Category: Litigation Hold

A story on CIO.com entitled "Electronic Discovery: Are You Really Ready?" discusses a survey done by IDC (commissioned by FTI Consulting Inc.) of 118 IT executives on their e-discovery readiness.

In contrast to the majority of surveys on e-discovery preparedness (such as this recent one from Xerox Litigation Services), this story reports that many of their respondents are actually "confident about their current abilities to respond to a litigation event" because a lot more attention is being paid to records management, archiving and information retention policies.

However, the data from the survey highlights an urgent need for organizations to adopt standardized policies and IT practices for activities related to the identification, preservation and collection of potentially responsive data.

The story states that nearly 79% of the IT executives surveyed rated their ability to respond to a litigation event from "above average" to "very well prepared."

Other choice sentences from the story:

IDC’s research concludes that corporations are enforcing the legal hold on an application and content-store basis.

While 86 percent of survey respondents claim to have formalized litigation communications policies in place, adoption of standardized processes and the ability to automate and document communications across records management, legal and compliance departments is lacking.

Approximately 55 percent of the companies surveyed are still in the early stages of automating the litigation communication process, 29 percent are using voice communications and in-person notices and 13 percent are still using paper-based surveys.

I have my usual spate of questions here: What defines an IT executive in this survey? Is it a CIO? An administrator? And are these IT executives at law firms or corporations?

Fortunately, my questions should be answered in the FTI/IDC Webcast on June 19 that will present the full findings from the study.

Link to story.

My article “The Easy Button” recently posted on InsideCounsel.com where I take a look at four vendors that provide tools for searching and analyzing e-mails. The four vendors mainly sell their products to in-house counsel with the alluring appeal that in-house attorneys can search employee e-mail and discover potential smoking guns before the litigation trigger is pulled.

The four vendors I talked to for the article were AXS-One, InBoxer, Clearwell Systems, and Estorian. Each vendor enjoys a certain sweet spot.

I wanted to talk to AXS-One after I read the great story on ComputerWorld.com about how KeyBank adopted the AXS-One Compliance Platform to help manage the laborious process of collecting and producing e-mails from their 300TB e-mail archive. The story provides a rare insight into how major corporations are dealing with the stress of complying with e-discovery requests.

I am very impressed with InBoxer and have blogged about the company in the past. The big seller to me with InBoxer is that it’s so easy to deploy - you either pop in a rack mounted server or install the software in a virtual appliance and it’s ready to go within an hour, or even a few minutes. In-house counsel search and analyze employee e-mail through an online interface (you can visit www.enronemail.com to test out InBoxer for yourself).

I’ve been following Clearwell for a while now, and I believe they have one of the most intuitive interfaces of the group. They made it very clear to me that they are not an e-mail archiving system, but that they work complementary to systems you may already have set up from Symantec or EMC. A Clearwell system can also get up and running very fast, and provides such a comfortable interface that I can see where some users may not even need training.

And lastly Estorian offers an interesting alternative to the slick-ness of InBoxer and Clearwell. Estorian’s LookingGlass software may not look as pretty, but I found that it provides an extensive array of options for searching, monitoring and saving potentially risky e-mail messages. The company views LookingGlass as more of a compliance tool because users can easily set up searches to automatically and continuously monitor employee e-mail for risky keywords.

I foresee in the near future that every corporation will have some sort of e-mail analysis tool constantly monitoring employee e-mail. And why not? In this country, the company owns the e-mail and has the right to read every message sent by an employee through the company-owned servers. Companies that purchase tools such as the ones mentioned above will enjoy a) the comfort of knowing that something is policing the e-mail servers for naughtiness, and b) the ability to quickly search and secure e-mail messages that are relevant to the latest litigation matter that flys across their desk.

Link to my article.

Rich Wersinger is a Technical Trainer at Fios, Inc. and authors a short article entitled “Hot Tips for Effective e-Discovery Review” (via In Re Discovery).

Rick offers three tips but the first one called “Bulk Categorizing for Smart, Efficient Document Review” is worth the whole article. He describes a scenario where a major custodian in a product liability suit subscribes to a daily business newswire e-mail message. That means his e-mail file will have a ton of messages that will ultimately be irrelevant to the present matter. Note, however, that with a simple keyword search, many of these messages may get returned as relevant.

Rick suggests taking a “proactive approach to identifying patterns of documents that are clearly not relevant to your matter.”

For me, the tip emphasizes the importance of actually interviewing major custodians or “key players.” It’s not enough to simply grab their entire e-mail file, you need to obtain a big picture idea of how they use e-mail and understand some of their e-mail habits.

This requires a more hands-on approach to a collection project. This won’t make the custodians happy because they have to answer more questions, but it is absolutely necessary for reducing costs.

If you can eliminate and filter out huge groups of e-mail messages from a single source like the daily news bulletins, stock quotes, weather updates, or fantasy football scores, then you could drastically cull down the e-mail file before having it processed by your vendor. This will save a lot of money both on the processing side as well as the review time.

Link to “Hot Tips.”