How Should You Manage Your Information So You Don’t Get in Trouble with the Lawyers?

As information professionals involved in the eDiscovery process, you are required to work with legal counsel and produce electronic information for use in civil litigation. A major part of this process is searching for and finding all relevant documents, and content related to the case. The operative word here being finding, and that includes audio files, video, files and even emails.

So where do you begin your search and where do you look to find it all? What process is in place and what steps will you take to ensure you have found everything? Do you search your network servers, individual PCs, Smartphones, PDAs and removable storage devices like thumb drives or is it all of the above?

Documented cases have shown it is all of the above and that if you do not comply with the request, the fines and costs levied could be significant. The key is to plan for it and design your ECM environment in a way that it supports eDiscovery, linking content repositories and line-of-business systems with eDiscovery platforms to shorten the eDiscovery cycle, improve consistency and accuracy, and decrease the overall processing time.

Consider these key stats from AIIM's research with how you handle paper, mobile, on-premise, and cloud information so you don’t get in trouble with the lawyers.

• Even in advanced organizations, a lot of chaos still exists -> 62% are still strongly reliant on their file-shares.

• A strategy and appropriate infrastructure are the first steps -> 75% agree that ECM/RM is a fundamental part of their information security regime.

• Creating a strategy for managing process information achieves two core objectives -> 58% consider their case handling system to be vital or very important to their customer experience management. And for 67%, it is vital or very important for legal and regulatory compliance.

Get control over your content, identify what information has business value and manage it properly. Information that is redundant, out of date, or trivial – referred to as ROT – should be removed from your repositories. Leverage technology to support your content management practices in ways that enable you to find the information you need, when you need it and position your organization to be defensible when it comes time to face the Judge. Discovery, data collection and preservation technologies and cloud use, optimize operations and collaborative efforts related to legal or litigation hold.

Organizations with a detailed preservation plan can minimize cost through efficiency, while mitigating risk with a timely and reasonable response to a preservation duty.