Yay! Having several methods for cutting the costs of litigation is good news indeed:
"Smoking-gun documents and emails have been at the heart of the world’s best known corporate legal battles, but the risks of information in litigation have suddenly grown with new U.S. Federal guidelines for e-discovery. How can companies get a handle on the exploding volume of online content to better address the costs and risks of litigation? Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a leading provider of software that helps companies manage their growing stores of emails and documents, today released a list of five key technology strategies for litigation and e-discovery readiness that can help companies be as prepared in the courtroom as in the boardroom.
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"Open Text Executive Vice President Bill Forquer [scroll down for bio] sees some advantages in the new rules. ‘Certainly, there are new risks and new challenges but the amendments add clarity. They create a sense of urgency and a mandate for companies to have good information management practices in their organizations.’
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"According to Forquer, these five key strategies can make all the difference:
"Define defensible policies: Map the governing regulations and internal requirements to the process of identifying what email or document constitutes a record. What is and isn’t a record? How long should a record be kept or how long must it be kept? Does it need to be stored on a specific media? Kept in a specific location? Do your policies take into account metadata associated with records?"
Above is just one of the five outlined….
Great article, thanks.
Since the majority of companies today don’t have strict document management policies in place, forensic specialists are the key to collecting effectively.
The first steps of any successful electronic collection or “harvesting” are planning the engagement, communicating with the stakeholders, and understanding the environment.
Simply having an IT person or client burn a CD, DVD or load data to an external drive could negate that smoking gun…not to mention a conflict of interest might arise if your opposition digs deep enough.
A forensically sound collection is economical and is the foundation of a thorough and defensible discovery.
For a free copy of “The New E-Discovery Rules” or to talk to a forensic expert, email me anytime at mmacdonald@biaprotect.com.
http://www.biaprotect.com/investigations.htm
Mark
Great advice. Being prepared for litigation ahead of time is a smart step in cutting costs. Mark’s point about the importance planning a project is also on the money. In fact, I wrote a post about the difficulties and importance of gathering requirements in litigation support projects on my blog. In my opinion the top three things that will significantly lower the price of a project are: