The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/116777
Why should an organization be concerned about large amounts of data being produced, stored and shared? Todd Corham: There's been debate about this for years. Some attorneys say not to keep anything because it's dangerous and can be used against you. Others say to keep everything because somewhere there's an email message that is exculpatory and could show your innocence. If you're going to have large amounts of data, you need to be concerned about loose data floating around your network, including the cost to store it and back it up, the risk of losing track of it, and the periodic need to find or dispose of it. As data volumes swell, all these issues rise in importance. Eric Lieber: Well, the more data you have, the more storage you need, resulting in higher associated costs. If you're running backups for disaster recovery and business continuity, it might be difficult to even do that on a daily cycle within 24 hours. And going back to costs, when data need to be processed and reviewed, the more documents you have, the more that costs, too. Sean Power: The storage of data represents a strong utility for most users; however, the burden of storing data and the ability to accurately search, protect and replicate that data is not typically borne by the user. With the advent of increased electronic discovery that clients are facing, the explosion of data is causing an exponential rise in the cost and complexity of being responsive to such requests. Adam Osberg: On average, organizations can expect to double their data every two years. At times, law firms can be even more vulnerable to large data growth. Because of this, firms need to plan ahead regarding how they want to grow, how that will impact the way they operate, and then plan to store their data and manage it down the road. Enterprise-level data storage isn't cheap, so firms need to be concerned with whether they're getting a true ROI from their data storage strategies. What factors have been most influential in the recent surge of data? Sean: People are demanding higher and higher resolutions, requiring higher fidelity. The ability to move data around is becoming increasingly easy as the amount of available bandwidth increases and the cost of storage plummets. Most people don't actually know how much data they're producing, and the cost of storing data in a legally defensible way is something that's abstracted from the user. Adam: Social media are a big factor. Picture-sharing, music downloads, videos and other types of digital data, plus sharing these files via email messages, can certainly cause data to grow. Eric: As Sean mentioned, the cost of disks has gone down, so you can now store a lot more data for a lot less money. Plus, because everything is stored on the computer, on the cloud or with a data service, how much data people are saving is not transparent. Todd: I think the main driver has been the inability of corporations and law firms to manage their email volumes. Rather than mandate employees segregate email messages that qualify as records, IT allows them to keep everything. And then when users' email inboxes get so large they're unable to work, they're allowed to create multiple .pst files. All of that data is then discoverable. Although only a small percentage of it is useful, all of it has to be managed, stored and protected. That's inefficient, expensive and risky. What technologies do you use to manage data? Eric: From a corporate perspective, all our big systems that keep the business running — finance, human resources and matter management — are structured systems, developed since the late '70s and early '80s. Then we have our unstructured data, the Word, PDF, Excel and PowerPoint files, and everything else users save on their computers or send to the cloud. A document management system (DMS) is probably one of the best paths to managing unstructured data, being able to apply retention policies and, even more important, being able to find and reuse work product. Sean: As a midsized law firm, we have nearly 300TB of data within the network. So we're always after any tool that can give us the means to manage it. We find we need a variety of tools to tackle data management, because not every tool gives us the ability to understand the data for the particular problem at hand. Todd: We use NetApps storage devices to do backups, but that doesn't really stop the spread of data. We also use applications like TreeSize, which is a very inexpensive utility to find and identity data on the network. What technologies do you recommend for the management of data? Adam: Two come to mind. One is data deduplication, which lowers the amount of disk space that's actually needed for file-level data, potentially saving firms a lot of money down the road. The other is data storage-sharing, which gives you the ability to mix and match the types of drives and storage partitions you create, so there's no longer a need to use faster spinning disks on storage that's not accessed a lot. Peer to Peer 97