In the American legal system, discovery is a phase of litigation in which the parties prepare for trial or settlement negotiations by exchanging information. Discovery is used to uncover facts, identify witnesses, and assess the merits of the other party's case. Until recently, the scope of discovery was "documents or tangible things" that might be relevant to the lawsuit. Courts struggled to determine how digital information fit into the traditional discovery rules, which were never designed to answer questions about the role of metadata, email headers, or instant messages. In 2006, the discovery rules were amended to include a new category of discoverable information called "electronically stored information" (ESI), and the term "e-discovery" was coined.
My experience with e-discovery comes from two fronts. First as an attorney, understanding the legal rules for discovery and the rule changes the courts initiated to address the evidentiary aspects of electronic information; and second as an IT consultant, helping healthcare organizations manage their e-discovery process. What I've learned is that getting e-discovery right means bridging certain communication gaps between attorneys and IT managers. For example, one of my earliest projects started after a corporate attorney had instructed the system administrator of a health enrollment application to stop all record deletions. The administrator did exactly this and, five hours later, the application crashed because the administrator suspended the purge function and the database locked up. Unfortunately, this event occurred during the open enrollment period and affected about 45 percent of the company's annual business stream.
A few simple questions could have saved the day. What the attorney really needed was that any information purged from the system be saved. It was not essential that the information be kept in the originating system so that writing it off to other media was acceptable. The enrollment system could have continued to operate normally, and the data necessary to comply with the discovery process would still have been available.
To Continue Reading: Click Here
---------------------------------------
Source: inews.berkeley.edu
By: Ann Geyer
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment