Peer to Peer Magazine

38 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2018 FEATURES IG and Ediscovery: A Symbiotic Relationship with IG policies in place before a litigation or investigation commences have a defensible collection approach (assuming, of course, that the litigation hold, preservation, and collection were properly executed). Let's take an example where a corporation uses Microso Teams as a collaboration tool and is under investigation for fraud. The government requests all communications between employees. The company identifies O365 as the primary data source, particularly email and chat. They have IG policies in place, including one for Teams which dictates that, outside of litigation hold, chat history is purged without archive every 24-hours. The organization retains outside counsel, and outside counsel brings in their electronic discovery experts. When asked about messaging platforms, they are on the same page and present their policy for Microso Teams. The organization is in a defensible position because it has an IG policy that defines the governance of information generated, exchanged, and stored on the messaging platform. In this example, the important takeaways are: » The company was able to identify and define the scope of collection for Microso Teams because they have a policy to reference. » The company has a defensible reason for the limited chat history because the policy was in place before the investigation. IG policies reduce the chances of geing it wrong, turning over too much or too lile, or simply not knowing what to turn over during discovery. Companies that proactively define IG policies mitigate risk and position themselves for a defensible collection. Get Cost Effective Ediscovery Perhaps most important is that IG policies lead to more efficient and cost effective electronic discovery. Organizations want to pursue initiatives that decrease litigation spend and increase the boom line, and a good place to start is to look at how the company manages information. IG policies help companies control electronic discovery costs because they facilitate beer information management and understanding, saving time and resources. IG policies help to avoid the wild goose chase previously mentioned. In the Microso Teams example above, think about how much time the corporation saved by not having to parse through chat history to understand what data they have to collect, let alone review. Email governance is another great example: if you do not have a policy in place to define the lifecycle of email, you will be in a tough position when you need to collect and produce data, especially if employees have the ability to create offline archives. A corporation that has IG policies defining email retention periods and archive options available to the end user will find themselves in a favorable position in the ediscovery game. It is prey straightforward: control the information, control the costs. The Feedback Loop Just as IG helps ediscovery, so too does ediscovery give back to IG by providing a positive feedback loop. Electronic discovery efforts shed light on areas where a corporation can improve their information management by refining existing policies or implementing new ones. It also acts as an audit to ensure the organization is complying with its existing policies, providing an opportunity to test the integrity, reliability, and cultural acceptance of IG policies. Let Ediscovery Refine Your IG Ediscovery improves an organization's IG by shining a light where the organization can improve. Say your ediscovery team recognizes during a collection that there are email archives extending beyond the retention period for email data. Evaluating the IG policies, the team recognizes that the email archives are the result of a past litigation hold. Upon further evaluation, the organization finds that the email policy does not cover remediation of archives previously retained under litigation hold. The organization recognizes this lapse in IG policy and takes the opportunity to refine their policies. Keeping up with IoT New and emerging data sources are also uncovered during electronic discovery, providing organizations with the opportunity to implement new policies. Take for example custodian interviews. The ediscovery team learns from multiple custodians that they use Google Hangouts to communicate with colleagues and Dropbox to access files on the go. By asking pertinent questions about technology and data practices, the ediscovery effort provides insight into the habits and IG policies reduce the chances of getting it wrong, turning over too much or too little, or simply not knowing what to turn over during discovery. Companies that proactively define IG policies mitigate risk and position themselves for a defensible collection.

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