10 things you should look for in an in-house eDiscovery solution

If you work for a mid- to large-size company — say, one with more than $500M in revenue — you probably are familiar with the problems of eDiscovery. Your enterprise may routinely face five or more litigation matters each year, and you have terabytes of unstructured information that you need to sort through in order to find relevant information and place it on litigation hold.

Worse, that unstructured information is growing dramatically: at a rate of up to 80 percent a year in many enterprises. Unmanaged and unplanned-for eDiscovery tasks increase both risk and headaches for legal, IT, and business unit organizations. Outsourcing eDiscovery to litigation services firms makes sense if you don’t have much data or rarely face litigation, but it doesn’t make good financial sense as your organization grows. That’s particularly true if you work in highly regulated and litigation prone industries such as banking, insurance, energy, or utilities.

Here are 10 tips for choosing an eDiscovery solution that can get up and running quickly, solve the problems you need it to, and pay for itself within months.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

1.) Make sure your solution covers the full breadth of the eDiscovery process as defined by the industry’s EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) standard. Your solution needs to cover everything from information management, identification, preservation, and collection to processing and early case analysis — handing over only the smallest legally defensible set of data to the legal review team. Otherwise, you’ll have to cobble together multiple solutions from multiple vendors and create a bigger headache for yourself. Not to mention the compromised audit liability point solutions present.

2.) Insist on an open integration platform that supports various email systems, storage systems, archiving systems, and content and document management systems. If you’re in the process of migrating data from a Novell server to an EMC Celerra or vice versa, for instance, you’ll need something that can read files from both. Your solution should be able to read data from shared file servers, desktops, and laptops, including Macs and PCs, from content management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum, as well as from storage systems including EMC Centera, NetAPP, Hitachi, and IBM.

3.) Ensure that when you implement your solution, you can execute without impacting employee productivity. Flexible job scheduling allows processing to occur after hours when employees aren’t around, and it’s essential to be able to perform litigation hold without disrupting the production environment of your knowledge workers.

4.) When locking down documents for litigation hold, be sure your system works in conjunction with existing corporate records management policies so you are coordinated with ongoing IT data management functions, such as data backup, migration, and file expiration/deletion. Implementing an effective litigation hold strategy requires close coordination with your corporate records management policies so that documents responsive to an active legal matter are not inadvertently deleted.

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Source: Tech Republic
By: Ursula Talley