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Timestamp: 2019-04-19 18:34:43+00:00

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The dramatic growth in the volume of electronic information and the need for greater compliance with rules and regulations are well known, but less known are the advances in technology which can solve the challenges facing corporations and counsel. Technological advances can address the issues and burdens for legal, compliance and information governance.
This InfoPAK will provide corporate counsel with an objective overview of technology and its defensible use. It will cover practical, technical, and legal considerations for selecting, deploying and leveraging litigation technology. It will look at the issues facing corporate counsel, solutions, and provide samples of ROI from real-world case studies. The information in this InfoPAK should not be construed as legal advice or legal opinion on specific facts, and should not be considered representative of the views of Autonomy or of ACC or any of its lawyers, unless so stated. This InfoPAK is not intended as a definitive statement on the subject but rather to serve as a resource providing practical information for the reader. This material was developed by Autonomy, a co-sponsor of the ACC Litigation Committee. For more information about Autonomy, visit their website at www.autonomy.com or see the “About the Author” section of this document. ACC wishes to thank the members of the Litigation Committee for their support in the development of this InfoPAK.
Practical Considerations: Selecting Technology................................................................ 5 A.
Technical Considerations: Deploying Technology............................................................. 11 A.
Managing eDiscovery and Compliance: Creating a Comprehensive Information Governance Program............................................................................................................................11 1.
Legal Considerations: Leveraging Technology .................................................................. 27 A.
Discovery Challenges: Rules, Regulations, and Case Law ............................................................27 1.
Inside Counsel and Outside Counsel: An Evolving Relationship ................................................34 1.
Court and Academia Acceptance: Defensible Search Technology ............................................39 1.
Appendix: Case Studies and ROI from Autonomy............................................................ 47 A.
With recent cases such as Pension Committee and Rimkus v. Cammarata (discussed infra), new regulations for financial services industries, and the specter of increased regulations for all corporate organizations, corporate counsel are facing the legal equivalent of the mythical beast Cerberus, the three-headed hound from Hell. These factors, when combined with the global financial crisis, created a need for corporate counsel to reduce their budgets, manage a massive increase in the volume and type of electronic data, and understand and comply with a corresponding increase in rules, regulations, and case-law requirements as they face increased litigation and investigation. This would seem to be a daunting challenge for anyone, but the task is not Sisyphean. Corporate counsel managing the litigation and compliance process today must be well versed in more than just litigation. The challenges facing corporate legal departments require an understanding of the corporate environment, the dual role technology can play in managing electronically stored information (ESI) for both litigation and information governance purposes, and the manner in which rules, regulations, and case law require them to act. As counsel look to manage their budgets while at the same time creating a systemized, practical, and defensible strategy for managing ESI, they have to be able to understand the process and challenges more than ever before. While it is clear that technology created this mess, it will also be required to ensure a viable, defensible, and effective solution. For corporate counsel, the key is in understanding the challenges of managing ESI and then creating an action plan to tackle this process. While many view the management of ESI for litigation purposes as a stand-alone project, it should be viewed as part of the broader picture of organizational compliance and information governance. Corporate counsel who take the broad view of a comprehensive information governance strategy that encompasses both eDiscovery as well as compliance and information management strategies will be able to more effectively, defensibly, and cost-effectively manage their ESI.
II. Practical Considerations: Selecting Technology A.
A May 2010 survey of general counsel revealed two key pieces of information about the GC’s role: 74% of those polled felt stronger in their position as trusted advisor to the board than a year previously; and those polled unanimously reported that GCs are increasingly expected to achieve more with fewer resources. The use of advanced technology can assist corporate counsel as they strive to do more with less. Additionally, any investment in technology can also be used to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone by providing benefits in two or more areas for the price of one; for instance, the solution implemented to defensibly manage eDiscovery can also be used for information governance and compliance purposes.
A primary responsibility of corporate counsel is to partner with businesses within their organization, providing timely, top-quality advice in whatever geography the internal clients require it. The question, then is how the expertise available to the GC can best be accessed. This correlates to some fundamental building blocks of the corporate legal department: internal collaboration, external collaboration, and case and matter management. a. Internal Collaboration As guardian of corporate integrity, corporate counsel needs to ensure that their expertise is available as a resource, initially at least, for intra-department sharing. Two key barriers to be overcome in order to achieve this are often geography and information silo, wherein departments, divisions, offices or regions store information in a repository or data source that is not easily accessible by or available to others in the organization. For example, a global security services firm has a small headquartered team, and then a largely federal structure of small national lawyers including sole practitioners who are able to collaborate effectively across the organization. By comparison, a multinational bank headquartered in the UK has major teams in six key financial centers, but outside of these six centers, there are individual or pairs of lawyers having to cope on their own in over 40 others which requires planning and cooperation for effective collaboration. Counsel need to take steps, such as creating collaboration teams or a knowledge management program, to ensure that geographic barriers and personnel limitations do not affect their ability to collaborate effectively with their colleagues in the legal department and to provide services to the organization. Counsel, like other professionals, are respected for their experience as well as technical acumen. They are usually keen to store their precedents, deal bibles, opinions and commentaries for their own use, but there is often a reluctance to share this information. Within most corporate legal departments, the majority of such stored data should be accessible by fellow-internal lawyers to benefit the organization during their tenure but to also ensure a continuity of practice should the lawyer leave the organization. b. External Collaboration Corporate counsel and their departments must be able to be relied on as authoritative sources of information. It is invaluable for counsel to be able to access and be alerted to external news, commentary, and specialist services as well as to effectively communicate with peers outside the organization. It is essential that processes and procedures be in place, be they a collaboration tool or archiving solution, to manage these interactions. While external collaboration can easily be managed through manual legacy techniques, this is often not cost-or time-effective. By utilizing technology to assist counsel in managing this information and automating the process, the burden on counsel will be reduced and a more defensible practice of managing external collaboration will come into place.
Retention and Archiving: Though typically not the realm of corporate counsel, retention and archiving procedures, policies, and technology can directly affect the legal team. By being proactive and ensuring that corporate policies are compliant with the rules, regulations, and any agency guidelines, counsel can ensure that any organizational process around records and information management is systemized, repeatable, and defensible. By taking active steps to assist in the process, counsel can ensure that their needs are met in both the short and long term and that they are able to search for, identify, and preserve relevant information for litigation and investigation needs.
Because of the increasing incidence of regulation as well as the specter of legal sanctions, corporate counsel can feel secure in recommending the acquisition of new tools for monitoring and enforcing internal and external policies to the CEO, CFO, and board. These tools, especially when deployed as part of a comprehensive platform, can produce a significant return on investment and heighten the corporation’s risk avoidance. However, though universal surveillance is possible, counsel should nonetheless be aware of the limitations on its implementation, including international data privacy laws and the vagaries of local business requirements.
electronic Word or even paper format. However, audio evidence can indicate mis-selling—for example, the failure to advise a borrower that they have the right to cancel the agreement within 5 days. The ability to monitor real-time telesales traffic is increasingly important. On the one hand, it can ensure that a defective sales pitch is rectified within a designated grace period. Further, it enables evidence to be given to regulators that the telesales person stayed within the guidelines set by the product management. c. Information Profligacy A feature of the last 15 years of information management is to provide the employee with flexibility as to the generation of internal data. It assists ingenuity, collaboration and expertise capture. The upsides of such independence, albeit within the corporate firewall, however, need to be balanced with the requirement for transparency and ability to monitor. Further, it has become increasingly apparent that individual employees and contributors have difficulty managing information in compliance with corporate policies, and this is where automating the process through technology can assist both corporate compliance and counsel with managing information. d. Confidentiality Limitations on employee access, corporate secrecy on M & A deals, management planning or HR data, for example, require limited visibility and high standards of security, while still enabling counsel to find information that may be needed for litigation-related and regulatory inquiries. Again, while manual processes could assist with this, it is clear that most organizations need technology to assist in managing this process in a scalable and effective manner. For corporate counsel, it’s imperative that they have an understanding of the over-lapping worlds of risk, compliance, legal and audit, facilitated by the IT architecture. To work most effectively, the legal department should have the ability to advise on the issues that need to be addressed, even though the budget may well lie elsewhere and the implementation very firmly with the IT department.
Law Firm Consolidation: Most corporate legal are reducing the number of law firms to a preferred list. As with vendor consolidation, this preferred-provider relationship can help reduce costs while also providing a trusted resource that corporate counsel can turn to for advice, strategy and case management. Technology Consolidation: Until recently, technological solutions for discovery, information governance, and records and information management were a hodge-podge of narrow programs that did not connect and often required duplicated and redundant efforts to maintain. With the availability of true end-to-end information governance platforms, costs and risk can be reduced through movement to a consolidated platform. Implementation of an Enterprise-Wide Content and Information Management Program: While litigation is often about identifying the relevant information, corporate litigation counsel are now participating in the adoption of enterprise-wide records and information management programs, which can reduce costs and risks while also reducing the overall volume of data to be preserved and reviewed through defensible disposition practices. Technology Implementation: The idea of outsourcing every step of the eDiscovery process is quickly becoming a relic as corporate counsel and corporate IT groups realize the value of bringing technology in-house to manage the eDiscovery and information governance process. With the availability of end-to-end solutions covering each step of the process (defined in detail by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, or EDRM, described at www.edrm.net) increasing, most corporate legal departments are bringing the information management, identification, preservation, collection, early case assessment, and processing technologies in house in an effort to control and reduce costs. In-Sourcing: As part of the process of bringing technology in-house, corporate legal departments are either bringing eDiscovery specialists in-house to manage the process or bringing in a third party to manage the process, acting as an embedded consultant. Software as a Service: Corporate counsel are increasingly looking to cloud computing as an effective way to manage ESI for litigation, compliance, and governance purposes. Secure, private clouds provide opportunities to reduce capital expenditures and risk through a unified approach in a hosted environment. ROI: With a new focus on return on investment, corporate counsel must look at the costbenefit equation and often justify purchases and expenditure based on the return on investment.
While there is no single approach that is right for every organization, corporate counsel need to take an informed approach, looking at corporate culture, risk tolerance, litigation profile, size and global reach. Through this InfoPAK, it is hoped that corporate counsel will see how technology can assist them in managing eDiscovery, litigation costs, and reducing risks in a systemized, repeatable, and defensible manner in compliance with the various rules and regulations they will face.
III. Technical Considerations: Deploying Technology A.
Every organization has an overarching goal, and corporate counsel’s is often to ensure compliance with legal, regulatory, and internal obligations. However, in today's economic climate, the corporation’s goal is often simply to survive. In order to increase its chances for survival, an organization needs its “information lifeblood"—enterprise content—to be available, consistent, and reliable, allow nimbler and better decision-making. By putting an information governance strategy in place, an organization is ensuring that their assets are viable, valuable, and protected.1 As the quantity of information that must be managed by corporate counsel and the organization alike have increased, the applications and techniques required to manage this data have had to adapt. The legacy techniques and applications that used to be simple “document management systems” have evolved. However, despite this evolution, these legacy systems cannot generally meet corporate counsel’s requirements today. A comprehensive information governance system built on advanced technology can meet the needs of both legal and compliance, and is virtually guaranteed to increase efficiency in almost any circumstance. While many corporate counsel are focused on managing data, particularly ESI, for litigation and investigation purposes, the broader needs of the organization and the legal department make it essential that corporate counsel consider discovery management as part of an overall information governance strategy. The obvious benefits of a carefully-constructed information governance program are reduced manpower costs, elimination of much infrastructure redundancy, greater consistency in managing data, reduced legal and regulatory risks, and enhanced defensibility of document retention and destruction policies. Rather than relying upon the mercies of employees’ subjective judgment to collect and preserve data, a unified, automated information governance platform ensures consistency across all departments and under all circumstances. Frequently lost in the discussion of tangible benefits to the enterprise and corporate legal departments, however, are the intangible benefits to the enterprise’s employees. The practice and management of law is, by its very nature, an extremely stressful endeavor. Because any oversight, no matter how innocuous, will likely be seized upon by a zealous opposing attorney, counsel and the legal staff tend to work long hours to ensure that all loopholes are closed—and then stay up late into the night worrying about whether they may have overlooked something. With a strong, well-crafted information governance program in place, however, work becomes less stressful and more rewarding, and employee morale improves. Other benefits include strong defensibility against any legal or regulatory challenge, avoidance of the likelihood of fines or sanctions, and (much to the relief of the VIPs in the Executive Suite) insurance of full, good- faith compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and FINRA requirements.
It takes too long to learn how to implement the solution.
It’s Too Expensive. Many enterprises have trouble seeing the return on investment (ROI) beyond only the most readily apparent costs, such as IT budget and spending with third-party vendors. Any information governance system can reach a break-even ROI if it avoids even a single, harsh fine or legal sanction; but as a practical matter, this sort of dire result is rare, and would be difficult to imprint with a dollar value if it did happen (ironically, the only way to quantify the cost of such an event is if it occurs). An immediate recognition of cost savings, however, comes from acknowledging that automating any process frees up human capital for other tasks. Automation across the enterprise would free up many employees and resources for other, more productive duties. More work can be accomplished without hiring additional labor or buying more computers; those savings can be quantified in real currency. Furthermore, by consolidating information across the enterprise into a single system, fewer resources need to be committed to managing the enterprise’s data. Many of today’s enterprises suffer from variability in business processes, disparate and poorly integrated systems, and inconsistencies in data structures and definitions. With a unified system, however, the process becomes much less complex, as access becomes consistent across the enterprise and fewer methods are required to get to data. Rather than purchasing (and training employees on) dozens of different software interfaces depending upon the department and the specific need, all employees can be trained to use the same handful of applications, designed with similar interfaces. After training, should the initial learning curve prove too steep for some, utilizing fewer software options allows the employees to assist each other—saving more money on training. As all employees learn how to access the enterprise’s information pool with greater ease and speed, their productivity will skyrocket. And, as employees find their comfort level with the more-common interface tools, the system will be used more extensively, which will speed up the rate of ROI. Finally, effective information governance can help the enterprise achieve its strategic objectives. Immediate benefits include greater effectiveness at gathering information for financial reporting, monitoring and measuring performance, complying with regulations, and managing risk. Outside the legal department, the enterprise can consistently produce the desired quality of information for making business decisions, with greater ease in developing high-quality information for decision-making.
frameworks and metrics, aligning business and IT goals to increase revenue, reduce cost, speed up processes and increase competitiveness. The legal professional's role is not so clearly defined. Lawyers' responsibilities run the gamut from complying with legal and regulatory requirements to avoiding unnecessary litigation to protecting intellectual property, and more. Meeting those responsibilities is no simple matter.”3 So who is responsible? The correct answer is: everybody. However, at the end of the day, corporate counsel needs to ensure that the preservation obligation is met and that relevant information is preserved as necessary. The corollary benefit of a comprehensive information governance program is that counsel can ensure that data that does not need to be retained is disposed of, reducing long-term costs and risks. While the records management team needs to institute sound policies and retention schedules and IT needs to design the appropriate systems to manage this information, corporate counsel need to be willing to spend the human and financial capital necessary to know what records management and IT have been doing, so that when the time comes to retrieve information for compliance and litigation purposes, they will not be so far out of the loop that they simply throw up their hands in despair. All of these departments need to come together during the early analysis and planning phases. During this early stage, each department should designate representatives who understand, if not the complexities of ESI itself, then at least the implications of a demand for production. Strategic information governance implementation can be one of those rare situations where “management by committee” is most successful, and it often yields great benefits for corporate counsel if they can help manage and direct this committee. The committee should include department heads, employee end-users, legal staff, IT staff, and records managers. In their most effective implementation, committees assign clear responsibilities for each decision to individuals who can accept accountability for their respective outcome.
No doubt, you have a computer on your desk. You probably have a PDA or Smartphone with you, and you may even carry around a laptop computer. Perhaps you have assorted flash drives, portable hard drives, backup disks, and maybe even some old legacy diskettes stashed in a drawer somewhere. That, in essence, is your “data map.” Do you know where all of it is? Now multiply that by the number of employees in your enterprise. After doing that, add in the enterprise-level resources: email servers, file shares, and perhaps even (as in one controversial California decision4) the volatile random access memory (RAM) of the servers themselves. If your company is sued tomorrow, do you know where all of the enterprise’s data is, and more importantly, how to get to it? Consider the nature of the information being managed and the formats in which they are held. “Structured information” usually takes the form of numbers or entries in database fields or spreadsheets and is by its nature well-defined and unambiguous. Someone’s address, age or date of birth, a department’s profit or loss at the end of the financial year, and the number of people employed on a part-time basis are familiar examples. These are easy to locate and are usually available in a specific database or IT system, although it may still be challenging to locate this information quickly and easily.
“Unstructured information,” however, is the bulk of today’s enterprise-wide electronic data. Typical sources of unstructured information include laptops, desktops, file-servers, SharePoint, email servers, wikis, and more. The challenge of unstructured information is that the data often cannot be understood without an understanding of the meaning of the information, which itself may be another, seemingly unconnected piece of unstructured data. For example, an invoice may not be understood without the corresponding purchase order, and a response to a request for information might not be understood without knowing what was requested or who issued the request. With respect to a single email message, access to many additional emails (such as the email thread) may be required to understand the context of that message. Unstructured data includes documents, emails, and phone calls throughout the organization, and the ratio of unstructured to structured information in an organization increases each year. In today’s organizations, more than 80 percent of the data is likely to be unstructured, including emails, Microsoft Office or WordPerfect documents, software applications, hosted or cached web files, social media and instant messaging, recorded phone calls and voice messages, video and audio files, XML documents, and rich media. Due to the overwhelming abundance of electronic data, formerly structured data such as printed documents have fallen through the cracks, and because they are not now carefully categorized, have evolved into unstructured data. Although vital information needed by the enterprise resides in both structured and unstructured information, most key business information will be in unstructured form within electronic documents and emails. Without an effective information governance plan in place, there is no practical way for counsel to track and manage this information. But control is only one part of the problem. Knowing where all the data resides and how it is organized is useless unless you also have rapid access to the documents you need, can be sure that the information contained in them is accurate, and know that the requested data is only available to those who have been granted permission to see it. None of this, of course, can occur until you know what documents exist, where they exist, and what part of them may be useful. A well-crafted information governance plan allows you to quickly locate all relevant documents and extract the information needed to complete processes, make decisions, and carry out business analysis. It becomes much easier to meet regulatory responsibilities and to demonstrate that conformance to compliance is being achieved. Information governance also allows the enforcement of data management policies, such as document retention and destruction policies, litigation holds, and compliance with regulatory requirements. Finally, it also includes security policies that determine which employees or groups of employees, may access certain types of information, and from which locations they may access or retrieve the data. Knowing what information the enterprise has enables counsel to manage risks, control costs, ensure quick response times, and realize the goals of providing greater organization to the information. By doing so, counsel can help ensure that the enterprise will be protected, critical business information remains secure, consistent information governance practices are in place across the enterprise, and ultimately that the information governance program is managed in a systemized, repeatable, and defensible manner.
The need to meet government strategic and legislative requirements, which includes the need to demonstrate compliance with legislative and regulatory requirements, such as SarbanesOxley or agency-specific rules, the implications of which are different in every organization. Efficiencies gained through better working practices as a result of easier access to information, reduction in duplicated effort, more accurate information, and the ability to share information within departments, between departments, and between related organizations. The capability to integrate different sources of information to deliver improved services through increased knowledge and reduced risk. Improved knowledge-sharing through better access to information and central control. There are significant benefits to be made by reducing the amount of information lost within an organization, such as when an employee retires or resigns, or when legacy data systems are replaced. There are also benefits in making such information available, such as speeding up the training of new employees. Cost savings related to lower training and maintenance costs associated with a simplified IT infrastructure. Cost savings related to minimizing the need for physical storage of paper documents and electronic data. Improved work/life balance by enabling flexible work schedules and telecommuting.
How much time and money can we save in responding to regulatory and legislative requests? In some organizations this can be a significant cost, especially if still being done via manual processes. Government agencies tend to be indifferent to the time, expense and manpower required to respond to voluminous requests and often require production within a very short time frame. An information governance plan with proper discovery procedures, in conjunction with the advanced technology that can quickly identify relevant data, will allow the enterprise to gain control over this risk by establishing plans of action before they become necessary. How much can we minimize our risk of non-compliance? Counsel is responsible for managing compliance processes and the final delivery of information required by regulation and law. Failure to comply with these rules can attract unwelcome publicity (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, or any number of other companies), legal judgments, fines, and criminal sanctions, which would in turn require additional costs to resolve. This liability can be dramatically reduced if the executives can demonstrate good faith by proving that reasonable information governance procedures to ensure compliance were established and followed. An enterprise-wide system makes it much easier to prove good faith and to address compliance matters in a correct and timely manner. How can we improve our efficiency by sharing knowledge within the enterprise? In many organizations, information resides on an individual’s computer desktop or in their network share folder, uncategorized and unclassified. If that employee is absent, on vacation, away on business, or terminated, vital information may be inaccessible or lost, risking spoliation. Even if the data itself is accessible, its value may be limited if all associated information is not available to provide context. A corporate information governance plan can dramatically improve knowledge sharing within the organization and ensure that employees are able to quickly and easily search for, identify, and locate relevant information. How can we make our employees happier and save a few bucks in the process? New ways of working require that employees working remotely have instant access to accurate enterprise information and can also share their own information efficiently. Many enterprises depend on field representatives, whose job requires them to be away from their offices for months at a time. Other enterprises hire qualified employees located hundreds of miles from their nearest office location, and rather than pay to relocate them, allow them to work from home. Still other organizations, mindful of the cost savings of shared physical resources and reduced office space, allow or encourage their employees to “telecommute” into the enterprise.
mitigation and information management policies govern the lifecycle of any organizational asset based on the meaning of the content, either managed in-place or moved to an archive.
A successful information governance program cannot be created in a vacuum, and counsel should look beyond litigation to achieve a broad understanding of the needs of the organization. The enterprise must take the broad view to be successful, and the right team is only the beginning. These needs will vary based on industry/vertical/geographic reach, but they must be considered. One of the greatest challenges facing corporate counsel is finding information. Many people believe that an enterprise-wide data map is the first step in locating relevant information. However, it is often difficult to prepare and maintain an enterprise-wide data map, as corporate systems are constantly changing. There will be active and archival servers, disaster recovery and backup systems, USB drives, DVDs, external hard drives, PDAs, laptop computers, and decommissioned systems to account for. Expect to find many "hidden" systems, utilities, and home-grown applications that that were never known to IT. One alternate approach is to create custodian-based data maps that are based on internal systems such as asset management systems, HR systems, and active directories, verifying their accuracy and supplementing the data sources through an interview process. However, the biggest challenge—even greater than knowing where data lives—is being able to identify relevant information for either discovery or information management purposes. While search is often core functionality for any device or platform, counsel should be aware of scholarly research and court cases that have called into question the effectiveness of legacy search methods, discussed infra, including keyword search. When creating an information governance program, counsel should look for a platform that is able to utilize advanced search functionality, such as concept search and contextual analysis, alongside legacy search methods to ensure the most accurate results.
is certain that such media are not subject to hold. In addition, as part of the implementation, counsel is solely responsible for creating a sound methodology for the management of litigation holds—one that is defensible, repeatable, and completely objective (and, ideally, automated). Despite the numerous dire warnings and high-profile judicial sanctions, most enterprises still do not have defined processes that cover the document retention and destruction lifecycles, including notifying custodians not to delete information (and ensuring that the notification is obeyed). From in-house counsel’s perspective, litigation hold management alone may justify the time and expense of implementing the entire information governance system. g. Storage Benefits In addition to version control and tracking, an information governance system enables existence of fewer versions of a document, saving the expense of storing a large number of residual versions and duplicates that remain when a team member emails each version to all members of the team. All these duplicates can also take up significant real estate on hard drives and backup tapes—every time one document is emailed to ten people, ten copies are sent to the email server. This can create an ongoing headache for the IT department, who must pay for storage and oversee and maintain the corporation’s records retention policy. The most advanced information governance platforms are able to manage data across the enterprise, across all repositories, and allow counsel to manage a single copy of a document through effective single-instance-storage, rather than having to worry about searching for and identifying multiple copies of the document. The legal department, which is the ultimate stakeholder, should drive the information governance process. In most cases, IT will be responsible for the successful implementation of the software and systems, but effective information governance will require buy-in from all departments across the enterprise. One frequently overlooked consideration is that, by keeping attorneys responsible for supervising the process, it becomes much easier to maintain and assert attorney-client privilege.
IV. Legal Considerations: Leveraging Technology A.
Unfortunately, the legal department challenges don’t simply end with budgetary and technology considerations. In recent cases, such as Pension Committee and Rimkus v. Cammarata, corporate counsel face unprecedented challenges as the rules and regulations are changing at a dizzying pace. It is necessary, but difficult, to keep abreast of the changes to the law and to separate the hype from the reality, especially with vendors often providing imperfect interpretations of the case law and modifying the definitions and requirements of defensible processes, legal holds, and early case assessment to meet their needs rather than those of the legal practitioner. The biggest challenge for corporate counsel, as evidenced by the never-ending tide of litigation on the topic, is to meet the duty of preserving documents and enforcing proper legal holds.
The duty to preserve potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI) when litigation or an investigation is reasonably anticipated or in progress is well defined. The penalties for failure to preserve relevant ESI have included evidentiary sanctions, adverse rulings, and fines, not to mention negative media coverage. As part of a defensible process, corporate counsel must be able to issue, manage, and track the lifecycle of hundreds of legal holds simultaneously while ensuring all potentially relevant ESI is preserved. While electronic data has been covered under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) for well over 30 years, the December 2006 amendments introduced the concept of ESI, the early attention requirements, and the need for a systemized, repeatable, and defensible process for managing the eDiscovery process.
Courts should guard against undue intrusiveness resulting from inspecting or testing such systems.” Much like the above provisions, to prevent opponent access to your computer systems, it is important that the organization be able to show that a systemized, repeatable, and defensible process of ESI identification, preservation, and collection.
2010 WL 2106640 (N.D. Ill., May 25, 2010). The defendant failed to properly issue a legal hold on several fronts, waiting 2 years to notify all custodians of the hold obligation and failing to supervise and offer guidance from outside counsel as to what to preserve. These actions led to sanction-worthy spoliation of data. However, in contrast to Pension Committee, the court noted that: “In the Northern District of Illinois, a party's failure to issue a litigation hold is not per se evidence that the party breached its duty to preserve evidence.” Furthermore, the court held that “reasonableness is the key to determining whether or not a party breached its duty to preserve,” and though it may not be necessary or reasonable for a party to stop automated document disposition routines, they must take positive action to preserve material evidence.” The Jones court reaffirmed the idea that counsel must take affirmative action beyond a hold notice to ensure the preservation obligation is met. The case did not break new ground, as even in 2004, in the Zubulake case, the court held that “Counsel must take affirmative steps to monitor compliance so that all sources of discoverable information are identified and searched. …[and] counsel and client must take some reasonable steps to see that sources of relevant information are located.” (Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, 2004 WL 1620866 at *8 [S.D.N.Y., Jul. 20, 2004]) Even with a hold notice being issued, the courts will look beyond the notice and ask litigants what they did to preserve the data. The Pension Committee, Rimkus, and Zubulake courts all made it clear that counsel must take “affirmative steps” to ensure compliance with the preservation obligation, but the question of what is a reasonable, affirmative step has not been resolved by the courts. It is clear, however, that doing nothing is unacceptable, and the courts have not hesitated to ask litigants what steps were taken to ensure that potentially relevant ESI was preserved. Highlighting the need to take adequate steps to preserve relevant information and to provide a complete audit trail when requested, the court ordered American Blind in Google Inc. v. American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, Inc., 2007 WL 1848665 (N.D. Cal., June 27, 2007) to provide declarations stating “what they did with respect to preserving and collecting documents.” (Emphasis in original). Despite assertions that preservation notices were sent to custodians, American Blind could not show additional efforts to preserve data, and the court determined they failed to meet the preservation obligation and ordered severe evidentiary sanctions and monetary sanctions. Additional cases where the court required parties to outline steps in the preservation process include Exact Software North America, Inc. v. Infocon, Inc., 2006 WL 3499992 (N.D. Ohio, Dec. 5, 2006), where the court demanded that the company outline steps taken to preserve, search, and collect ESI in response to a discovery request and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. Rambus, Inc., 439 F.Supp.2d 524, 565 (E.D. Va. 2006), where the court used strong language in holding that “for a company merely to tell employees to 'save relevant documents,'... [was the] sort of token effort [that] will hardly ever suffice.” It is clear that litigation counsel should be prepared to document and provide an audit trail to the court, showing what steps were taken to meet the preservation and what was done beyond merely sending out a legal hold notice. From Zubulake to the present cases, it is clear that in order to ensure defensibility of the legal hold process and meet the obligation, best practices suggest that a written hold notice be issued and that counsel take affirmative steps to ensure compliance with this. While there is no requirement of using technology to ensure that relevant information is located and preserved, it is clear from the cases on custodian self-collection that automation can greatly assist in the process.
Custodian self-collection, where litigants ask individual employees (i.e., custodians) to determine potentially relevant data and preserve and collect that data, often fails to meet the systemized, repeatable, and defensible requirements of the FRCP amendments. Self-collection is inherently risky because technical limitations, lack of legal understanding, and improper preservation techniques that modify or alter the metadata are all grounds for potential errors in self-collection efforts. Even with proper instruction and training, employees typically lack the expertise to determine relevance, preserve ESI, and collect ESI in a defensible manner. Furthermore, some employees may not understand or remember that relevant ESI may be stored as sent email messages or drafts of documents. While custodian self-collection is generally not recommended, it may be useful in smaller matters with simple, well-defined issues, or with secondary or tertiary custodians. However, on the whole, selfcollection will likely fail to comply with the FRCP requirements of a systemized, repeatable or defensible process. It is rarely systemized, as different criteria and search techniques will typically be used by different custodians across the same case. It may not be repeatable, as individual custodians must use their best judgment for preservation, leading to inconsistent results across cases. Additionally, self-collection may not be defensible as counsel who rely on custodian self-collection cannot have confidence in the accuracy and thoroughness of the process or determine how much relevant information custodians may have intentionally or inadvertently failed to produce. Additionally, many courts take an unfavorable view toward custodian self-collection and question whether such a process can be defensible absent the necessary precautions to verify the accuracy of the search. In Cache La Poudre Feeds, LLC v. Land O’Lakes, Inc., 2007 WL 684001 (D.Colo., Mar. 2, 2007), the court faulted Land O’Lakes for directing employees to produce relevant information and relying on those same employees to exercise their discretion to determine what was relevant. In Wachtel v. Health Net, Inc., 2006 WL 3538935 at *8 (D.N.J., Dec. 6, 2006), the defendant “relied on the specified business people within the company to search and turn over whatever documents they thought were responsive, without verifying that the searches were sufficient.” The court held that this process was “utterly inadequate” as “many of these specific employee-conducted searches managed to exclude inculpatory documents that were highly germane to Plaintiffs' requests.” Whether or not HealthNet employees were self-filtering, inculpatory documents were not produced and the defendant was held liable for this omission. What the cases do show us is that if custodian self-collection is used, it is essential that an organization monitor employee compliance with legal holds, as courts have held the organization liable for the bad faith of individual employees, highlighting the need to quickly preserve potentially relevant data. In larger cases, such monitoring can prove impossible as individual monitoring cannot scale, highlighting the benefits of automating the preservation process. For example, in Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 2007 WL 3172642 (Bkrtcy. D.Hawaii ,October 30, 2007), the court held a party liable for spoliation by a custodian, in opposition to the legal hold that was issued and acknowledged, holding that “Mesa facilitated [the witness] misconduct” because it made no effort to preserve the data beyond the notice. The court said it was not reasonable to simply tell the witness to preserve evidence and trust him to comply.
The challenge facing corporate counsel in managing ESI is well documented. Additionally, this challenge only increases with a 60% annual growth rate for unstructured data. The web and websites have always presented a challenge for counsel, as it is often difficult to capture data from a point in time for any dynamic site. Those challenges, however, are dwarfed by the challenges facing corporate counsel around the areas of social media and rich media. Worldwide, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many other websites; in fact, we often read about these social network and media sites in the news (or while visiting their pages). On top of that, the rapid adoption of advanced corporate communication packages including unified messaging/communications and video/web-conferencing has further added additional data sources. Though counsel could hire outside counsel or outsourced reviewers to visit social media sites searching for relevant content or listen to every voicemail or web-conference recording, this just is not practical. Currently, the most common approach is to turn a blind eye to these data sources, but with increased media attention, increased levels of technical expertise in the judiciary, and the FRCP definition of ESI, this would not be a recommended course of action. The main challenge facing corporate counsel when dealing with social and rich media is determining how to search, identify, analyze and manage the information they provide. While the majority of search platforms can manage and understand emails, office documents, PDFs, and other more traditional forms of ESI, almost all platforms fail when it comes to searching and identifying relevant information across the web. Compounding the challenge, there are even fewer platforms, still, that are able to analyze and understand rich media formats such as audio and video. In searching for the right technology platform to manage the eDiscovery and information governance processes, counsel should look to solutions that can handle these data sources, as all signs point to the fact that social media and rich media will become more and more a part of everyday life in the corporate world. Compound this with the fact that counsel should be aware of the same search limitations around legacy versus advanced search techniques that becomes even more apparent when dealing with the more casual and conversational means of communication provided through social media sites, audio and video. Social media use is on the rise. The popularity of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, to name but a few, is rapidly rising. With users in the hundreds of millions, it is likely your employees are using these sites. Additionally, in many cases, your marketing and public relations group is also using social media sites as a way to reach customers, increase business, and maintain a favorable public profile. However, despite the rise in popularity, there is a darker side to the use of social media: it is often extremely difficult to monitor these sites to ensure corporate policy and regulations are monitored/maintained and to ensure that reputation remains intact. In the United States, there is no doubt that the FRCP requires production of any and all relevant data, including ESI, which includes “other data or data compilations stored in any medium from which information can be obtained.” Clearly, social media sites are covered under this description—after all, their main purpose is generally to be data compilations from which information can be obtained. The only challenge facing corporate counsel is how to do so effectively. With cases that have already looked at the need to maintain, find, and produce audio recordings and web pages that are relevant to a given litigation, there is little to be gained from simply attempting to argue that social media sites and rich media should not be discoverable.
In many cases, much of the commentary and information on social media sites is publically available and can be manually searched for. Though this is time-consuming and difficult, there is a need to search for relevant data when there is the possibility that custodians are using these sites. Manual investigations are not scalable, however, and counsel should look to the emerging group of technology solutions that can address their needs around social media as well as easily integrate into their existing eDiscovery and information governance practice. This challenge is only compounded by the requirements of the Civil Procedure Rules in the United Kingdom (CPR), the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States (FRCP), as well as a myriad of other regulations including the FSA COBS 11.8 and the recent FINRA regulation requiring that these sites be monitored. While there is limited case law on how counsel must manage these data sources, they need to be aware of the need to monitor, track, and potentially manage employee use of social media and networking sites. The use of these technologies has the potential to create a gaping hole in an otherwise sound eDiscovery and information governance program, including the potential for spoliation and issues around the litigation hold. While one could argue the use of these sites should be prohibited, most organizations are finding that the benefits outweigh the burdens. That being said, counsel should be prepared to interview custodians and ask questions about their use of social media sites, as well as be prepared to perform discovery on their use, with the potential to require subpoenas and motions to get evidence. Corporate counsel can look toward regulators for some guidance on social media—with the recent FINRA regulations covering social media sites, guidance from the FSA on audio recordings, and a rising cacophony from EU privacy regulators on privacy issues and management of data, a spotlight is focused on social media, and it will likely not be long before there are court decisions on the topic.
lower costs, preferred hosting providers with negotiated and alternative fee arrangements. Some law firms find these approaches difficult to quickly adapt to. They are falling behind those that are embracing change and generating more value in their relationship with clients by supporting their objectives. Lawyer and renowned author Richard Susskind suggests that lawyers ask themselves what elements of the current workload can be done faster, cheaper, and better. He reveals that inside counsel are asking their outside counsel to jointly utilize new methods of working and cautions that in-house legal will “no longer tolerate expensive lawyers for tasks that can be done with the support of modern systems and techniques.”9 Mr. Susskind posits that change will be driven in a meaningful way by the uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies, sparked by the demands of in-house counsel. For entrepreneurial lawyers, he foresees different legal roles and jobs emerging which may be highly rewarding and very different from those of today.
confidential, responsive or non-responsive and coding them as such. With ever increasing volumes of ESI, this approach is causing review costs to skyrocket and sometimes even exceed the amount in controversy. This causes parties to move to settle, not based on the facts, but rather on the cost of discovery. Justice is not served and Rule 1 of the FRCP, “just, speedy and inexpensive discovery,” is not met. A recent survey of inside counsel presented at the 2010 Civil Litigation Conference reported that among the companies surveyed, spending on discovery averaged 16 to 24 cents of every dollar of profit.10 Discovery review is the largest piece of the litigation budget, and inside legal are highly motivated to reduce this cost. However, many corporate counsel feel that outside counsel have not been proactive enough in addressing this issue, initiating discussion with their outside counsel about review methods and costs. One approach to reduce eDiscovery review costs is to improve efficiency through non-linear review that integrates advanced concept searching, contextual analysis, and automated clustering. Non-linear review is the process of reviewing documents that have been grouped together by computer technology based on common themes, patterns, and context. The groupings are the result of conceptual search running simultaneously with keyword search. This provides a more conceptually connected set of information for the reviewer to quickly evaluate for responsiveness, privilege and confidentiality, among other things, and apply codes or tags in bulk across sets of documents, greatly speeding the review process. Automated technology exists that has the intelligence to understand the meaning of the data and automatically group together documents with shared concepts and context. For example, if a reviewer searches “shred” to find documents about shredding files, it will also find documents about shredding files and related ideas such as deleting documents and disposing of files. It will also find documents about shredding other things, like cheese and lettuce, and identify these as a group. When the reviewer reads these documents and sees the commonality among them, review goes much more quickly and enables bulk coding or other efficient and proactive coding methods. Additionally, the ability for the review platform to understand meaning and context allows the technology to assist by automatically suggesting coding for the current document based on past decisions. Using advanced, non-linear review has seen dramatically improved efficiency in the review phase, with an increase in review speeds by more than 300 percent over traditional methods.11 The potential for reducing review costs is so compelling that many inside counsel are initiating discussions about utilizing new methods for review with their litigation firms.
With such a disjointed process, it is difficult for lawyers to get a 360-degree view of the entire process. This makes it extremely challenging for outside counsel and a 30(b)(6) witness to explain the process to the court or an adversary in a satisfactory manner. It creates unnecessary risk of eDiscovery disputes over the approach, process, or methods in-house and outside counsel utilize. One solution that is gaining acceptance is the use of a single platform providing end-to-end eDiscovery and information governance with the ability to create comprehensive and detailed reports to track the data at each step of the process, enabling organizations to demonstrate an auditable and defensible practice in accordance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Because disjointed tools lack the ability to form a unified, conceptual understanding of the data, they are unable to streamline the process of quickly identifying and holding only relevant information for each case. As a result, in a process where speed and accuracy are of paramount importance to success, law firms are often left with their hands tied while they wait for access to their clients’ data. And clients are frustrated by the delay in obtaining a fact-based assessment of the matter. Many are looking to bring more of the eDiscovery process in-house. Streamlining the end-to-end eDiscovery process can be one of the most beneficial initiatives to undertake with your outside counsel. Approaches to streamlining the process include moving to a single platform for most, if not all, of the tasks across the EDRM, and sharing that platform across inside and outside counsel. By linking together the processes, tools, and people—using them on a common platfor—inside and outside counsel can jointly transform a slow, reactive, manual and costly process to one that is fast, proactive, automated and cost-efficient. For example, a streamlined platform that provides legal hold notification, preservation, and the ability to discover data in place allows inside and outside lawyers to securely access preserved ESI. With such rapid access, inside or outside lawyers can make a fact-based assessment of the matter and substantially compress the timeframes and costs associated with eDiscovery. Many organizations and firms are making this change today and already saving money on every matter. A streamlined process on a common platform links inside and outside counsel with the benefits of greater efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces the risks associated with disjointed methods and tools. Utilizing an end-to-end platform that can directly chain together corporate legal departments and their law firms enables inside counsel to take a more proactive approach to managing ongoing eDiscovery with better visibility and support from their outside counsel.
outside counsel are intimately familiar with discovery in a particular case or group of cases but may not see the client’s breadth of matters to recognize opportunities to standardize. In the face of large and ever growing volumes of ESI, inside counsel are introducing new procedures in the eDiscovery process to reduce the amount of data that is collected and the amount that is reviewed. Methods such as Discover-in-Place that enable culling before collection and conceptual, meaning based early case assessment with intelligent culling of collected data are being introduced as standard protocols in eDiscovery. A survey by Cogent Research reported that conducting thorough ECA reduced expenses by 28-50% and was found to assist attorneys in their ability to prepare a more accurate litigation budget. Are these new methods of intelligent culling before review considered reasonable and defensible by the bench? Yes—provided the process is well documented. In September 2006, U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola, a leading national voice on eDiscovery, commented on the practice of triaging out nonresponsive documents on a regular basis before review, writing: “It’s hard to imagine a greater waste of money than paying a lawyer $250 an hour to look at recipes, notices of the holiday party, and NCAA Final Four pool entries while doing a privilege review. A company that permits that situation to occur is wasting its shareholders’ money as surely as if it were burning it in the parking lot.”12 Many lawyers will say that no two legal matters are the same and each must be considered and managed based on its unique facts and merits. While that is genuinely true for managing legal strategy, what is also true is that the basic tasks in discovery are common across a wide variety of legal and regulatory matters. Although outside counsel may, at first, hesitate to concur that these tasks are repetitive or can be done on a single platform utilizing standard methods and tools, forward thinking lawyers are embracing this change. It allows them to focus more on the facts and deliver real value to clients, and avoid complexities of uncontrolled, expensive and risk-laden eDiscovery. Repetitive and predictable tasks can be transformed into a series of steps and procedures. These can then be automated and standardized across a range of legal matters. Collection and ECA are good candidates for automation and standardization. They will provide hard dollar savings to organizations when an ad hoc approach is replaced with a standardized process. The net result is that less data will be reviewed and the process will be less disruptive to the organization. One of corporate counsel’s chief complaints is the tendency to over-collect to ensure broad preservation and avoid sanctions under the FRCP. By standardizing this highly repetitive process and utilizing intelligent search and real-time policy tools, the process will better align with the needs of the business and outside counsel’s concern over risk of spoliation and quicker access to data. By implementing standard methods across the EDRM that enable good faith efforts and utilize advanced software tools, the law firm can deliver more value in their legal services and more readily argue that the eDiscovery process meets the FRCP standards for reasonableness.
Automating manual tasks such as internal legal holds and review conducted by outside counsel; Requesting that outside counsel leverage nonlinear review methods including conceptual search and meaning-based, computer-assisted tagging and coding to reduce the cost of review; Engaging with outside counsel to identify repetitive tasks, such as collection, processing, ECA, and bringing some in-house; Standardizing and automating the collection and culling processes, utilizing conceptual, meaning-based technology to reduce data volumes needing review by as much as 50%; Linking together inside and outside counsel on a single platform to access client ESI. This allows law firms to provide new services to clients such as 48-hour early case assessment or outsourced legal holds, dramatically changing the landscape of corporate risk. Moving to a single platform across the EDRM to reduce the number of disjointed processes and reduce the cycle time so outside lawyers can quickly make a fact-based assessment of a matter. A single platform also eliminates the need for inefficient handoffs of information between technology and service providers. Streamlining and simplifying the process on a single platform to better comply with FRCP requirements and help outside counsel avoid sanctions.
However, recent scholarship and case law has examined and discussed the effectiveness of different search techniques, including the legacy standard-bearer, keyword search. The result of some of this research is quite interesting and it has been shown that keyword searches may identify only 22% of relevant documents.
The limitations, shortfalls, and over-inclusiveness of keyword and Boolean search have been documented in numerous papers.13 “A Boolean search is an exact-match engine in that a Boolean search engine will only return documents that exactly match the query, and the documents will be returned in no particular order….If “AND” is used, then the engine will retrieve only documents which contain every term so joined. Such queries generally return too little. If “OR” is used, then the search engine will return any and every document which contains any one or more of the so joined terms. Such queries generally return too much….” “In short, language is a ‘form of life.’ Others have catalogued types of indeterminacy arising from this truth. Thus, it is not surprising that lawyers and those to whom they delegate search tasks may not be particularly good at ferreting out responsive information through the use of simple keyword search terms. Furthermore, people make up words the fly, including new codes that function as language. People in different parts of the country, in different parts of an organization, or in different age groups devise their own private languages for the context of their then current environment. For example, what does POS mean? What is 1337?” Though legacy search techniques including keyword, Boolean, and stemmed searches are considered the standard-bearer for eDiscovery and compliance related searches, the ineffectiveness of these techniques is well documented. In the NIST-TREC studies, keyword searches were shown to find approximately 22% of the potentially relevant data, missing 78% of relevant documents, while also returning an inordinate amount of non-relevant data. Keyword searches will also often fail to find or identify documents with slang, abbreviations, or misspelled words. While many have argued that keyword searches are the standard, it is questionable whether or not a technique that returns on 22% of relevant data and information can truly be considered reasonable. A better approach is required to find all potentially relevant documents and comply with the requirements of a defensible process under the FRCP and case law.
(D.D.C. Apr. 28, 2009), the plaintiff contended that the defendant’s keyword search was conducted in bad faith as and the court ordered an additional keyword search utilizing additional terms. However, most importantly, the court clearly stated that “keyword searches are no longer the favored methodology” based on other decisions and scholarly research. The Asarco case highlights the changing view of the judiciary toward keyword searches and makes it clear that counsel should begin to look at other technologies, such as concept searching and other advanced search methodologies.
The Federal Rules require that a litigant be able to search all types of electronic data. This includes not only email, office documents, spreadsheets, and other text-based documents, but also voice, video, and multimedia data. The eDiscovery solution/technology utilized needs to be able to search the entire document or file, including the metadata, without altering the metadata. Another important idea is that the technology should be able to withstand legal challenges in court. While there are the Daubert/Frye challenges to technology, these have yet to be used outside of traditional criminal law cases. However, it is important to choose a vendor with a track record in the space and the expertise and technology to support your needs. Counsel should look for a strong history of litigation support and use in countless thousands of cases, including hundreds of cases that have gone to trial, to ensure that the technology is battle tested and proven.
Enterprises today produce ever-increasing volumes of information in varying forms and formats. Compound annual growth rates in the enterprise are estimated at 60% and will result in a six-fold increase in the volume of electronic information through 2010. (IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report, October 2008). Since 2004, the world economy began producing more transistors (core building blocks of computer chips) at a lower cost than grains of rice. This latter event enabled rich media such as voice and video to become a part of enterprise information infrastructures, along with continued increases in messaging channels, unstructured office content, and structured/transactional content. Finally, corporations today rely heavily on several information types, for even the simplest transactions. A given process often requires the use of general office documents, email, transactional content, and voice for execution. As noted throughout, these data sources are discoverable for eDiscovery purposes, and present their own distinct challenges. These data sources should be considered in light of information governance functions, which need to seamlessly manage and analyze all of this disparate information to be effective. Understanding all of this unstructured information is a core requirement for any plan to effectively govern and enforce associated obligations.
The need for new or modified legislation to address the increased use of electronic information. The need to demonstrate fairness and good governance in business practices following a number of high profile and well publicized business scandals such as those at Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems, and WorldCom. An increase in the rights of individuals to obtain enterprise information being held by businesses and other entities (e.g., through litigation).
These factors have placed a huge new responsibility on the enterprises and, in many cases, specifically on the senior management of the business who may be held personally responsible for the retention and disposition of information under certain legislation.
Leverage a Scalable, Defensible Platform to Automate Traditionally Manual Processes. Historically, enterprises have relied heavily on manual methods to understand, organize, and manage information. When content volumes and complexity were more limited, this method, while difficult, was at least minimally sufficient. Today, and into the future, a model that relies so heavily on manual methods to understand the growing volume and complexity of information will likely fail. Computing power and advancements in software analytics now provide solutions that can automate these traditionally manual processes. These advanced solutions go far beyond the legacy methods of information governance and eDiscovery, providing users with the ability to understand the meaning of information and eliminating the risks and failures of manual and keyword-based searches. This ability to understand meaning in the same way human beings do allows enterprises to address some of the most critical information risk areas through automation and understanding, while also meeting the FRCP requirements of a systemized, repeatable, and defensible process.
Manage Content in Place. The idea of managing data in place, or “where it lives,” is a more recent concept. Advances in technology now allow the enterprise, as well as corporate counsel, to manage, analyze, identify, and preserve data in place. Several years ago, there was a movement toward implementing a centralized repository for all information and that corporate users would be able to access all data remotely. However, this idea proved impractical and organizations have not been able to deploy such a storage and management solution. The current challenge is now how to manage data across the enterprise, in a systemized, repeatable, and defensible manner that will meet the needs of the organization as well as the needs of corporate counsel. Managing content in place has evolved as the solution of choice. In order to avoid disrupting productivity, managing in place provides the flexibility for users to create content without needing to move the information into a central managed repository. Such manage-in-place solutions provide ready access to information for those responsible for normal business operation, greatly improve the efficiency of managing information assets, and significantly reduce storage costs. Additionally, as the volume of ESI continues to dramatically increase, managing in place provides the critical ability for counsel and the business to adopt an information governance solution that does not rely exclusively on the manual efforts of users and administrators. These solutions automate the consistent application of policy to unstructured content based on the conceptual understanding of information in all file formats. Further, these information governance policies can be extended to help manage content in place by invoking actions across disparate systems to apply consistent rules. This also extends the ability to automate processes, such as real-time classification, to quarantine batches of content based on conceptual similarity, allow the content to be accessed and controlled simultaneously, and make it available for ongoing business purposes while permitting governance activities such as retention or eDiscovery to occur without disruption.
Proactively Address Scalability Needs. Enterprises today produce ever-increasing volumes of information in varying forms and formats. Compound annual growth rates for most organizations are estimated at 60%, with large enterprises now regularly managing over a petabyte of information. Given these information growth rates, counsel must look at solutions and models that can scale accordingly. Information governance and eDiscovery strategies should look at scale as both a function primarily of processing, and secondarily storage. Often enterprises consider storage as the primary requirement of information growth, but in reality, the need to understand, act, and process information will continue to take on greater importance.
Create a comprehensive information governance and eDiscovery program to ensure that rules, regulations, and statutory requirements are met. Have an effective method for enforcing the legal hold and preservation obligations that goes beyond mere notification of legal holds and includes the ability to automatically enforce the preservation of ESI. Utilize reasonable methods for the search, identification, and preservation of ESI, including advanced technology. Create an audit trail of actions in order to prove the defensibility of their process.
Guidance from courts and regulators on these issues is clear—business as usual will no longer suffice. Though these can seem like insurmountable tasks, they can easily be tackled with the right partners, including outside counsel and vendors with experience in the space.
V. Appendix: Case Studies and ROI from Autonomy To be successful, corporate counsel need to ensure that their eDiscovery program is systemized, repeatable and defensible. In addition, the recent financial crisis has made it essential that any investment in technology provide a return on investment (ROI). In addition to the sheer cost savings that technology can provide for eDiscovery and investigation purposes, technology that can be leveraged outside eDiscovery as part of a comprehensive information governance platform can provide even greater ROI. What follows are examples of ways in which organizations have been able to implement technology, create a defensible process, and provide value and ROI.
Process over 2.8 TB every 24 hours for 180 days, to complete the entire project by the government mandated deadline Prioritize the collection of data from leased hardware to avoid the necessity of purchasing tens of thousands of obsolete systems and licenses Provide a secure, long-term archive environment that supports legal hold and sophisticated eDiscovery operations Maintain defensible chain of custody throughout the process Future collection requirements included SharePoint system data and 20 TB of content located on NAS storage systems.
The Benefits The solution provides a fundamental quantitative and qualitative shift in enterprise collection. It makes possible what would have been, until now, an unachievable target using existing manual legacy technology, for all except the simplest collection scenarios. To date, the firm has archived over 350TBs of data and has successfully automated and streamlined its compliance operations.
All Bloomberg messages are retained and searchable for a period of 50 working days The hardware requirements to scale to these loads are standard: Bloomberg uses commodity Linux boxes.
Meaning Based Information Processing Bloomberg deploys a number of advanced capabilities to support their user-base with the analysis of news, information, events and companies. Real Time Scrolling News: Bloomberg users can set up agents to monitor information 24/7 on specific concepts. Every time a story matches the criteria, the news is populated in real time across a user’s computer screen. 1.26 million trading alerts are powered every day, demonstrating the value of this feature for Bloomberg’s user base. Cluster Visualization: This technology serves to streamline equity research by visually depicting the intensity of news coverage about companies, indexes, sectors and geographies, relative to the level of coverage normally received. The Heat Maps, as Bloomberg calls them, give users visibility into burning topics, trends and areas that require more or less attention in their portfolios. Headline Clustering: All of Bloomberg’s news stories are read through in real time, clusters of related coverage from different sources are identified and results sets automatically collapsed to prevent information overload. At the same time, the full range of information sources is available if required. Automatic Classification: Every piece of content from Bloomberg and non-Bloomberg sources is classified into a 2.1 million node taxonomy with rules that are conceptually created. This has reduced the need for Bloomberg editors to manually tag articles for classification. Innovation: The competitive landscape that Bloomberg competes in is fierce. To build market share against rivals, Bloomberg is committed to extending functionality in the information services across the organization on an ongoing basis. The enhancements include: Instant Messages: “Instant Bloomberg,” the instant messaging service for Bloomberg users is added to the index. Greater Scale: The Bloomberg email system has expanded its retention of messages from 50 working days to one year. This translates to a searchable archive of 1.5 billion messages. Bloomberg Law: The Oracle Text search engine installation that failed to scale was replaced without significant increases in costly hardware. Bloomberg Pharmaceuticals: Directed navigation capabilities will be rolled out on this yet to be launched Bloomberg service for pharmaceutical data. Bloomberg Television: Bloomberg is currently exploring Autonomy’s conceptual video and audio search for the company’s ten television networks.
Background The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is responsible for defending the United Kingdom and promoting international peace and security. The scale and complexity of these responsibilities makes the MoD one of the largest and most diverse UK Government Departments. Like all large government organizations, the MoD has to continuously improve its business processes and develop new ways to process, manage and share the vast amount of information it both creates and receives each day. As part of its modernization and change program, it has implemented a single information architecture that will eventually provide IT services throughout the MoD. This will mean that MoD staff will have an IT infrastructure that supports collaborative working, provides faster and more secure communications and will enable teams to store and retrieve information anytime, anywhere. The Need The MoD found that personnel were investing considerable time locating information across the various systems at its Whitehall headquarters, causing costly delays. In addition, the MoD needed to implement an Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) system to meet the UK Government’s requirements for compliance and records management and other obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. They sought out and implemented a solution that provided a single platform to manage their data, one that also provided advanced search, included the ability to understand meaning, conceptually analyze the data, and provide contextual analysis in order to speed access to information. The Solution and Benefits The ability to find information from document libraries, as well as many other portals and intranets, has fundamentally changed the way the MoD works. The MoD is able to meet the UK Government requirements and legislative responsibilities for Compliance and Records Management. The infrastructure facilitated the development of a “Freedom of Information” toolkit, which enables the MoD to fulfill its commitments to Central Government and the public in this area. The EDRM component of the new DII(F) infrastructure will be rolled out across the entire MoD—up to 330,000 users.
Background This bank is one of the largest financial institutions in the US, with operations around the globe and more than $1 trillion in assets. The company offers banking, insurance, investment, mortgage and consumer finance services through a range of distribution channels across North America and the world. The bank understands the importance of advanced technology in maintaining its competitive position in the premier financial services market. The Need This client needed to protect sensitive customer and prospect data while leveraging contact centers to drive revenue growth requires an intelligent data privacy solution.
Delivers an unprecedented level of compliance.All contact center interactions, including email, IM and audio recordings, are managed within regulatory and corporate policies. This bank can set triggers to identify sensitive materials within interactions and automatically mask or mute the information based on its business needs, ensuring customer-sensitive data is not made available without an appropriate level of security. Performs gap analysis on all leads. Allows the bank to better understand how agents are managing leads and qualifying prospects. All calls are classified, and where the agents mark the lead as “unworkable,” it facilitates gap analysis. By understanding such gaps, the bank can take steps to better educate agents, thus improving the number of lead conversions and driving top line revenue. Reviews how agents use sales tools and applications. Enables the bank to monitor the actions on agents’ desktops in order to identify areas for improvement and provide coaching where necessary, thus improving efficiency and maximizing resources. Uncovers key areas of erosion in the sales process. Sorts and understands calls in order to identify common drop-out points within the call process. Reducing the drop-out rate by just 1% can result in a substantial lift in top-line revenue and overall profitability. The platform can also be used to improve the coaching of agents at all stages of this process.
classify and categorize calls based on desktop information, resulting in better segmentation of customers and transactions, while delivering PCI Compliance to the agent desktop and protecting against serious security threats at the desktop level.
Background By the very nature of its business, the media and communication services arm of London-based Aegis Group plc is in 24/7 communication with clients, editors and others. Much of this communication is conducted using email. The company’s London office alone handles 4.5 million incoming messages each month and stores 1.5 million folders in its file system. Due to growing pressure to retain electronic information for increasing periods of time to meet both internal business and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, Aegis Media’s data stores were doubling year-on-year. “In an attempt to get storage under control, we tried to get staff to spend more time managing their email databases and to use file servers for storing attachments, but, in reality, this simply was not happening,” says James Morris, group infrastructure manager of Aegis Media’s United Kingdom and Ireland operations. “We just had to keep throwing more storage space at the problem.” The Need The company faced increasing costs to accommodate storage requirements that were growing 100-150% each year, and the IT staff had found that mailbox quotas and user guidelines were simply not enforceable. The challenge was further complicated by an upcoming migration to Microsoft Exchange from its Lotus Domino email environment. Because another Aegis Group company, Synovate, was using Exchange, a global migration was inevitable, so a solution that would support both new and old email environments was needed. Any information archived in Notes had to be fully preserved and accessible when the move to Exchange occurred. The Solution Aegis Media began searching for both an onsite archiving solution and an email migration solution. After an extensive evaluation process, the company chose solutions that allowed them to provide centrally managed and administered control of email policies across Aegis Media’s global network, enabling email administrators to selectively offload email and file servers automatically. Approximately 10 Gigabyte is archived nightly to the company’s EMC Clariion SAN. Aegis Media first archived its Notes data to Autonomy Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS). Then the company started its transition to Microsoft Exchange using TransVault. “With the data in EAS and TransVault to migrate it, migration to Exchange was a totally transparent background process, with no time pressures on the IT department and no adverse impact whatsoever on end users,” says Morris. Using TransVault, Aegis Media IT creates a copy of the EAS-archived Notes data, converting email messages and, where needed, email addresses, to ensure that they will work in the new environment. Shortcuts (stubs) to the archived Notes data are put in the corresponding Outlook mail folders so users can still retrieve those messages. Populating these shortcuts to a 1.5 Gigabyte mailbox takes only a few minutes and uses a fraction of the space on the Exchange server.
The Solution After thorough investigation of several solutions and interviews with firms using the solutions, Richards Butler chose the only solution that met all of the firm’s key criteria, one based on advanced meaning based technology that could support its needs now and in the future. The firm was particularly impressed with its scalability, ease of use and rapid deployment.
Ganesh Vednere, “The Quest for eDiscovery: Creating a Data Map” Infonomics, Nov./Dec. 2009, available at http://www.aiim.org/infonomics/quest-for-ediscoverycreating-data-map.aspx.
George Socha & Tom Gelbmann, Don’t Box ECA, Law Technology News, June 1, 2010, available at http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleL TN.jsp?id=1202458746630&Dont_Box_ECA.
See Socha & Gelbmann, ibid.
Richard Susskind, The End of Lawyers (2009).
Richmond Journal of Law and Technology (2006), http://law.richmond.edu/jolt/v13i2/article10.pdf.

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