From FINRA disclosures to complex commercial litigation, industry experts can assist with a winning data strategy and limit exposure during the discovery process.
Outside counsel can sometimes be at the mercy of its client's network infrastructure and document retention policies when it comes to Data Mapping and Litigation Readiness. Parties may find themselves in a nightmare scenario if they do not know exactly where potentially relevant data resides and how it is preserved.
It is not always the best strategy to rely solely on a client's IT Department when it comes to figuring out where email and other ESI is hiding. Often times (at no fault of IT), corporate networks can resemble the "Wild West" for many reasons including...
- Individual permissions to save and customize email locally on workstations
- Unknown/unauthorized archiving on shared/hidden folders
- Use of personal email accounts
- Outsourced IT vendor involvement
- Cloud-based communications and applications
According to Frank Mancini, TERIS/Phoenix “a Phoenix law firm recently hired TERIS to collect email in response to a motion to compel. The firm’s client had a 3rd party IT vendor who directed TERIS to an email Exchange server. The amount of email on the Exchange server was not nearly enough related to the request. TERIS experts quickly realized that additional ESI must be residing elsewhere on the network. Further investigation revealed that employees were saving PST archives to a shared folder on a separate network from the main email Exchange once their mailbox reached a certain size limit. Had we not notified outside counsel that this was a red flag they would have certainly under-produced.”
A neutral third-party expert can help manage these first few steps to Identify, Preserve & Collect client data with consistent results:
- Determine "where the bones are buried"
- Provide defensible, documented collection steps
- Limit firm/client IT staff exposure
- Offer low fixed-rates for cost predictability
- Fulfill Preservation Obligation with a forensic "Time Capsule" of data
The term “cloud” is being thrown around a lot lately. In fact, some would argue it’s become the phrase du jour for the tech world. There’s Apple’s iCloud, Google’s cloud computing services, and Amazon CloudDrive, just to name a few. With the amount of new services popping up that utilize the cloud, it’s quickly becoming a hot topic for the movers and shakers of the tech world.
What is the cloud?
Think of it this way: Almost everyone who uses a computer knows what a USB flash/stick/thumb drive is. The tiny little drives store gigabytes of information and can be accessed at any time on different devices as long as they’re quipped with USB ports.
The cloud operates the same way – except it’s a virtual drive. For example, with Apple’s iCloud, a user can store music, pictures, movies and documents, and just about anything on Apple’s servers can be accessed on any Apple device. So, use an Apple Macbook to write up that business proposal, store it to the Apple’s cloud servers, and then access it later at work on an iPad or an iPhone.
Apple isn’t the only game in town, though. Dropbox.com has offered free online storage services for some time now, even before the cloud became the “next big thing.”
Not just a fad
There are plenty of fads that come and go in the tech world but count on cloud computing to become a fixture in the daily life of businesses and people. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), customers are expected to $42 billion on cloud computing alone.
IDC also projects that "by 2020, a significant portion of the Digital Universe will be centrally hosted, managed, or stored in" cloud services. “And even if a single byte in the Digital Universe does not ‘live in the cloud’ permanently, it will, in all likelihood, pass through the cloud at some point in its life.”
What This Means for Ediscovery?
Though more and more businesses and organizations are considering switching over to the cloud for their data storage and archiving needs, it’s becoming increasingly clear that most of these groups simply have no electronic discovery (ediscovery) plan set for cloud computing.
According to a Forbes survey, “The Cloud and eDiscovery,” ediscovery plans were uncommon among respondents, with only about 16 percent of those using cloud-based services creating one before migrating to a cloud-based form of data storage.
A whopping 58 percent simply didn’t know if they had a plan or not. When facing litigation, those organizations will be left struggling in a high-pressure situation to gather necessary cloud-based data. Inevitably this will lead to high costs and difficulty making quick, sound legal decisions.
Solution: Ediscovery plans are essential for any organization using the cloud for information storage. These plans should cover each cloud-based service being used, and they should spell out how the information is to be accessed, service-level agreements for how quickly it's retrieved, who own custody of the data, and any other advanced services that are to be included.
