IT’s role in E-Discovery
OK IT folks, if you’re just starting to wonder about e-Discovery and what you might need to worry about, I’ve got some good stuff for you.
But first of all, where ya’ been!?!? Somewhere in your career, this is going to happen, your organization is going to get sued, and electronic documents are going to be part of the case. It would behoove you to learn a little something.
A good place to start, would be this white paper I saw today on Complex Discovery, The Role of e-Discovery Technology and How IT Can Address Immediate Requirements & Prepare for the Future.
Take a look, it’s not overly long and will give you some good background to start looking at how you would handle the situation, before it happens!
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Mike:
E-discovery reflects the natural collision of technology and legal practice. As an enterprise creates an ever-growing mountain of records, adversaries of course want access to it. Knowing that litigation and e-discovery are inevitable, an enterprise can use technology proactively to make records more benign. What do you think? –Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/nix-smoking-gun-e-discovery.html
Ben, it’s an interesting point, but I don’t think we’re even there yet. IT it seems to me, from my own experiences there, is much more focused on preventing people from watching porn, or accessing webmail accounts/social networking and “wasting time” under the guise of security than doing anything real about security or e-discovery. IT has been charged by management with babysitting employees and making sure every single document and email is somehow available and backed up no matter what happens. Coming up with a retention policy and e-discovery plan is simply not on the radar in most small and medium businesses, though your idea certainly allows them to CYA, which most are interested in doing! 🙂
Still, too many would simply add the disclaimer text to outgoing emails and call it a day, doing nothing to actually secure the enterprise data. That may get the enterprise off the hook, but as an IT person, it doesn’t do much for me at all, and it doesn’t answer the core question, when a lawsuit comes in, how is IT going to get the data that is needed? That’ to me, is the area that is missing in current IT planning.