Electronically stored information (ESI) presents increasingly expensive challenges to organizations faced with legal discovery requests. Initially, courts were willing to accept most claims that costs of finding and producing ESI was too high, too onerous, for the responding party. However, recent decisions in Federal courts, as well as changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, reflect a shift toward holding respondents-the providers of information requested during discovery-responsible to pay for producing ESI. This responsibility is based on the assumption that a reasonable IT manager understands the need for knowing where his or her organization’s information is kept, whether it should be accessible during discovery, how to provide an environment in which documents and other information can be easily placed and kept on “legal hold”, and the how to implement and use the tools necessary to provide them on demand. This is the first in a series of articles in which I’ll explore these issues.
In Part 1, I look at the history of discovery and how we arrived at the current state of ESI discovery management. In the Part 2, I’ll walk through various approaches to mitigating ESI discovery risk and the risk to organizations who fail to do anything until served with a litigation-related request. Electronic messaging and content monitoring/filtering solutions are the topics for Parts 3 and 4. Finally, in Part 5, I discuss the most important element of successful discovery management-employees, the creators and users of information.
This is a big topic, so let’s get started.
History of Discovery challenges
Before we dive into the particulars of discovery, we should settle on a definition, one that we’ll apply throughout this series. The following is taken from
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Source: blogs.techrepublic.com
