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How to overcome the ever growing problem of storage of case files.

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  6. How to overcome the ever growing problem of storage of case files.

published July 16, 2007

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Then there's that other absolute in business. If you need one file cabinet today, you will need another one tomorrow. Files are getting bigger, case documents are getting huge, and paperwork, in the ordinary course of business, is growing exponentially. This "paper" may be in the form of bits and bytes (digital documents), but grow it will. So in the end, add "you will be served" (suits) and "the disks will grow" (paper) to the old "death and taxes" line.

While you can't do much about the grim reaper, there are things you can do about "suits and paper." First, even in this day and age, not all offices are digital; in other words, some folks still use paper files and carbon paper. While it may be considered quaint, in the business climate of today, it is costing you money and exposing your office to liability. Go digital, computerize, and use the new tools that are reliable, standardized, and supported by generations of products and technologies.

Second, look at your workflow. This is the process of creating ideas, communicating and collaborating, implementing, and then distributing, storing, and deleting the concepts, thoughts, and work product of your firm. Today, much of this process is done in writing—in emails, spreadsheets, and database entries, for instance. Understand this process, analyze it, and be able to model it so that you can set up procedures (explained later) to manage your files.

Third, and last, set a tone from the top. As you roll out your new practices that will help you manage "suits and paper," the folks at the top—the CEO, CFO, general counsel, and all of the most senior people in your office—must demonstrate an understanding of and acceptance of some new principles for managing corporate documents.

So what are these new principles? That's the easy part. Start acting like a company that embraces the facts that litigation will happen and that the new rules of e-discovery will make that litigation more dangerous. E-discovery involves collecting and storing all pertinent digital documents, which then must be analyzed and processed for relevancy and privilege, as well as preserved for case history. Typically, five challenges arise from having to perform these tasks:
  • It's hard to know what documents you have.
  • Even if you know what you have, do you really know who wrote, changed, or deleted those documents?
  • Once you capture all the relevant "matter-specific" documents, you must audit access in order to be assured that the documents are in fact copies of the actual documents in your working files.
  • Accurate reports on all user and file activity are difficult to attain.
  • Information obtained during one investigation is often not leveraged for use in future investigations; you tend to start all over again.
These challenges impose unnecessary information risk on a company and increase the level of uncertainty for an organization trying to manage and protect the volumes of collected evidence it holds.

And that's where the solution comes in. There is a new class of enterprise life cycle-management applications coming on line today. These "litigation repository servers" help companies manage their workflows in non-invasive ways. The best of them automatically tag new documents that are created within the firm (or new documents that are mailed into the network) in ways that produce "metadata" on who, when, and what—all of the relevant information that would be necessary to track and find that document in case of a lawsuit that may touch on that document.

This tagging is done in the background (so the workflow is not interrupted), and every document must be tagged. These new servers also can incorporate your written records-retention policy in such a way that the files are managed, stored, and destroyed per the policy. (Yes, you do need to have an active policy—remember the tone-at-the-top discussion.)

So how do you know if you've succeeded? There are two ways to tell. First, your legal bill will be lower; second, your legal exposure will be lower. Follow the rules above such that you mark and track all documents when and as they are created; produce periodic reports based on that metadata; produce and enforce a document-retention policy; and consistently delete and purge unnecessary files from your archives. If you do so, you can claim success. When a lawsuit happens (and it will), you can turn to your files (and they will be huge), and you can focus on the merits of the claims, not the cost of e-discovery, to help you succeed in court.
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published July 16, 2007

( 3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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