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Legal Aid: How It Can Be The Difference Between Litigating and Settling
Litigation is one of the nightmares that IT staff fear most: How will we respond when the General Counsel comes looking for electronic records we didn’t even know we had? What happens when the fate of the company rests on producing a few old email messages sitting on a backup tape? IT is used to working under pressure, doing the best job possible with limited resources and technology, but “best effort” work is not sufficient when it comes to preservation of evidence for litigation. The time required to search through terabytes of data on a multitude of systems can put a legal case in jeopardy as well. IT systems are just not created with legal requirements in mind – they are designed for performance and availability, not preservation, distributed search, culling and production. But help is at hand. A new partnership is being forged between the legal and IT departments at many organizations, with a focus on electronically-stored information (ESI), and records management is joining the discussion. IT systems and tools are evolving as well, enhancing litigation capabilities but also delivering value for information lifecycle management and capacity control. When it comes to production of records for legal cases, IT is being transformed from a technical roadblock to a risk- and cost-mitigation powerhouse!
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