Storage Managers Need a Legal Technology Taxonomy

This week's LegalTech event in New York City has drawn storage vendors like flies to the honey pot. And no wonder: Storage plays a crucial role in supporting corporate litigation activity. Just ask anyone who's had a run-in with the feds over FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) or any one of a range of other current regulations.

Indeed, storage managers have so much information on keeping abreast of legal requirements that it's confusing. The problem's compounded by marketing materials that make any kind of archiving system or search program an "e-discovery" tool.

What's needed to help make sense of it all is a taxonomy – one that would help storage managers parse the different kinds of tools available with a view to creating an effective storage strategy, one based on their particular requirements.

Let's check some examples. At the very least, a list like this might include software that monitors the Web for activity that exposes a company to litigation – much like the Websense product that recently helped identify porn surfing in U.S. federal agencies.

Another tier of products would include email archiving with e-discovery capabilities, like the products offered by Mimosa, Lucid8, Symantec, and others. Add to that a corollary of vendors peddling email archiving services, like Autonomy, Fortiva, LiveOffice, MessageOne, and MessageOne resellers IBM, Iron Mountain, and Sungard.Next up would be document and records management products, of which EMC Documentum is typical.

Yet another list might include packaged systems that combine archiving, search, and e-discovery services for large corporate legal projects. Cue Autonomy, Clearwell, Iron Mountain, and Xiotech.

None of these products or services constitutes a legal strategy in itself. For that, storage managers need guidance from their own company lawyers, or from services hired by those lawyers to marshall the process of data retrieval for litigation. That means more expenses and complications to add to the taxonomy.

What do you think? Is there a need for a storage taxonomy for legal strategizing? What would you put on that taxonomy? What is missing from the suggestions above, and what should be removed, if anything?

Byte and Switch will be covering e-discovery topics related to storage in more depth in upcoming articles. We'd love to get your view to help us furnish really useful information. Hit that message board, call us, or write to us.