All Dogs Must Learn New Tricks

The absence of formalized processes, communications policies and means to enforce litigation holds underscores an urgent need to educate IT organizations and their legal and compliance counterparts about each other's actions and activities during a litigation event.

• IT professionals need to better understand the language of their compliance and legal discovery counterparts and be more cognizant of the technology requirements for managing and processing data during a litigation event. For starters, it is important to recognize the distinct but complementary relationship between their information management practice and their legal hold procedures. A resulting lack of understanding between the two can contribute to IT's overconfidence in its infrastructure's abilities to support the legal-hold process.
• IT should be aware of issues that would interfere with the IT infrastructure's ability to automate the consistent enforcement of information management and retention policies.
• Additionally, IT needs to do a better job understanding the potential dormant liabilities that may arise from its technology decisions in processing and handling data.
• IT executives need to work more closely with their compliance, records management and legal counterparts to ensure that the IT processes and infrastructure are able to support the end-to-end records management and information retention lifecycle.

An effective means to begin communication between IT and other functional areas is to create cross-functional core litigation response teams—groups assembled for identifying custodians and scoping out litigation holds.

For companies prioritizing automated legal-hold workflows as a critical requirement, coalescing policies and best practices for enforcing, managing and tracking legal holds by application and content is the place to start. Initial efforts should focus on the most popular target sources for electronic discovery in litigations, investigations and audits.

Vivian Tero will present the full findings and recommendations from this study during a live webcast on June 19 at 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. For complimentary registration, please click here.

Vivian Tero is the program manager for IDC's Compliance Infrastructure Service. Ms. Tero's primary focus is research, analysis, and strategic advisory on information and system infrastructure technologies that facilitate legal discovery, data privacy and IT GRC (governance, risk management and compliance).