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E-Discovery: Being prepared Saves $$$
Companies unprepared for an E-Discovery can find themselves in a sticky situation. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have tight deadlines for responding to E-discovery requests.
The general flow for responding to a request, in itself, seems manageable, but can be daunting if it needs to be done quickly with no prior planning:
- Identify the key elements being requested
- Determine the people and departments within an organization that may have generated electronic information related to the request
- Determine the repositories where the electronic documents were archived
- Determine a plan for search and retrieval of documents that mean specific search criteria
- Find the documents
For companies that have an information management process already in place, e-discovery requests may be time-consuming, but it can be addressed in a very straight-forward way. For organizations not prepared, an e-discovery request could prove to be very challenging. Complicating matters may be the enormous amounts of data that requests can sometimes touch on.
Rule 26 requires that the two parties meet within 120 days of the original request to clarify the information that is to be produced and the format that it will be in. It’s not uncommon for massive amounts of data to retrieved as part of an e-discovery search — sometimes as much as a terabyte of data, or 500 million pages.
E-discovery requests can cost companies significant money in noncompliance fees and in costs related to performing manual searches. The importance of having a process around information management can’t be overstated.
