|  | | 2005 News and Press Releases | | |
HEADLINE NEWS:
E-Discovery: Pre-Litigation Considerations For In-House Counsel
Jonathan W. Hughes and Simon J. Frankel
Law.com. November 22, 2005
_________________________________________________________________________
EXCERPT: Return to EDD Trends of 2006. Every week, it seems, there is another article (or another court decision) highlighting the pitfalls of electronic discovery for companies in litigation. This article touches on some key considerations for in-house counsel even before litigation lands at your door and you are in the thick of discovery. EDD Trends of 2006 • The Forecast for EDD • Piecing Together EDD's In-House vs. Outsource Puzzle • EDD Training: A Growth Industry • More Than OneNote: Will Microsoft Break Into EDD? Consider all of the electronically stored information throughout your company -- including far-flung offices, servers that may be maintained by third parties offsite, and even computer files of contract employees. Consider the volume of electronic information that is created -- and destroyed -- each day. E-mails and more e-mails; Word documents in multiple versions; PowerPoint presentations; Excel spreadsheets. Multiple copies of every one of these. Now imagine being told by your litigation counsel -- or by the judge -- that you must locate, review and produce all of that electronically stored information for purposes of a pending lawsuit. And that you must take steps to ensure that no potentially relevant data is destroyed -- that you must stop all business deletion of electronically destroyed information, even the most routine practices, such as rewriting of backup tapes and the deletion of e-mails by individual employees. Of course, you should already have a comprehensive document retention policy in place. But when litigation comes, or is merely peeking at your company on the horizon, all bets are off. Consider Enron, where an attorney's reminder to accountants to follow Enron's document retention policy led to destruction of paper and electronic records -- and the criminal conviction of the Arthur Andersen firm. |
|
|
