Electronic Discovery Navigator

Oce Business Services Shares Winning Document Management Strategies in an Economic Downturn

Oce Business Services Shares Winning Document Management Strategies in an Economic Downturn

"The current global economic downturn will create challenges for enterprises well into 2009. Successful companies will implement strategies that will enable them to weather the storm and achieve a strong competitive edge in the eventual recovery. Some experts point to outsourcing as one such strategy, which is likely to increase in 2009. Oce Business Services is sharing insights on how specific document management processes, whether outsourced or managed internally, can help organizations lower costs and streamline operations during a downturn.

These processes include enterprise-wide print/copy management. According to Gartner, most enterprises do not manage their office printers well, having too much and often the wrong equipment and supplies for their needs. Actively managing office printing can reduce spending by 10 percent to 30 percent while reaping real environmental benefits ("Key Issues for Print Management, 2008," Pete Basiliere, March 2008)."

Legal Holds Process Behind eDiscovery Risk?

Legal Holds Process Behind eDiscovery Risk?

"Released by CGOC, a practitioners’ forum focused on records retention and preservation practices, and the Huron Consulting Group, the survey looked at legal holds and e-discovery practices in companies with annual revenues ranging from US$5 (AU$7.35) billion to more than US$150 (AU$220.62) billion.

Titled “Benchmark Survey on Prevailing Practices for Legal Holds in Global 1000 Companies”, the survey focused on corporate practices for preserving information in litigation, identifying custodians of data, communicating legal holds, interviewing custodians, and collecting potentially relevant data."

Paragon’s Five Stages of Records Management Maturity

Paragon’s Five Stages of Records Management Maturity

"With eDiscovery such a hot topic these days, one of the more important things that enterprises need to do is ensure their information is stored in an accurate and easy to find manner. IT Consultancy firm Paragon Solutions has created a Records Management Maturity Model that will help you determine where you are in the process of doing just that and what you can do to move from one stage of the model to the next.

The Records Management Maturity Model executive briefing was written by Paragon’s life sciences records management program leader Douglas Vargo. Vargo is also an industry speaker on Records Management best practices.

The Model outlines the five stages a typical enterprise goes through to achieve a solid Records Management strategy."

The Smoking Gun in Your Adversary's Hard Drive

The Smoking Gun in Your Adversary's Hard Drive

"If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us." -- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (American politician, 1900-1965).

Since the e-discovery related amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in December 2006, it has become increasingly common for litigants to seek complete copies, or images, of computer hard drives from their adversaries. Not all appreciate, however, that such requests are not likely to be supported by the court in the absence of special circumstances that justify such an invasive and often overreaching demand.

This article will discuss how the rules and court decisions have addressed the propriety and parameters of hard drive image requests.

Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34, a party may certainly request copies of electronically stored information maintained by an adversary. In particular, Rule 34 permits a party "to inspect, copy, test, or sample any designated documents or electronically stored information." While there is no doubt as to a party's right to request duplication of relevant electronic data, requests calling for complete copies of a party's computer hard drives for searching and production of select ESI are often met with resistance."

Fulbright & Jaworski 2008 Litigation Trends Survey Shows U.S. Companies Preparing for Rise in Litigation Following Two Years of Declines

Fulbright & Jaworski 2008 Litigation Trends Survey Shows U.S. Companies Preparing for Rise in Litigation Following Two Years of Declines

"Following two straight years of reporting declines in the number of new lawsuits and regulatory proceedings – including a drop in large-dollar cases – U.S. companies now anticipate an uptick in new actions and government probes, as well as the need to hire more in-house litigation staff to help manage the expected rise in disputes. Such is the outlook from the 2008 Litigation Trends Survey just published by international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.

This is the fifth year Fulbright has polled corporate law departments in the U.S. and U.K. on the state of global litigation. The 2008 survey drew input from 358 in-house counsel on both sides of the Atlantic, including 251 U.S. respondents. The survey, initially launched by Fulbright in 2004, is the largest canvas of corporate counsel on litigation issues and trends.

“This year’s survey appears to mark an inflection point for American business, between the end of a prolonged period of prosperity and the start of a period of economic challenge that is likely to fuel litigation over who is to blame and who should pay for the consequences,” said Stephen C. Dillard, who chairs Fulbright’s global litigation practice. “Given that we were polling in-house counsel on the cusp of that transition, it’s no wonder that this year’s findings highlight both the evident calm before the storm, as well as the sense that disputes are on the rise.'"

It’s Happening Now: This is the Tera Era of Data Storage

It’s Happening Now: This is the Tera Era of Data Storage

"It’s not terribly revelatory to say that there has been an explosion in the amount of digital data recently. After all, in the decades since the term “Information Age” was first coined back in 1971, uninterrupted, unrelenting data growth has been perennial.

In the 1980s, the new Mac OS and Windows layout-rich documents and spreadsheets replaced simple ASCII-based files, invoking the transition from the temporary storage of the day, the 360 kilobyte (KB) 5¼-inch floppy, to much higher capacity 1.44 megabyte (MB) 3½-inch floppies. In that same decade, IBM introduced the 3380, the world’s first gigabyte (GB) capacity hard drive, and it was time for our language to march forward as well. Soon, gigabyte supplanted megabyte as the common term for storage capacity.

And the march continues. New visual and audio file types and increased computing power continue to drive storage capacities upward. But today’s digital data explosion is, indeed, very different.

This is a new era of increasing storage capacity. The Information Age has given way to the Internet Age. Digital data now permeates much more of our lives and lifestyles. It spans our laptops and desktops, of course, but also a new host of broadly used consumer devices like digital cameras, mobile phones, digital video camcorders, car navigation systems, gaming devices, digital video record­ers (DVRs) and handheld audio players, each wholesaling in comparatively huge file types. And while some of these devices have internal solid state storage, many more also have hard drives. Moreover, virtually all of these devices ultimately interact with a larger hard drive storage system for the ability to access, network and share files, songs and games, video footage, digital movies or photos."

The searchable solution

The searchable solution

"Jorgensen reviewed a number of email archiving systems including GFI Mail Archiver, Sunbelt Software USA's Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) and Symantec Enterprise Vault, but the front runner was ArcMail Defender.

Dean Richardson, chief marketing officer, ArcMail Technology.“Email archiving is keeping a copy of every single email that comes into or leaves an organization. In real time, any time a message is sent or received through their mail system, we archive and index and make it searchable — quickly,” says Dean Richardson (right), chief marketing officer, ArcMail Technology.

Richardson says that ArcMail Technology's value proposition to the market is that ArcMail Defender is, by comparison, “easy to buy, easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use.”

While evaluating email archiving solutions on the market, Jorgenson was impressed with ArcMail Technology's live web-demonstration of how the product works. He saw that email could be searched by subject, sender, recipient, attachment name. Also, users can search for emails within a date range or search for full-text. The system is, “very straightforward, very upfront,” Jorgenson says. Cost, ease of use and the end user experience were all factors in Jorgenson's choice in picking ArcMail Defender.

The cost of the product depends on the amount of storage a company needs. Sacred Heart went with an eight-terabyte unit, which cost them $24,000. As for how long that unit will sustain them — if Sacred Heart's employees use reasonably light email — each employee contributing 20 emails a day at 25 kilobytes per email, the unit will sustain them for about 20 years, Richardson says."

The Cost of E-Discovery

The Cost of E-Discovery

"There are few words that frighten corporate executives or storage managers more than "lawsuit" and "e-discovery," since one usually leads to the other. Both can be costly, even if e-discovery works the way it is suppose to work and your company ends up winning the lawsuit.

Businesses and other organizations spent more than $2.7 billion on electronic data discovery last year, and spending on EDD will grow to more than $4.6 billion by 2010, according to consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, who presented their Sixth Annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey in a report published earlier this year on Law.com.

The good news? "Better and earlier analysis of electronically stored information means a greater ability to successfully navigate the EDD whitewater," said the consultants, who see a shift in the market from a services-based approach to one where improved software used by companies in-house and by law firms and service providers plays a greater role.

Storage, software, and search vendors know a good market when they see it, and more vendor pitches tout the ability of their products and services to help with e-discovery. That's a change from a few years ago when they were offering products to help companies comply with SEC regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley rules, according to Arun Taneja, head of analyst firm Taneja Group ."

The Law Requires Email Archiving

The Law Requires Email Archiving

"According to industry experts, approximately 90% of the day's business communications are performed via email or by way of unsecured instant messages. Communications including unstructured data can clog up an organizations network bandwidth and take up great amounts of storage space. The volume of emails and similar data forms in most businesses double every 12 to 18 months.

It begs the questions: What do I do with all of that data? For most organizations, the data has been backed-up to tapes or in the worst case scenario deleted from centralized repositories within email and database servers. After the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedures were passed in December of 2006, all emails, communications, files, directives and requests that may be relevant to a current or future litigation cannot simply be deleted or overwritten. The data must be produced and thus it must be archived, because that's the law."

New rule curbs inadvertent waivers

New rule curbs inadvertent waivers

"A recent law that amends the Federal Rules of Evidence will significantly limit the circumstances under which attorney-client privilege is waived during discovery, legal experts say.

While practitioners are split on the impact new Rule 502 will have on litigation, they agree that it will clarify the risks associated with privilege reviews of vast numbers of electronically stored information, or ESI.

Rule 502 is “absolutely a critical rule,” said U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm in Baltimore. it will protect against waivers of privilege based on inadvertent disclosures and cut litigation costs — by as much as 75 percent in cases involving a lot of ESI, he estimated."