Electronic Discovery Navigator

Messaging Architects Included in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Email Archiving for 3rd Consecutive Year

Messaging Architects Included in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Email Archiving for 3rd Consecutive Year

"The need to archive emails so that they can be quickly and cost-effectively produced in the event of a lawsuit, audit or request-for-information is being driven by changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and escalating email storage requirements. In the past year, organizations have become significantly more proactive in deploying a solution, which explains the 70% growth in email archiving product sales since 2007."

When to Dump Stale Electronic Data

When to Dump Stale Electronic Data

"Corporate counsel, IT officers and records managers all have an interest in controlling and expiring stale information -- data that no longer serves a business purpose, or is not subject to a regulatory or legal hold obligation to preserve.

Stale information poses the risk of excess discovery costs while bestowing little benefit. Even when a corporation has been diligent in purging stale information, significant repositories of information may persist outside of its IT infrastructure -- in the hands of its outside counsel.

Since the typewriter era, corporations and law firms have routinely eliminated stale paper through common practices such as an annual file cabinet cleaning day. Culling paper is an intuitive task that can be performed by the employee who keeps the file cabinet -- keeping what is needed, sending records to be filed and disposing of the rest (e.g,. stale documents).

There is an ostrich-like tendency to ignore electronically stored information because the task is not immediately visible as it is with paper -- and ESI storage is relatively inexpensive. Furthermore, executives may not appreciate the associated risks and are unsure how to go about eliminating stale ESI."

What to Do About Data in the EU?

What to Do About Data in the EU?

"While the collection, review and production of e-mails and other electronic documents have become routine for U.S. companies involved in civil litigation, internal investigations and various other legal matters, there is an increasing number of cases that involve foreign or multinational clients, and the collection and production of electronic documents from these clients can be anything but routine.

Clients with operations in the European Union pose a particular problem for electronic discovery because of the strict data privacy laws in most European jurisdictions, which regulate the processing of personal data and its export from the EU. These laws create a significant tension between a foreign or multinational company's obligations to produce documents for U.S. legal matters and its compliance with European law.

This is an evolving area of the law, and it is imperative that U.S. lawyers become familiar with the data privacy issue and work closely with their clients to address them before a single document gets reviewed."

Could Message Archiving and eDiscovery Have Saved Bear Stearns?

Could Message Archiving and eDiscovery Have Saved Bear Stearns?

"In the past few years, The Securities and Exchange Commission consistently imposed multi-million-dollar penalties for mismanaging e-mail, including $8.25 million in fines to five firms in 2003 and a $10 million fine to Bank of America in February 2004. It has also handed down several indictments for obstruction of justice, which can lead to jail time for convicted executives.

Just finding the ‘right’ records easily costs large companies millions of dollars in legal and search fees.  Proactive eRecords management locates critical e-mails in minutes – even when the Safecore service is installed after legal papers have been filed. eRecords management also provides a strong policy backbone for compliance and better proactive policies about how, and what, is communicated.

'E-mail trails are a treasure trove for investigators,' said Stephen Catanzano, CEO of Safecore.  'Corporations need to have tools in place to monitor, manage and maintain e-mails to ensure compliance, enforce policies – such as retention and destruction practices, and enforce legal holds to avoid costly lawsuits or dramatically reduce the impact.'"

IBM Puts Data Archive on Center Stage

IBM Puts Data Archive on Center Stage

"IBM opens the doors today to a brand-new $10 million dollar Global Archive Solutions Center in Mexico aimed at helping companies develop and build long-term plans for data archival.

Staffed with 30 to 50 experts, the center will provide simulations of real world customer environments and help companies address challenges faced in retaining data. It's IBM's 11th global center and the first to focus on a specific technology "pain point" rather than a customer vertical industry or IBM product line."

E-Discovery Is All in the Asking

E-Discovery Is All in the Asking

"The most recent federal decision[FOOTNOTE 1] weighing in on the hot-button issue of discovery of metadata[FOOTNOTE 2] and documents in their "native format," i.e., "the way it is stored and used in the normal course of business,"[FOOTNOTE 3] offers some simple, common-sense advice on how to best achieve that discovery objective: Ask for it. Up front.

Otherwise, if you ask too late or have already received the documents in another format, you may be out of luck.

In Autotech Technologies LP v. Automationdirect.com Inc., No. 05 C 5488, 2008 WL 902957 (N.D. Ill. April 2, 2008), defendant ADC filed a motion to compel Autotech to produce an electronic copy of a document it had already produced in PDF and paper format. ADC claimed that Autotech's production of this document in non-native format was insufficient, because the formats in which Autotech produced the document lacked the accompanying, underlying metadata, including when the document was: (1) created; (2) modified; and (3) designated confidential."

Can E-Discovery Boost Solution Providers` Bottom Line?

Can E-Discovery Boost Solution Providers` Bottom Line?

"Once electronic records became admissible in court, the quest to gather, manage and audit those records became one of the most important elements of a corporation’s legal staff. Add to that a judicial system that has become more tech-savvy, and the excuse that the records “were lost” just doesn't fly any longer. Those issues have driven impressive growth in the data archiving and storage market, which in turn has created a new but related problem—retrieving relevant data.

That's where e-discovery comes into play. Before e-discovery tools became available, those searching for data relevant to a case had to manually search through data stores to build a silo of pertinent information. One worry was that some critical element would be missed, while another worry was that information not relevant to the case would be mixed in. Auditors and researchers found themselves turning to more and more indexing tools to help manage the data, yet the very nature of each case requirement would render some of those indexes useless."

New Industry Research Unveils Insights into Corporate Counsel e-Discovery Practices, Concerns and Trends

New Industry Research Unveils Insights into Corporate Counsel e-Discovery Practices, Concerns and Trends

"Ari Kaplan Advisors, LLC, in conjunction with underwriter Fios Inc., today released the results of in-depth research conducted with professionals from corporate legal departments at Fortune 500 corporations. Kaplan contacted 117 corporations and held 30- to 60-minute interviews with 28 individuals in the financial, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, technology and discrete manufacturing industries. Of the professionals interviewed, 26 were associate general counsel and senior counsel that have direct responsibility for e-discovery supervision and management.

'Over the past two years, there has been a dramatic transformation in the complexity and management of e-discovery related to litigation and government investigations inside the corporation,” said Ari Kaplan, principal researcher and owner of Ari Kaplan Advisors. “This research is unique in that it provided a platform for the participants to share their views and concerns around e-discovery practices, as well as real insights into what’s working and what is yet to come. As the underwriter, Fios enabled us to go deep and provide a view into the legal community that you traditionally don’t get from statistical surveys. I was pleasantly surprised and excited by the results.'"

Over 80% Worry About Email Authentication

Over 80% Worry About Email Authentication

"Surety, LLC, the leading provider of data integrity solutions, today announced the results of the 2008 Email Security and Authentication Survey. The survey of more than 800 IT security, email security and compliance professionals revealed that 65 percent of respondents lack confidence that their organization's email records would be admitted as authenticated evidence in legal, regulatory or patent disputes.

The survey further revealed that more than 80 percent of respondents are concerned about their ability to authenticate email records and attachments and more than 50 percent of respondents remain unclear on new regulations and legal expectations related to email authentication."

Have you Ever Used One of These?

Have you Ever Used One of These?

"The controversy over the White House emails has pushed records management issues onto the front pages of national publications and web sites. Lots of people, including members of Congress who control agency purse strings, want to know why records management issues sometimes get short shrift.

In some ways the private sector and the government are very different, and in some ways very much the same. So it's interesting to look at new data from the Storage Networking Industry Association. They surveyed IT professionals responsible for record keeping in the private sector, and found that most say they are "highly dissatisfied" with the way email is archived at their companies."