Discovering E-Discovery update from May 2009

Few IT managers look forward to dealing with their companies' legal departments. It usually means there are serious problems. But storage managers have the opportunity to head off trouble and save their companies money if they have the foresight to understand and plan ahead for the inevitable e-discovery request.

We are a litigious society. That's not news. What is new is the impact lawsuits and other legal actions are having on the IT department and storage managers in particular. These days, when a lawsuit is filed or a company is investigated, a request for all related documents follows shortly afterwards. And where are those documents kept? On backup tapes and in archives. Who has to produce them? You do.

It is a costly effort to sift through tens of thousands or millions of documents and emails and files to find the ones that are responsive to a court order or necessary for a legal defense. Businesses and other organizations spent more than $2.7 billion on electronic data discovery last year. That spending will grow to more than $4.6 billion by 2010, according to consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann.

If your company is like most, it doesnt have an automated system to help with discovery for litigation purposes. And these days, you really can't afford the time or the money involved in using manual processes to sort and sift through all of the electronic documents and files you have stored. Do you really want to print out all of those documents and emails, which then have to be reviewed by hand by dozens of expensive lawyers? Probably not.

An automated e-discovery tool or system can pay for itself in a single lawsuit. And it can help to show senior management that storage admins and IT managers are able to do more than just spool tapes and spin disks. This is an opportunity for tech professionals to work with legal professionals to help protect the company you both work for.That's why Byte and Switch has started running a six-part series from the respected research firm Taneja Group on e-discovery. The series by analyst Christine Taylor is designed to help you understand what e-discovery is and how it works, what steps are involved, and what types of tools are needed to prepare to deal with the e-discovery requests that you will soon see -- if you haven't already. Part 1, which ran on Monday, focused on being proactive about e-discovery.

Over the next several weeks, Taylor will walk you through the ligitation e-discovery workflow, discussing preparation, collection, preservation, review, and production of documents in a legal setting, and she will take a look at some of the tools available in the market to help you handle those tasks. And you should pay attention. As she points out, UBS Warburg was hit with a $29.3 million judgment in a court case that resulted, in part, from the company's failure to produce evidence from backup tapes in a timely manner. There also was evidence that the company overwrote backup tapes that should have been held and preserved.

You don't want that to happen to you. Instead, you want to be the guy or gal who, when confronted by company lawyers saying they need everything on XYZ in two days, says: "Sure, no problem. Do you want that sorted by person, date, phrase, or in some other form?" That alone could make you a hero. And if your work helps your company to win a major lawsuit, you might even get a key to the executive wash room.

All joking aside, there are other benefits. One is working with your company's legal department to plan for the future. That alone should help to change the image of storage as just a cost center. Another is to get a better handle on what you have stored and where to find it. And did I mention that you could save your company a lot of money?

Read the e-discovery series and let us know what your company is doing to prepare for the next lawsuit.0