eDiscovery and Information Lifcycle Management

This week I attended a customer event around the impact of eDiscovery for the legal community. The key note presenter was Dr Bradley Schatz who is the Director of Forensic Technology from Vincents

eDiscovery extends the current incredibly time consuming and expensive paper based discovery process for litigation used by the legal fraternity. eDiscovery extends this to potentially include all corporate electronic records including information stored on:

• Corporate Transactional Systems (Finance, HRMS etc.),
  
• Messaging (email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki's, voice etc.),
  
• Native Files such as (word, ppt, PDF, video and audio) stored on various resources such as file servers, laptops, handheld devices (mobile phones and iPods), USBs, external stroage.

The process of eDiscovery described by Dr Schatz incluses 2 new steps Preserve and Process from the traditional approach to be:

1. Identify - strategies to locate relevant infromation (online, backup storage, etc)
2. Preserve - the integrity of the information (ie if on a cycled backup tape copy before it is destroyed)
3. Collect - de-duplication and near duplication of documents into a central location for analysis
4. Process - into searchable images or native electronic copies
5. Review - the content for relevance and priviledge
6. Produce - the material for the other side

Given the relative cheap cost of storage and the broad sources of "relevant" information, some organistaions have had a tendancy to hold on to as much data as possible, potentially resulting in incredible high cost in the event of litigation. The establishment of a well though out Information Lifecyle Management strategy and policy that defines security, catorgorisation, destruction of information and eDiscovery use cases is critically important. This can not only save money in the event of a Freedom of Infomation (FoI) request or litigation, but could also save significant storage and Data Centre costs and operational costs.