NIGHTOWL DISCOVERY PROFESSIONAL

NIGHTOWL DISCOVERY PROFESSIONAL

To a cybersecurity or eDiscovery professional today, those acronyms may mean the difference between complying and not complying with an investigation or request. To a person in the corporate technology space fifteen years ago, the acronyms BYOD, USB, VPN, SMS and MMS meant little or nothing. At each phase of design and implementation, the feedback of the individual departments is critical to ensure day to day compliance with any program. Once inside and outside counsel determine a framework based on regulatory requirements for data preservation, the departments included in the policy implementation should have input into the initial workability of that plan. Each affected department should designate an individual or small working group responsible for representing that group in the overall design and implementation process. Corporations around the world are replete with extensively designed but clearly ignored proactive policies. By necessity, a proactive policy will touch each part of the organization, whether internally or externally facing. Although IT, Legal, Outside Counsel and Service Provider comprise the key design team, they are by no means the only stakeholders in designing proactive data policies.

Invariably, each entity will have multiple irons in the larger market and a myriad of internal groups to support those efforts. There are virtually no global organizations with a single silo. There are several key components in the origination and execution of these programs that will increase the chances for success. Time and resource constraints can choke even the most well-intentioned efforts. The prospect of designing and implementing a proactive strategy can be daunting. The proper process in creating and implementing a proactive records strategy lies in the combination of the entity’s legal and IT departments in concert with outside counsel and an experienced outside provider. Furthermore, this strategy may boost an organization’s competitive potential and decrease costly legal spend when discovery arises. A proactive approach to policy creates an opportunity to take control and plan for the unknown, reduce volume, lower costs, and mitigate risk associated with unclassified electronic records.

Shabbily conducted discovery responses place an undue risk on the whole organization.

Poor management of large data repositories can result in costly sanctions and increased long term organizational risk. Regardless of whether an organization is planning for information governance or discovery management, the design process is similar as is the intent. Currently, sophisticated organizations realize that implementing a robust information governance and strategic discovery management program is critical to their long-term business strategy, particularly in heavily-regulated and litigious industries. Beyond the critical importance of adequately responding to administrative hearings or litigation, these decisions concern some of your most critical business assets, your data. IT-driven decisions determine the path of data creation, management, storage and, ultimately, disposition. While many still consider electronic discovery to be primarily a legal issue, in reality it is a critical business function as well.

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