Discovery involves the preservation, search, analysis and production of information that might play a role in litigation. Consequently, ‘Key issues in eDiscovery’ is relevant information and data that is not printed on paper—it is electronic communications and documents.
A standard established in the landmark case Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, called the Zubulake Standard, explains that: “A party has a duty to preserve all evidence, including electronically stored information (‘ESI’), that it knows, or should know, is relevant to any present or future litigation.”
What this means for every organization is that it must retain all of its electronic content – emails, files, databases, social media posts, instant messages and the like – and do so systematically and following a set of procedures that will allow it to satisfy all of its legal obligations.
While the formal process of discovery has been a key element of civil litigation for decades, eDiscovery has become much more important over the past 10-15 years as the proportion of electronic content in most organizations has become more voluminous and more difficult to manage than information on paper.
The consequences of poor data management practices–inadequate archiving, no ability to implement legal holds, lack of competence, etc.–include significant legal judgments, loss of corporate reputation, and an increased level of overall risk.
Poor eDiscovery results in poor decision-making because those charged with managing litigation–as well as the overall organization–do not have sufficient insight about what is happening within their organization. Administrators need to understand that eDiscovery can extend to any platform on which ESI is stored: desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, backup tapes, servers, and even employees’ home computers and other personally owned devices.
Download your FREE Whitepaper: “Key Issues in eDiscvoery”
Osterman Research has discovered that the vast majority of organizations believe they are reasonably well prepared to deal with searching for, finding and producing live email, e.g., content on email servers; however, they are much less prepared to satisfy eDiscovery requirements for other types of content, particularly social media and cloud-based content repositories.
Retain Unified Archiving
Retain provides multi-platform unified message archiving, eDiscovery and publishing for organizations looking to reduce costs, manage complexity and mitigate risk on-prem or in the cloud.
Retain allows administrators, records management, and other authorized users to perform eDiscovery and complete regulatory tasks such as place litigation holds, print, forward, save, redact and export with the built-in tools.
For more information, visit http://gwava.com/Retain/Retain_for_eDiscovery.php
Look for our next post, “The Key Elements of a Sound eDiscovery System,” for more information about how you can implement an effective eDiscovery solution
*Information comes from the GWAVA/Osterman whitepaper, “Key Issues in eDiscovery.”
