Entries categorized under “Legal Hold”

DCIG expects to unveil its DCIG 2012 Early Case Assessment (ECA) Buyer's Guide in Q2CY12. As prior Buyer's Guides have done, it puts at the fingertips of organizations a Buyer's Guide that provides them with a comprehensive list of ECA software that can assist them in this all-important buying decision while removing much of the mystery around how ECA are configured and which ones are suitable for which purposes. (read more)

Companies who execute Information Governance plans are looking for eDiscovery products supporting Early Case Assessment (ECA). ECA is a combination of search, workflow management, information processing, and multilingual user interfaces. ECA requires a cohesive set of technology, business and data science stakeholders to select products. ECA is powerful business process, but identifying ECA products is a beleaguering task. ECA mashes together eDiscovery and technology requirements. The "mashing of requirements" creates a broad matrix of products and functionality. Without question, eDiscovery has significantly evolved within the last few years. (read more)

As more organizations consolidate servers and create private storage clouds to store the data associated with these servers, the need to lock down that data to meet emerging data governance and eDiscovery demands has grown more acute. It is for reasons like these that features such as 3PAR's new Virtual Lock are becoming more sought after on storage systems. (read more)

It is time for organizations to heed the calls to take a proactive position on data management and preservation. While the sirens have been wailing for a number of years about the risks of not putting in place a comprehensive data management solution, too many organizations have failed to heed these warnings. Now a recent landmark opinion has dramatically altered the data management and preservation landscape by making it a necessity for organizations to implement a comprehensive, singular data management solution like CommVault® Simpana®. (read more)

Organizations across the United States have steadily felt the sting of legal action involving eDisocovery as they are quickly discovering that it is no easy feat to comply with mandates such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). This is resulting in mounting sanctions and a steadily decreasing patience in courts towards eDiscovery mistakes. However state and local government agencies were conspicuously absent from this steady stream of eDiscovery rulings. (read more)

Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information. (read more)

No company regardless of its size is immune from the possibility of an eDiscovery. But even as companies look to respond to eDiscovery demands placed on them by rulings such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), an equally vexing problem that they face is making sense of their growing mountain of email data. (read more)

I recently had an interesting conversation with an IT Director who is currently working in health care. We were discussing how his job has evolved with the complexity associated with EMR (electronic medical record) systems and how IT in health care has been especially burdened. Beyond just playing technology catch up, there are numerous regulatory and litigation threats now hovering over it. He specifically pointed to litigation as one area that represents a growing risk to his company's business and how responding to eDiscovery requests for electronic information has become a huge burden. (read more)

Smart managers always put a large emphasis on automating whatever processes they can within their organizations and for good reasons: processes become more predictable, there is a reduced chance of human error and ultimately the business is more successful. However businesses are finding out that it may not be in their best interest to automate data classification and that for now courts still prefer people to computers when it comes to performing this particular task. (read more)

To say that storage clouds are gathering in the distance is probably an understatement. Everyone is beginning to see the benefits - both technical and financial - that cloud storage provides, especially in the archiving and backup realms. But there are more factors to consider than just the underlying architecture of the provider's cloud storage offering or the price per GB. Managing and accessing data in the cloud presents entirely new risks that organizations either are still failing to address or may not even know exist. (read more)

A recent report from Ferris Research estimates that the total number of business e-mails sent in North America alone will surpass 139 million in 2009 and 143 million in 2010. This volume of email growth continues to put pressure on IT staff in every size organization to manage its inflow, outflow and retention. While the mechanics of managing emails inflows and outflows can be fairly straightforward, when it comes to setting policies as to how long to retain these emails, the picture can start to get a bit hazy. (read more)

"If it really costs millions to do that [e-discovery], then you're going to drive out of the litigation system a lot of people who ought to be there." This quote by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cuts to the heart of current issues surrounding eDiscovery. A recent DCIG blog highlighted how out of control litigation costs have become and have left companies with hard decisions on whether it is best to settle cases based solely on the cost of eDiscovery or attempt to litigate. But as companies face unprecedented economic pressure, a key question comes to mind, "Are these costs driving risky data retention strategies such as destroying all of your data?" (read more)

Regardless of how one approaches an eDiscovery project, having processes and tools in place to help guide you through the EDRM (electronic discovery reference model) are critical elements that influence how effective an eDiscovery project will be. Data retention policies, access to outside resources, and technology are all critical components to have in place in order to successfully complete an eDiscovery. Yet an equally important question that organizations need to answer is how reliable is the information they discovered in their eDiscovery? Or, better put, how do they move from a faith-based approach of eDiscovery where they assume they have all of the information that they need to a fact-based approach where they have confidence that all of is the information found during the eDiscovery is accurate and defensible in court? (read more)

There are many factors that guide a company's approach to eDiscovery. But knowing which ones matter - and which ones don't - continue to be a source of frustration as companies grapple with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and how best to respond to an eDiscovery request. Two areas of immediate importance that plague companies are how best to take responsibility for the results of an eDiscovery request and then control the costs associated with the eDiscovery. And without any easy answers and growing costs for outsourced eDiscovery, more companies are examining at the merits and cost-savings of an in-place eDiscovery (read more)

Understanding legal hold and how to best approach this difficult topic can lead to a failure of the electronic discovery process for a company and put a company at considerable risk if it does not retain critical documents needed to answer an FRCP request. (read more)

In 1978 the Presidential Records Act (PRA) was passed which fundamentally changed the landscape of Presidential records by moving them from a classification of personal information to the public domain. The PRA is explicit in describing that retention of records created by the President of the United States as well as the Vice President is the responsibility of the President. The PRA guides the President in how records should be handled and guides the steps in the proper destruction of records and how they are retained to comply with this federal statute. (read more)

A just released March 2009 Nielsen Company report, Global Faces and Networked Places, makes some startling observations about the rapid adoption of social networking such as blogs, social media sites (Facebook), Twitter and wikis among Internet users. While many may intuitively suspect that the adoption rate of these forms of social networking is accelerating, this report removes all doubt. It highlights that two-thirds of the world's Internet population now utilize social media sites, traffic to these sites is growing at 3x the rate of other Internet traffic and people now spend 10% of all Internet time on social networking sites. (read more)

Responding to an eDiscovery request is definitely not a task that most enterprise organizations eagerly anticipate. But the pain of an eDiscovery is often a result of poorly written or non-existent internal policies and procedures. An organization that takes the time to put internal policies and procedures in place may not only avoid this scenario but also lower its overall cost of doing an eDiscovery. (read more)

As analysts within the electronically stored information (ESI) space, DCIG pays close attention to not only features and benefits of specific products and solutions but also monitors other articles, blogs, and columns in the broader market place about specific vendors. In instances where allegations are made, it then tries to sort fact from fiction and present a more complete picture. Recently, some allegations about Autonomy have surfaced that sparked interest at DCIG as to their accuracy. (read more)

A SearchStorageChannel.com article that appeared in early 2008 estimated the cost of outsourced eDiscovery at about $1500 per gigabyte. While those costs may sound high, they are justifiable when a company factors in the need for qualified personnel to search, access and retrieve data securely and authoritatively as part a legal eDiscovery. However these same costs can quickly become untenable for enterprise companies that need to access and search terabytes if not petabytes of information. Therefore it is not surprising that more enterprise companies are exploring the option of performing eDiscoveries in-house to minimize these litigation costs. (read more)

Not too long ago, we can recall checking our voice messages and finding 30 to 50 messages in our respective inboxes every day. We would listen to them and then delete some or all of them, making notes along the way until we reached the end of the mailbox. While some of the messages were irrelevant, some were very important in that they conveyed corporate direction or pseudo-contractual agreements. Given that same scenario today in the financial industry, companies need to exercise extra caution as regulatory agencies and courts heighten requirements for companies to make documents of any type available, including audio recordings (telephone messages, voice mail, etc.). (read more)

Before storing documents electronically gained acceptance in the enterprise, retrieving documents meant parsing file cabinets and retrieving paper forms. And when it came time to share that information with the public without revealing classified information, it usually meant copying the original document and then pulling out a black marker that was used to cross out sensitive information on the copy, followed by more copying until the underlying text could no longer be seen. So while in the last decade most companies have scrapped file cabinets in favor of document images, more companies keep the black marker handy than they would probably like to admit. (read more)

If there are any two disciplines within corporate IT that should be in the process of becoming best friends, if not inextricably linked, it is security and storage. Storage management teams routinely send data offsite on tape or optical media, grant administrators or users permissions to search production or archived data stores during eDiscoveries or change backup policies on the fly with minimal or no supervision. The problem that emerges is that when companies are asked to prove that they can comply with certain laws or to respond to a legal eDiscovery, it turns into a corporate fire drill with security and storage scrambling to prove they managed corporate data according to preset corporate policies. This begins to change with today's announcement between CommVault and McAfee, Inc, as it creates a new mechanism for companies to proactively monitor corporate data while preventing corporate data leakage. (read more)

It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy's solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI. (read more)

In Part 1, we talked with Jack Halprin about transitioning from a forensic collection product and market to Autonomy's enterprise solutions. Now we get to learn more about the specific products that he is working with and how they address customer's pain points in the early stages of the e-Discovery lifecycle. (read more)