evidence exerted boundaries on the legal budget based on one's tolerance for going through the boxes of paper and other paper-based evidence. With today's electronically stored information (ESI), cost provisioning has become unpredictable. It has changed because a single, four-gigabyte thumb drive can have 240,000 document pages on it. Counsel doesn't really know how many of these documents will be relevant until the review cycle, unless there is an early case assessment done. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)

I put file virtualization in the same category as block storage virtualization: they are both technologies in which businesses usually see the value but have a hard time pulling the trigger to make virtualization technologies a reality. The reason that businesses tend to hesitate in acquiring virtualization technologies in whatever form is that it requires hard dollars to solve what are perceived by businesses as soft dollar problems. (read more)

For IT professionals who see no reason to treat evidence any differently than any other data, I practice a simple chain of custody exercise. I have them simply "move" files from on physical disk to another. Many people interpret data movement like they would move a chair; however, when you move Electronically Stored Information (ESI) from one physical device to another, it moves a representation of the original item. Critical things like data ownership, group security, created date and many other pieces of metadata (data about data) are changed when the data is "moved." This minor issue can become a major legal risk when authenticating chain of custody in court. (read more)

When these two groups meet, the language and focus is decidedly different. Fios consultants use skills of communication and collaboration to bridge this gap. This has been the focus of Fios since our inception nearly a decade ago. We pioneered the concept of litigation readiness in 2003, well before the amendments to the Federal Rules were in place, and have built an entire portfolio of discovery planning services to help both IT and legal prepare for discovery challenges. For example, in the data mapping process, we help them focus on e-discovery as a business process that incorporates: (read more)

The more pressing question is not which method should companies choose to encrypt data but, "How do companies generate and manage the encryption keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt the data?" The obstacle here is that there is no industry standard way to generate or manage encryption keys long term. (read more)

The last enterprise company at which I worked used at least five different products to do backup and there may have been more. This amalgamation of backup products occurred over a period of years and mostly by happenstance. Acquisitions of and mergers with other companies; internal consolidations; specific backup requirements for certain applications; and, as often as not, the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, contributed to the company ending up with a menagerie of backup products to manage. (read more)

As CEO I'm happy to say my sales, engineering and operations teams are executing against our shared vision. AXS-One latest functionality includes a very sought after Case Manager module. It is providing our customers with a true self-service discovery and review capability. If I may indulge a bit on my team's hard work; the Case Manager enables our customers to: * Conduct initial searches themselves * Review and modify the results of the searches * Add dispositions to the searched results * Package the search for additional review by outside counsel/other 3rd party (read more)