eDiscovery now part of business process

Contributed by Roumiana Deltcheva (Friday, November 05, 2010) | Category : eDiscovery

Companies across the globe are constantly dealing with dozens of investigations, regulatory inquiries and lawsuits that never make the nightly newscasts or the morning newspaper, but nevertheless place financial strain on the organization and open executives and shareholders to great risk.

The trend doesn't show any signs of slowing in the near future. As companies continue to produce more electronically stored information, respondents to the annual Socha-Gelbman Electronic Discovery Survey estimated the eDiscovery market will grow 10 to 15 percent both this year and next.

According to a recent Forbes report, the increase in litigation against them means companies can no longer deal with eDiscovery requests on a case-by-case basis. The process is deserving of a place in the overall business as a collaboration between numerous departments, including compliance, legal, risk and human resources, among others.

Failing to prepare for impending litigation can set a company up to fail. For multinational companies, eDiscovery cases can involve as much as 20 terabytes of data - about 20 million documents - from China, 15 terabytes from Brazil and 10 terabytes from the United States, according to Forbes. It's easy to see why collecting, analyzing, reviewing and presenting data for an eDiscovery request seems daunting to most companies.

"The process of collecting and analyzing this data can amount to a logistical and financial nightmare when most companies today lack the technical expertise, processes and technology to easily respond in an efficient way," the Forbes report states.

And the task is decidedly more difficult when it comes to multinational companies answering to countries across the globe. These companies must adhere to compliance standards that stretch across geographical and jurisdictional boundaries.

In countries such as China, India and Brazil, large investigations of companies are launched based on suspected violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. European countries go by the EU's Office of Fair Trading, Serious Fraud Office and Financial Services Authority. Dealing with such vastly different regulations is all the more reason for companies to recognize the threat of litigation and prepare accordingly.

But some good can come from increases in litigation, more stringent regulations and lessons learned from past cases.

"The opportunity is to transform a corporation's eDiscovery approach from a tactical fire-fighting design to a strategic business application that eliminates massive cost and risk," according to Forbes.

It takes collaboration in order for that to happen. Several industry experts have voiced their belief that email archiving solutions and policies and responses to eDiscovery cases can no longer be viewed as problems meant solely for IT and legal to deal with.

Departments across the company must work together to set email archiving standards, schedules and apply automation, defensibility, efficiencies and a best practices framework around eDiscovery. And to ensure all are carried out properly, all employees within an organization must possess at least some legal knowledge appropriate to the specific compliance and regulatory environment.

"Taking these steps to accurately understand the eDiscovery icebergs lurking below the water line, organizations can safely navigate their way and avoid becoming that next litigation headline - and financial nightmare," according to Forbes.

The explosion of data produced by companies in recent years is unlike any ever seen. Corporate users now produce about 60 billion emails per day collectively, Forbes said. According to market research firm Gartner, 47 percent of IT respondents to a survey conducted over the summer ranked data growth in their top three challenges. According to the same survey, data containment and retention, such as email archiving, was cited by 37 percent of respondents as the main driver for strategic change.