Data digging can be legal headache

Here's a fact to consider: As much as 70 percent of all electronic documents your business generates will never be printed on paper.

So what, you say? Isn't the paperless office a good thing?

Well, it depends.

If your business gets sued, it's no longer a matter of leafing through boxes for letters, files or other papers that lawyers typically request during the initial discovery phase of a lawsuit. These days, a suit against a company, or any other organization, is likely to trigger a new kind of cyber-scrambling.

Instead of searching through boxes, you've got to search hard drives, servers and backup tapes. Your IT guy might have to wade through two years' worth of stored e-mail for messages related to the suit. And you may end up paying a small fortune for a legal team (because it will take a team to do the work) to review all the electronic documents that turn up despite trying to refine a search using words related to the specific case.

It's not hard to imagine that this could become a really big headache for any size business.
"Companies are starting to drown in their own e-mails and electronic files," said Patrick J. Burke, assistant general counsel for Guidance Software Inc., computer forensic specialists based in Pasadena, Calif.

In December, a set of federal guidelines came out that gave lawyers and courts a better framework for how to deal with electronic discovery issues. The new rules force participants in a lawsuit to think early on in the process about the quantity of electronic documents that need to be produced, who is going to pay for them, and how the process will be done.

As for awareness in the business community about impact of the new rules, most lawyers believe the news is filtering out.

"Businesses with in-house counsel are either aware of it or are beginning to be aware of it," said David Kohane, a litigator with Cole, Schotz, Meisel, Forman & Leonard in Hackensack. "Companies involved in litigation are definitely aware of it."

What they might not be aware of, however, is cost.

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Source: northjersey.com