According to industry studies, it is common for companies to preserve over 250,000 pages and manually review over 1,000 pages for every page produced in discovery. However, when companies cull down their information through systematic execution of a defensible retention schedule, they dramatically reduce the costs and risks of discovery and greatly improve operational effectiveness. The challenge is to operationalize existing information retention and management policies in an automated, scalable and accurate manner, especially for legacy data that exists in many different information silos across larger organizations that face frequent litigation.
This is much easier said than done. Most all archiving and information systems are built on the centralization model, where all the data to be searched, categorized and managed needs to be migrated to a central location. This is fine for some email archives and traditional business records, but does not address the huge challenge of legacy data and other information “in the wild.” As leading information management consulting firm Jordan Lawrence pointed out on our recent webinar, organizations cannot be expected to radically change how they conduct business by centralizing their data in order to meet information governance requirements. Knowledge workers typically create, collaborate on and access information in their group and department silos, which are decentralized across large enterprises. Forcing centralization on these many pockets of productivity is highly disruptive and rarely effective due to scalability, network bandwidth and other logistical challenges.
So what this leaves is the reality that for any information remediation process to be effective, it must be executed within these departmentalized information silos. This past week, X1 Discovery, in conjunction with our partner Jordan Lawrence presented a live webinar where we presented a compelling solution to this challenge. Jordan Lawrence has over 25 years experience in the records management field, providing best practices, metrics and deep insights into the location, movement, access and retention of sensitive and personal information within the enterprise to over 1,000 clients.
In the webinar, we presented a comprehensive approach that companies can implement in a non-disruptive fashion to reduce the storage costs and legal risks associated with the retention of electronically stored information (ESI). Guest speaker attorney and former Halliburton senior counsel Ron Perkowski noted that organizations can avoid court sanctions while at the same time eliminating ESI that has little or no business value through a systematic and defensible process, citing Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) (The so-called “Safe Harbor Rule” and the case of FTC v. Lights of America, (C.D. Cal. Jan. 2012)
Both Ron Perkowski and Jordan Lawrence EVP Marty Provin commented that X1 Rapid Discovery represents game-changing technology to effectuate the remediation of distributed legacy data due to its ability to install on demand virtually anywhere in the enterprise, including remote data silos, its light footprint web browser access, and intuitive interface. X1 Rapid Discovery enables for effective assessment, reporting, categorization and migration and remediation of distributed information assets by accessing, searching and managing the subject data in place without the need for migration to the appliance or a central repository.
> The recording of the free webinar is now available here.
Next Gen eDiscovery Law & Tech Blog 