Ellery Buchanan, CEO, RenewData says "There's no reason to keep all that data."
Byte and Switch
April 14, 2008
By Mary Jander
Ellery Buchanan says companies make a couple of big mistakes when it comes to e-discovery. One of them is trying to go it alone; the other is keeping too much tape.
“There’s no reason to keep all that data,” says the CEO of RenewData, a supplier of e-discovery services. “Some of our clients have 900,000 backup tapes.”
Unfortunately, he says, those tapes contain “latent liability.” If the data stored on them is found to be relevant to a company’s legal position or regulatory compliance, the fact that it wasn’t handled properly subjects a firm to fines — or worse.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been following changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, along with increased regulatory scrutiny. RenewData is just one of the companies benefiting from the rush of e-discovery business resulting from these changes. Since 2001, the company has offered legal data services ranging from planning and advice to actual hosted archiving. And business reportedly has never been better.
We caught up with Buchanan, who’s been CEO since 2004, to ask him a few questions about e-discovery — and get some feedback on what folk can do to cope with it.
