Five tips for meeting the eDiscovery challenge

The time to develop your data archiving strategy is not the day you get hit with an eDiscovery request. Here are a few pointers to help you implement a system that will keep you in compliance.

eDiscovery, email discovery, electronic discovery — however you refer to it, eDiscovery is a necessary burden for IT managers, corporate legal teams, and executives alike. Federal, state, and corporate regulations require most companies to retain electronically stored information for two to seven years and to be able to produce it quickly upon request. Noncompliance can be costly; FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) alone handed out $50 million in fines in 2009. Thankfully, companies that follow simple best practices can drastically reduce the burden of eDiscovery while protecting their finances — and reputations.

1: Know your regulations
Do you know what the December 2006 revision to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) mean for eDiscovery requirements? According to Debra Logan, VP of Research at Gartner, “Many companies aren’t even aware of the new eDiscovery requirements … this could cost them billions of dollars if they don’t get up to speed quickly.” If you are not familiar with FRCP, here is the short version: EVERYONE must be prepared to discuss how and where they store their email early in the pretrial proceedings, they must preserve their email in a compliant manner and produce it with specified metadata intact, and they must produce their email quickly according to discovery timelines. Talk to your legal department. Or if you don’t have one, consult outside counsel. Make sure you are aware of the regulations that affect your company and then promote awareness and preparedness internally.

2: Create an internal policy
Create an internal policy that details exactly what data needs to be retained to comply with regulatory and eDiscovery requirements. In most cases, companies choose to implement an archiving strategy that addresses retention and compliance requirements for email and other communications. Not only will an effective plan alleviate pressure and lighten the workload of your organization’s IT staff, but it will allow IT staff and legal departments to define an email retention policy that automatically archives all necessary emails. This will further protect the company, should it face litigation, by removing the possibility of human error.

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Source: blogs.techrepublic.com
By: Greg Arnette