Bridging the Communication Gap in E-Discovery

Several years ago, I was the technical lead for a mission-critical application at a Fortune 100 insurance company. The application quoted and issued policies for the company's largest commercial line of business, booking revenues upward of $28,000 per minute of scheduled uptime. One day, I received a request from the chief litigator to stop automatic deletion from the system. Simple enough, right? Wrong. Complying with this request -- which, translated into IT terms, meant suspending the purge process -- would have locked the database in 11 hours, crashing the application, crippling the company's ability to sell a policy, and suspending 30 percent of the company's revenue stream.

This was my first experience with e-discovery, and a classic example of the process disconnects I see at the companies for which I now consult. E-discovery, like litigation, can be a frenzy. Most companies are simply not set up with the streamlined channels of communication they need to respond effectively.

I've learned a lot since that fire drill. Once I clarified what the legal department needed -- in this case, an attorney general's office investigation required that purged data be saved -- I got approval to determine the impact of the request, which was unknown at the time. I assembled a team of experts -- anyone who had their hands on the system -- and by the end of the day we had discovered the proposed suspension's alarming impact on the bottom line. I proposed an alternative solution: Run a tape exporting everything that would normally be purged, and report from that data. This met the legal team's needs, did not significantly affect IT's processes, and didn't affect the bottom line of the company.

Communication gaps are a persistent problem in IT, and here, "soft skills" deliver hard results. It's no secret that IT and legal speak different languages. No one is doing paper-only litigation anymore, so legal and IT working together is simply a fact of life. Clear communication goes a long way toward getting them to work together and can effectively bridge e-discovery gaps.

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Source: Law.com
By: Peter Caradonna