The Risks of Disorganized Data
March 28, 2012
Ah, eDiscovery, you spin a wide web of repercussions. Australia’s Lawyers Weekly reports, “Messy Info Systems Could Cost Firms Millions.” Allison Walton, an eDiscovery attorney at Symantec, spoke recently at the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association’s 2012 Victorian Corporate Counsel Day. Information management company Symantec helps clients with eDiscovery needs, among other things.
The article reports on Walton’s session:
’E-discovery has been a very expensive, painful process in America over the last 15 years and some of that has started to happen in Australia. The same trends of over-collection, having to sort through duplicates, being at the mercy of outside service providers and their bills, and generally not owning the process,’ she said. Walton aims to accelerate that ‘painful process’ in Australia, by giving those who own information within law firms, power over it. ‘That’s the information governance message I want to get across,’ she told Lawyers Weekly.’
Information governance, she says, should take the form of end-to-end archiving across an “electronic discovery reference model” she supplied. See the article for an illustration of that model.
Hoping Aussies learn from the mistakes of US companies, Walton emphasizes that organizations need to let go of the old. Fearing the very real danger of being prosecuted for deleting data they should have kept, many firms just refuse to delete anything. This approach, however, can hamper a system so that retrieving relevant information quickly might be impossible. That’s not much help. Furthermore, it can mean that “tons of different pieces of sensitive information end up getting all mixed up together and probably don’t have the right security parameters around them.” Even less than unhelpful.
Walton informed her listeners that a number of US companies have been very heavily penalized for being unable to produce required records. She cautions that if businesses wish to have offices in the US, they must understand and follow US laws. They should lay the groundwork for efficient compliance from the beginning.
So, now we understand about the cost to lawyers of unkempt information systems, but what about to the clients? Oh, clients. Yep, they can be important. . . .
Cynthia Murrell, March 26, 2012
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