In an increasingly litigious society, your company must be prepared to defend itself against lawsuits brought by shareholders, customers, suppliers, partners, employees, government agencies and others. A major part of being prepared is the ability to perform “eDiscovery”—the identification, collection and delivery of all electronic documents relevant to a lawsuit—within a very tight schedule.
eDiscovery, however, can present a significant challenge. Your company may have millions of documents scattered across many different systems and storage resources in many different format and possibly in several languages if it is a multi-national litigation.
It can be prohibitively expensive and enormously disruptive to sift through all this data in order to find all the documents relevant to a specific lawsuit. In some cases, it may actually be impossible to ensure the complete fulfillment of an eDiscovery objective within a tight legal deadline.
As a result, your company may be exposed to significant legal risk and/or may wind up going to court without a key piece of exculpatory evidence. It may also be fined for being unable to comply with the court's request.. Even worse, it may find itself in a position where it has to settle a case that it could have won it on its merits.
Furthermore, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) now require organizations to preserve relevant information when it learns, or reasonably should have learnt of pending or threatened litigation, or of a regulatory investigation, even before a law suit is actually filed. This is called ‘Legal Hold’. In the Hawaiian Airlines case (2007) it was held that simply telling employees to preserve all evidence and trust that they would comply was not deemed as acceptable conduct. The organization must address the possibility that a custodian could act in bad faith and may not save evidence as required. In practice this means that unless the organization prepares for such scenarios in advance, and already has a reliable and secure information management system, it may not be able to meet eDiscovery requirements without a major disruption to its operations.
So how can you ensure your company’s ability to quickly and comprehensively gather every relevant document from across the enterprise? how can you prevent even the most difficult and sudden eDiscovery assignments from draining all your resources and completely disrupting your business? And how can you ensure compliance with legal hold requirements?
To proactively and effectively prepare for eDiscovery, contact Nogacom today >>>