E-Discovery Impact on IT

I thought this quote from a ComputerWorld article really sums up what I’ve been thinking since I moved into Litigation Support and out of a strictly IT job.

?[FRCP] has made their lives incredibly complicated,? Nirken said. IT is now responsible for immediately locating electronic files that ?can exist just about anywhere ? in networks, in people?s personal computers [or] on any electronic media you can imagine.?

That really kind of sums it up. When you’re the solo IT guy in a small business like I used to be, and that business gets involved in litigation, for whatever reason, you suddenly become responsible for locating, preserving, searching and producing all the relevant data, no matter where it might be located. That’s not fun.

I’ve only been involved in a peripheral way since moving into this job, doing some collecting, and sitting in on conference calls to advise these IT folks, and what I can see isn’t pretty. Mostly, it occurs to me that when you’re in litigation, it’s too late to make this easier. The time to document where your data is, and what it is, is well before that!

Follow these topics: LitigationSupport, Tech