Peer to Peer Magazine

9 WWW.ILTANET.ORG BEST PRACTICES Meaningful IG: How to Implement Practical Solutions that Achieve Policy Goals Mitigating Risk It is important that established IG policy is applied to every document at its inception to ensure policies are actionable throughout the life cycle of the document. Policies may differ for different practice areas or types of internal documents, but an automated system will aach the appropriate policies to all maers. The more you can automate your entire IG program, including both internal policies and outside counsel guidelines, the more you reduce the firm's risk. The longer you keep data against policy guidelines, the more risk you have of unnecessary documents being subject to discovery and the more susceptible you are to exposure by disgruntled employees. Furthermore, noncompliance with outside counsel guidelines increases the risk of losing clients. Automating IG reduces risk to the firm, simplifies processes and achieves measurable cost reduction. The key to successful, meaningful governance is being able to demonstrate consistent compliance with established policies. And the easiest way to consistently apply policy is with automation. P2P Generally, creating an IG program is not the problem. Rather, where firms fall short is in following through on their established retention policies. Falling Short Firms struggle to achieve compliance with their own stated IG retention policies for several reasons. There is a significant amount of manual work involved in consistently applying policies to physical records and electronic documents across various platforms and systems. Many firms also face challenges integrating required outside counsel guidelines for retention and destruction with firm policies. Gaps in process execution are a challenge some firms face. For example, where maers are not geing closed, or where they are geing closed but the appropriate retention policy is not being aached to the maer, implementation can be interrupted. Automating IG The key to achieving compliance with governance policies is to make the policies actionable. This means taking the wrien policy and applying it to everything it affects, including the maer and all items related to the maer. The best way to achieve this is by using technology to automate the entire process, or as much of it as possible. The policy should drive the life cycle of your content no maer where it resides. A big part of information governance involves content life cycle management or records management, and much of records management can now be automated. Automation is not just about saving time or even money, though it certainly does both: automation ensures policies are applied consistently and correctly throughout the content life cycle, reducing the risk of gaps in execution or of items falling through the cracks. An automated IG system is a tracking tool, taking your policy and applying it to all maers and even to documents when necessary. It can notify users when a maer has closed, providing a trigger for first-level policies to be enacted. This also informs users what records are affected, identifying those that should be reviewed, destroyed or sent back to a client. DARRELL MERVAU Darrell Mervau is a co-founder and president of FileTrail Inc., a global leader in records management and information governance, where he provides vision and oversees product strategies that have propelled FileTrail to its current market leadership position.

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