Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | C O R P O R A T E L E G A L D E P A R T M E N T S 6 Rena Verma is a Senior Managing Director in FTI Technology's Information Governance, Privacy and Security Practice. Rena has been providing advisory solutions to Fortune 500 legal departments and law firms in information governance, electronic discovery, legal technology and legal operations for nearly two decades. Rena's clients include some of the largest pharmaceuticals companies, banks, insurance, transportation and technology companies. H O W C O U N S E L C A N F I N D S O L I D F O O T I N G I N T H E E - D I S C O V E R Y , P R I V A C Y B A L A N C I N G A C T a case may issue an ad-hoc request to review the personally identifiable information (PII) included. This could range across structured and unstructured systems, creating a heavy lift for the discovery team to provide a complete set of PII in scope. The custodian may also request that his personal data be redacted before it goes through production. Any of these steps can add significant cost and delays to e-discovery processes. For such scenarios, litigators should consult with their outside counsel, the data privacy office and their e-discovery provider to create a workflow for document processing and review. For consistency of approach across matters, they might also consider updating their e-discovery playbook with the process steps that the teams will follow to address DSAR requests in discovery. • Champion a Data Minimization and Remediation Initiative: Many organizations still retain excess legacy hard drives, email archives and other backup stores. E-discovery counsel can significantly reduce costs by conducting an assessment of these stores and remediating data that no longer needs to be preserved for legal, compliance or business purposes. The benefits of such an activity are widespread. Remediation reduces the size of the data footprint that may come into scope for a matter and mitigates the complexity of working with the data privacy office during e-discovery. More, it improves data privacy practices by reducing the volume of personal data being held within the organization and providing transparency into backups and instances of co- mingled data. • Train and Educate: Any practitioners involved in legal hold decisions, data collection and e-discovery for litigation and government investigations must be educated about data privacy and trained on new workflows. When teams have the ability to recognize privacy sensitivities, they can pause before missteps are taken, and ensure their activities are both streamlined and aligned with the data privacy office's policies. Data privacy is a complex and multi-faceted issue, fraught with risk. Counsel facing new challenges stemming from data privacy may benefit from the support of third-party experts experienced in achieving the balancing act between e-discovery and data privacy demands. This can provide teams with much needed support to review and rework standard e-discovery operating procedures and implement training programs so teams can appropriately navigate new processes and reduce costs. ILTA

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