In the eDiscovery Viewpoint on Balancing Cost Containment vs. Risk, CIO Talk Radio asked Caroline Bodreau Sweeney what sorts of problems arise when organizations attempt to cut costs by reducing or changing their eDiscovery policies.

She warned against the costs generated by analyzing large volumes of data in the process of document review, the risk of collecting data in-house rather than hiring a more litigious, outside organization and the concerns that arise when businesses store all their archival data on a public cloud.

All of these things point to a lack of a solid retention policy, or a lack of an ability to enforce one, but outside of keeping clear lines of communication open between CIOs, legal, outside contacts and other important decision makers, there are a number of approaches you can take to find solutions that are cost effective and reduce risk.

Start with Email Archiving Tools

Collecting email through eDiscovery seems obvious, and arguably the least of your worries. And yet using an email archiving tool can help centralize everything and in the long run lower the costs of data collection and document review. There are a number of email archiving tools that offer solutions for SMBs and those also juggling IM threads, all of which will eliminate the potential of one person’s laptop having 30 GB of data backlogged in their mailboxes.

Use litigious tools to do collection

A good way to start acting litigious is to use basic data collection tools that can crawl laptops and your local network. There is cost effective software that can take care of the essentials that can be easily discovered through keywords and eliminate the need to get potentially more disruptive, predictive coding software only necessary for more substantive legal documents that should be reviewed by an attorney.

Find Document Review services at predictable prices

If you have large amounts of data, document review can be daunting and expensive. But based on the amount of data you’re analyzing, document review can be obtained at predictable prices. By selecting your own vendor, an entire staff of lawyers can be hired at consistent, reasonable rates instead of full salaries, all of the prices established per-document.

Invest in legal hold tools

A legal hold tool can automatically issue reminders to custodians to preserve data if a legal matter is anticipated. Issuing legal holds is already a challenge in most organizations, but the algorithms found in most software are more efficient.

With all of these tools, it’s important to remember that making them work effectively requires training and an understanding of how these tools work. Too many companies allow these eDiscovery devices to sit on the shelf when there are national eDiscovery counsels and law firms that can really get inside what data your company has and trace it back to its original source.

Learn more about maintaining eDiscovery risk, including the risks involved with data collection and converting to a cloud, in our Viewpoint on this topic. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

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