Impressions from ILTA '08
By: Joe Garber
Sr. Director, Product Marketing
RenewData
I just spent the last several days at ILTA 2008, the 31st annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. This event, which brings together some of the brightest minds and most technologically savvy companies in the world, is a great place to get a pulse on the most-urgent legal challenges facing law firms and corporations today.
Not surprisingly, a topic that received a good deal of coverage in the breakout sessions was how to better manage the risks associated with electronically stored information (ESI). It is simply no longer possible to for organizations to ignore the pain that NOT being prepared for eDiscovery can inflict. As a result, specific topics that generated buzz over the past several days naturally included:
- Applying retention policies – Increasingly, enterprises want to automate the process of disposing of ESI in accordance with their retention policies. This not only lowers storage expenses, but it also lowers the risk that outdated data will be taken out of context.
- Enforcing legal holds – The ability to search for, and lock down, all data that may be relevant to a given case is a must have in today’s legal environment. Courts are no longer lenient on mistakes that result in lost or indefensible data.
- Leveraging advanced search tools – The amount and complexity of data in today’s enterprise requires tools that go beyond the simple keyword searching that has been the norm for many years. Counsel must be sure it has all data relevant to a case and has visibility into the inherent risks that this data presents.
- Driving efficiency into legal review – It’s no secret that the most-expensive aspect of eDiscovery is legal review, and organizations are now looking for tools to dramatically lower these costs. Two of the most common solutions discussed this week were: 1) the use of Early Case Assessment (ECA) tools that allow the organization to do some pre-analysis and formulate a legal strategy before review; and 2) the use of advanced analytics tools to help attorneys doing the review become more efficient.
Each of the above is right on target as a measure to lower an organization’s ESI-borne risk. But there’s a more fundamental problem that each organization must solve first, before focusing on these exciting initiatives.
My daughter recently came to me and said she wanted to throw a tea party for all her stuffed animals. She had an extravagant plan of lining them all up in a special order so her closest ‘friends’ got special treatment. What she forgot was that she had hidden her animals all around the house over the past few weeks in a toddler’s game of hide-and-seek. It took several minutes to explain to her that she had to find all of her friends first before she could evaluate and sort them to her liking.
This is a similar realization that many organizations have as they start to prepare for eDiscovery – albeit with a little less sobbing… in most cases. In the world of ESI you first have to know where all your data is, what is contained within that data, and then (generally) consolidate it in one place before you can uniformly manage and search that information. And nowhere is that task more difficult than with your historical information sitting on backup tapes – where data may be scattered throughout your organization and in formats that aren’t easily understood by today’s technology.
The interim (and highly important) step in preparing for litigation is thus conducting an inventory of what you have on backup tapes, deleting those that you are no longer required to maintain, and then centralizing this data in a historical archive so you can optimally leverage the above tools and effectively protect your organization from risk in the future. From my discussions this week with organizations fighting the eDiscovery fires on the front lines, it became clear that many have made this key step a priority for 2008-2009.
If you are one of those forward-thinking enterprises, I offer congratulations. The foundation you are setting will pay off in spades. The next challenge you have will be deciding whether you want to do that work yourself or outsource it to a third party – the general rule most speakers talked about this week was to outsource unless you are 100% confident that you have the technology, processes, and people to capture and preserve all data, without exceptions, errors, or breaches in security. If you’re not one of those organizations that will prioritize making your ESI more centralized and accessible, ask yourself why. Or more important, ask yourself how you plan to apply uniform retention policies and legal holds across all your data and how easy it will be to see potentially case-altering linkages in your data if it’s not all fully visible to you. And if you don’t have an answer that allows you to sleep well at night, feel free to give me a call.
