To Preserve and Protect: E-Discovery Requires Data on Demand
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(0)Overview: A new study from CMP Research shows that more than half the businesses surveyed had to produce electronically stored information for litigation or regulatory investigations. Without strong processes and tools for records management, businesses are at risk of not being able to effectively and economically retain and produce documents required by auditors or lawyers, not to mention purge obsolete data that could further complicate matters.
Regulations such as Sarbanes-
Oxley and the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA) have made many organizations
more cognizant of the need to put
in place processes and tools for efficiently
retaining, securing, producing and even
destroying electronic data. Institutions
want to be able to discover electronic
information quickly in response to the
demands of a compliance audit—the
sooner they can put that behind them, the
sooner they can get back to business.
Companies affected by these regulations
may at last have some reason to
celebrate. All the work they have put into
these efforts can serve as a base to help
them satisfy the new e-discovery requirements
of the Amended Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure, which went into effect in
December. These rules require that parties
involved in a federal court case meet in
advance to discuss issues around discovery
of relevant electronic data, and then produce
required data in a usable and searchable
form—unless they can show that it is
too costly or burdensome to access.
In some important ways, the
new rules may level the playing
field. In the past, courts may potentially
have had higher expectations
of a public company’s capacity to
produce electronic documents than
they had of a private company’s
ability to do so, because the private
enterprise never had to implement
strict processes and tools to govern
records management for compliance
requirements. Now, every organization
is subject to the same expectations.
