Is Your Company Ready for e-Discovery?: What FRCP Can Mean for Your Business and How to Prepare

Electronic Discovery (or e-Discovery) refers to the producing, obtaining and reviewing of digitally stored electronic evidence in response to civil litigation.

With the passing of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), it’s a new era in which organizations are challenged with how to face the increasing pressure to proactively manage the retention and handling of various forms of corporate records and data for compliance and legal discovery purposes.

The first step to addressing this challenge is for enterprises to be aware of what is required under FRCP. Next, businesses should prepare themselves for compliance by ensuring the ability to retrieve and analyze terabytes of data upon request. With new advances in technology, this crosses an increasingly expansive landscape, including: email, instant messages, handhelds, laptops, enterprise networks, databases and SMS. By proactively addressing FRCP challenges, enterprise IT staffs can ensure a seamless process should the need for legal discovery ever arise.

What Is the FRCP?

The FRCP governs the conduct of all civil actions in US Federal District courts. Although the most recent amendments to the FRCP were made over a year ago, many companies are not familiar with what is required of them by law. Enterprises should be concerned about these new amendments because, unlike most data retention requirements that are industry specific (such as the NASD and SEC rules for financial institutions and broker-dealers), the FRCP applies to organizations in all industries.

Proper data retention is no longer just a best practice – it’s a legal obligation. If electronic data is not properly managed, corporations face serious consequences that include hefty fines or imprisonment, making it particularly important for business decision-makers and IT administrators to understand the new amendments. To prepare for e-discovery, organizations must adopt a complete approach to managing all types of data so that it can be easily searched and retrieved when necessary.

The Amendments and Their Implications

Recent FRCP amendments require companies to retain all their corporate correspondence, including electronically stored information (ESI), so that it can be produced in a timely and complete manner. As such, litigation readiness has become an increasingly important IT responsibility. The following is a summary of the amendments that impact e-discovery and reinforce the need for email archiving.

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Source: wwpi.com
By: Rick Dales