Building a Collaborative eDiscovery Team

Featured article by Rick Wilson, Vice President of Strategy and Solutions, Sherpa Software

Over the last decade, the need to perform electronic discovery (eDiscovery) has become a fact of corporate life. What began in 2006 as a legal mandate prompted by amendments to the U.S. Rules of Civil Procedure, has rapidly spread to jurisdictions in other parts of the world. Whether the need to search for electronically stored information is being created by a pending litigation, Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) or some other directive, the process is frequently time sensitive and often onerous.

Part of the reason eDiscovery is challenging is due to its ad-hoc nature. Requests routinely arise without prior warning and, in many organizations, personnel dedicated to performing eDiscovery are a luxury. Consequently, when a request arises it can become a major interruption that delays or adversely impacts other planned projects. Here are three collaboration tips shared by our clients that can help you optimize the eDiscovery process:

– Make it a team sport. Placing all of the burden for performing eDiscovery on one person may not be the best use of your available resources. For example, the IT team certainly understands where the information may be stored and the best way to access it, but they really need the expertise of a legal resource to help narrow the search criteria and keyword list. Consider creating an eDiscovery strike force with representatives from IT, legal and upper management to collaborate on the project and maximize the efficiency of your response.

– Speak a common language. When you do involve team members from different disciplines make sure they understand one another. Both IT and legal are notorious for layering their conversations with technical jargon. If IT is talking about MAPI access to PST files on virtual machines and legal is warning about custodian hold notifications and spoliation, you definitely have a failure to communicate. Cross train your team on the meaning of common terms and caution them to explain new lingo to everyone involved instead of just assuming implicit understanding.

– Don’t over collect. When there is confusion about what information to produce the tendency is to ‘give them everything’. While this may be fine from a compliance standpoint, it will substantially increase the cost of your review and production process. Over collecting is a huge problem in the eDiscovery world and an excellent reason to have a collaborative team working on any response. If your IT team can conduct the search and legal can review those results interactively, they can rapidly spot issues with the results set and adjust key words or other search criteria accordingly so IT can re-run the search to generate more efficient results.

Rick Wilson
Vice President of Strategy and Solutions
Sherpa Software

Rick Wilson is an AIIM-certified Information Governance Practitioner and also a ARMA-certified Information Governance Professional, as well as Sherpa Software’s VP of strategy and solutions. He works side-by-side with Sherpa’s sales team to understand each customer’s unique business and technical needs. He then combines products and services into a solution offering that best fits their particular situation. Rick participated in the overall design of the Attender Utilities for Microsoft Exchange products: Archive Attender, Mail Attender, PST Backup Attender and most recently, Sherpa Altitude IG.