Electronic Discovery Navigator

The Hidden Cost of Email

The Hidden Cost of Email

"Do you ever find yourself thinking, "I need to devote an entire day to sorting through and cleaning up my email inbox?" The time you spend sifting through that forest of emails is costing your organization time and money -- a factor many companies fail to recognize, according to Jesse Wilkins, principal consultant with Access Sciences Corporation. To combat the lack of insight, Wilkins has developed an Email Management ROI calculator for the AIIM organization.

Wilkins stresses the fact that email management should be taken seriously. He references statistics provided by The Radicati Group that suggest the average worker sifts through approximately 150 email messages every day -- devoting about 20 percent of their time in their inbox, filing, sorting, searching, categorizing, sending, and receiving. (And from a purely technical standpoint, all that email gobbles up about 20 megabytes per day in storage space, yet another cost that organizations fail to fully account for, Wilkins says.)"

Bridgeway Develops Legal Hold Solution for eDiscovery

Bridgeway Develops Legal Hold Solution for eDiscovery

"Bridgeway, the leading provider of technology solutions for in-house legal departments, announced that it has developed a new Legal Hold application and workflow product to assist with the notification and preservation process.

According to Rich Hall, Vice President of eDiscovery Solutions at Bridgeway, "General counsel have told us that they want a Legal Hold application that manages preservation notices, interviews, and collections more cost-effectively than previously available offerings."

Bridgeway Legal Hold is designed to assist corporate legal departments with generating, distributing and tracking preservation notices. In addition, it provides the ability to track interviews and capture results of interviews, and it supports the process to collect the discoverable data."

Int’l News: Clearpace NParchive introduced for long-term storage of structured data and eDiscovery

Int’l News: Clearpace NParchive introduced for long-term storage of structured data and eDiscovery

"Clearpace introduced its new archive data store: NParchive. NParchive enables IT teams to reduce storage consumption and guarantee long-term immediate access to structured data that must be archived. This is a task which RDBMS and data warehouses are not designed for or suited to as they are optimized for transactional processing or high performance analysis.

The NParchive software compresses structured data from databases, data warehouses or log files into archives that are 95 percent smaller than the data source, time-proofing the data and ensuring immutability. The NParchive data store that is created can be hosted on any storage architecture and remains fully searchable by native queries."

Is Tape Dead in the SMB Market? HP and Sony Think Not

Is Tape Dead in the SMB Market? HP and Sony Think Not

"What is the viability of the tape market in the future, taking into account advances in online technology and compliance/eDiscovery requirements? According to Robert Amatruda, research director, Tape and Removable Storage, IDC, 'Tape continues to be a key part of many organizations’ data-protection strategy. Yes, increased use of disk for performance, search and discovery requirements augments tape’s low cost. Tape is still being deployed with enhanced features such as encryption and WORM.'"

Survey Shows E-Discovery Best Practices

Survey Shows E-Discovery Best Practices

"Teams of people are overwhelmingly responsible for e-discovery in the modern corporate legal department. Despite the fact that almost 57 percent of the respondents advised that an associate general counsel or senior counsel-level attorney managed the day-to-day e-discovery process, most indicated that the effort was more of collaboration between litigation support and IT.

Another 89 percent reported that their organization has an e-discovery response team in place, and they are cross-functional interdepartmental teams comprised of lawyers, paralegals, litigation support and IT. Some companies also included records management and forensic document specialists as well.

This integrated relationship between the technical experts and the legal department was evident in almost every metric. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents reported working "very close" with IT, and 61 percent noted that legal is "often" consulted when IT adopts new technology.

Stronger internal structuring may also be responsible for the fact that 46 percent of the respondents do not have a long-term agreement in place with a preferred e-discovery services provider, and that only 14 percent of the respondents engage national e-discovery counsel."

Minimizing the Risk That E-Discovery Failures Will Create Corporate Liability

Minimizing the Risk That E-Discovery Failures Will Create Corporate Liability

"E-discovery practice in civil cases and government investigations has rapidly evolved since the onset of federal rules governing electronic discovery a little over a year ago. During its infancy, e-discovery was viewed as a costly but powerful tool that could generate "smoking gun" emails that would alter the outcome of cases. Just a few years ago, litigants were infrequently sanctioned for e-discovery failures, in part, because many judges gave litigants who botched e-discovery the benefit of the doubt and chalked up e-discovery mishaps to "the learning curve." Those days are over.

Judicial tolerance for shortcomings in e-discovery is on the decline, and litigants, their counsel and e-discovery vendors are facing direct liability for such failures. As a result, sensibly managing e-discovery is critical not only to success in the underlying litigation but to minimizing the possibility that e-discovery failures will become a source of liability in and of themselves. Before reviewing some ways to minimize the risk that e-discovery failures will create liability, this article draws upon two recent and notable e-discovery disputes to show how liability can arise."

Texas law turns companies with eDiscovery data into private eyes

Texas law turns companies with eDiscovery data into private eyes

"Businesses in Texas that work in the eDiscovery area and amass and store and search digital data could need a private investigator's license as a result of a ridiculous new law in Texas."

Web 2.0 and e-discovery: Risks and countermeasures

Web 2.0 and e-discovery: Risks and countermeasures

"Enterprise employees frequently use social networking tools, most notably Web-based applications. It's no surprise more organizations are wondering what happens if social networking data becomes relevant to an e-discovery investigation.

How does an enterprise go about discovering and assessing Web 2.0 data? How responsible is an organization, legally speaking, for the information that's out there in the Web 2.0 world? What risks arise from e-discovery as it relates to Web 2.0 data, and how can you mitigate them? In this tip, we will look at e-discovery as it relates to Web 2.0 and consider the strongest options for minimizing risks to the organization."

Preparing for an E-Discovery Showdown

Preparing for an E-Discovery Showdown

"As a buzzword, "e-discovery" doesn't have much flash, but it does have plenty of substance─as those involved with litigation have discovered. Because so much corporate communication and information is stored in digital form, being able to retrieve that data quickly and affordably is helpful, but it's not always realistic.

Many organizations might store data in legacy systems or at off-site locations, and requests for specific e-mail, for example, could be expensive to locate, and may not even be relevant to the case. CIOs need to implement and enforce e-discovery protocols and infrastructure, but some believe many companies are woefully unprepared."

Telecommuting Presents an EDD Nightmare

Telecommuting Presents an EDD Nightmare

"Despite its promise of increased productivity and job satisfaction, working from home poses special legal obstacles for corporate employers.

A majority of employees report working from home at least one hour a week, and 10 percent of employees said they performed at least half of their work from home.[FOOTNOTE 1] More than a third of employees who use computers also said working at home made them much more productive.[FOOTNOTE 2] But another survey reveals a darker side to technology's role in blurring the lines between office and home: nearly 16 percent of the survey participants admitted using their personal e-mail accounts to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages.[FOOTNOTE 3]

In light of these findings and recent case law sanctioning corporations for their employees' destruction of electronically stored information, corporations and their counsel must consider whether current policies adequately cover ESI that is transferred between the office and employees' homes or, worse yet, never touches a company's computers."