Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 47 G O I N G F O R I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N A N C E G O L D – C L O S I N G T H E G A P O N D I S C O V E R Y M A T E R I A L S While visibility into information was referenced as critical to the deployment of an IG program, the ability to make actionable decisions upon the information is uncharted territory for most firms. It is easy enough to say that users need to move documents from email and network shares into the DMS, but how is that actually done at the tactical level. Users have years of legacy information to sift through, with little to no time allocated to doing so. While users need training to address moving documents on a day-forward basis, there are 3rd party tools that can facilitate the moving of legacy information from email and network shares into the system of record (the DMS) en masse. IT support to stand up these 3rd party tools to facilitate relocating documents from numerous locations, coupled with extensive user training and the setting of milestone dates for compliance feeds into a project plan that defines program deployment. Ultimately, official retention schedules are managed within the DMS for official electronic records, with all ancillary data locations purged per a set schedule. Purging also requires expertise and technolo that may not be present. While email purging can be managed within the system itself, purging of the DMS (per retention schedules) or crawling of network shares per a set schedule may require 3rd party drop- ins for the tactical level execution. For physical records, eligibility reports should be run from within the Records Management System to identify records that warrant disposition consideration. The eligibility report will identify paper records as well as physical media, and these materials should include the client discovery materials moving forward. For legacy materials, there may be a complicating issue with many of the older off-site holdings lacking precise insight into box contents (due to a number of system migrations, vendor changes, acquisition of smaller firms, etc.). Thus, firms will need storage specifically for drives, or sent to off-site storage. Regardless, the location should be updated in the Records Management System (just like any other physical record) and be held to the identified retention schedule for the matter. Thus, the media will show up on an eligibility report run by records staff, and will go through the same disposition process as other materials. This may entail contacting the client for the return of materials, or destroying per policy with the necessary approval steps. A change management program is critical in getting users to change their behavior when it comes to document handling. For example, long- term storage of critical information in email and network shares is a typical practice with most law firms. These silos are locations where the firm cannot leverage the information for business needs nor ensure its compliant storage with ultimate disposition processes per policy. For a successful program moving forward, users need to alter long-standing behavior to migrate necessary information into the Document Management System. Further, standardization of indexing within the Document Management System is critical for cross-user retrieval and any future disposition exercises to be carried out by records staff. This requires a program with orientation, training and change agents to lead the charge. "Quick wins" and internal champions should be celebrated as part of a structural program that identifies key milestones and tracks progress metrics (e.g, reduction in size of email boxes or network shares). Users have years of legacy information to sift through, with little to no time allocated to doing so.

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