P2P

56 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | F A L L 2 0 2 3 No one can decide where it sits As with much in life, successful IG is about wanting it enough. Senior management need to be committed to the concept and ideally a member of the senior management team needs to take ownership of driving IG through the firm, from top to bottom. Critically, and among other things (eg: providing direction, helping overcome obstacles, communicating goals) this person will ensure that adequate resources are allocated to IG to enable it to take root and thrive. But who is this person? It's a vexed question. Something that Chris Giles, CEO and Founder at LegalRM, observes is that law firms vary widely in structure, capacity and approach. Each is its own unique fiefdom and one of the sticking points when it comes to embracing IG lies in pinning down who in the senior management team will take ownership of it. The danger is that it either falls between the cracks with no oversight and no cohesive approach to a strategy, or it becomes a bone of contention. "I know of one firm, for instance," says Giles, "that can't even agree on a retention schedule because their Head of Knowledge Management wants to keep everything forever and says destruction is not needed and a General Counsel who's pushing back and asking practice teams to weigh in." He adds that each firm has a unique set of challenges in terms of getting IG policies and procedures even created, because no one can decide where it sits. He often sees IT working in "its own world" focused on application efficiency, security, backups and business continuity, while Records Management specialists are in a different world, focused more on matter mobility and record lifecycle management, but there is often no discussion between the two. Risk Management is another discipline that might claim IG, yet without IT & Records input may not understand the process, data and application challenges. In reality, however, successful IG really does take a village, or a community at least, within the firm that shares a single vision on the need to get it done. Policies and procedures How do you get IG started at a law firm? One of Chris Hockey's first big tasks was drafting the firm's information governance policy. To do so, he looked at other organizations' information governance policies in other industries – not least because, as he drily notes, "Legal is not always ahead on these things." He also reached out to different people in the info-gov world and asked if they could share their thinking and draft policies. He then applied what he'd learned to the context of his firm. F E A T U R E S "Successful IG really does take a village, or a community at least, within the firm that shares a single vision on the need to get it done."

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