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eDiscovery: Friction Between Legal and IT Groups Jeopardize Response
A new survey by Recommind finds that there is a mini-war brewing between IT and Legal coalitions. The results show that communication between the two groups has waned over the last year. Now, only a little more than half say that they feel that they have “good” or “very good” relationships with the other group, a drop of 13 percent from last year.
When asked if they’ve found that they’ve been working more closely with the other group this year over the previous one, only 27 percent answered affirmatively, a drop from 37 percent of the previous year.
This is disturbing because issues like e-discovery, risk management and compliance are complex are be best solved when there is close cooperation between the two groups.
When asked which groups are very involved in e-discovery purchase decisions, 78 percent said that IT was very involved, but only 33 percent thought that Legal was involved. In the previous year’s survey 48 percent thought that legal had a strong involvement in purchasing decisions. That’s a fairly big drop.
Interestingly, when IT members were asked if they considered e-discovery a “high priority”, only 26 percent thought so. In the previous year, 40 percent had agreed. Again a big drop in attitudes.
And when asked if the two groups ever even talk, 72% of respondents said their IT and Legal groups meet once a quarter or less; 52% meet once a year or less and 23% never meet at all.
When asked about goals, the IT group responded that their main goal for eDiscovery projects is to “execute as quickly as possible”, while not too unexpectedly, legal had a primary goal of “complying with federal regulations and court orders”.
How to interpret these results? It would seem that IT is taking a lead in preparing the infrastructure for responding to an e-discovery request, but the fact that IT doesn’t see e-discovery as that high of a priority can lead to some cause for concern. And the fact that there is a lack of clear input from Legal about what e-discovery features and capabilities to implement seems to be a recipe for disaster.
Because things like compliance and e-discovery have significant overlap between IT and Legal groups, Gartner last year recommended that companies consider adding legal support managers, a liaison position between IT and legal, to help smooth out the handling of policies, schedules and execution between the two groups. 75 percent of the companies have not yet created this kind of position.
