The Principles of eDiscovery: Managing Electronic Content By Bob Larrivee Director and Industry Advisor at AIIM

Electronic Discovery or eDiscovery as it is often called is part of the legal process known as discovery in civil litigation. 'Discovery' is a term used in some countries but not all and refers to the phase in a legal dispute when the opposing parties gather evidence and share it before the trial goes to court. Discovery is often time consuming and costly due to the requirement of producing the requested relevant content and records within a given timeframe. The term eDiscovery puts the focus on Electronically Stored Information (ESI) meaning all electronic files across the enterprise. If viewed at its core elements these files would be shown as a series of binary numbers or digits making electronic files and information a greater challenge to manage and defend in litigation. Electronic file and records sources include:

• Email and text messaging
• Word processing documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations
• Audio and video
• Blogs and wikis
• More...

In this context, we are dealing with content that is not physical or tangible in nature like the paper world, it is digital. This electronic content and can reside in many locations and in multiple copies making its management much more challenging.

Regulatory Driver
In December of 2006, a set of amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the set of rules governing civil suit procedures in the United States Federal and District Courts, took effect. These rules and amendments impact businesses of all types, sizes and segments and define how the courts and litigating parties handle electronic files. It describes the process to gather, filter and deliver the requested information.

Imagine your organization having to produce electronic information for civil litigation. Now imagine that as part of this process, you must find all relevant emails. Where do you search? Do you search your network servers, individual PCs, Cell Phones, PDAs and removable storage devices like thumb drives or is it all of the above? Documented cases have shown it is all of the above and that if you do not comply with the request, the fines and costs levied could be significant. To address this, we can leverage technology but technology alone is not the complete solution to the problem. Well managed content and records will facilitate searches and disclosure better than records that are stored in poorly-designed structures, or that have poor use of metadata and taxonomies. In order to achieve this, we must adopt a set of principles, in many cases the same information management principles related to information in the physical world.

The Principles
Managing electronic content and records as part of a comprehensive information management program requires that the information management policies and processes address both physical and electronic files and records. The only difference being one of format, physical versus electronic. In order for an information management policy to be effective, there must be a foundational understanding and acceptance of the organization's information management principles that could include but may not be limited to the following:

• Information assets are corporate assets
• Information belongs to the organization and not the individual
• There is a need to share information and corporate knowledge
• Information needs to be available for others to use and leverage, not locked in silos
• Information must be secured and access must be controlled
• Addresses confidentiality and protection of corporate information assets
• Information retention is a corporate responsibility
• All employees of an organization are responsible to adhere to the corporate information management and retention policies not just IT and Records managers

As we see here in Diagram 1, the basic ECM Principles lead to the development of a set of rules that all employees must follow when capturing and managing content. These principles also lead to 'Best Practices' which together with the Rules, define the Procedures and help determine the hardware and software infrastructure that will be required to support them. In short, we are addressing the guidance, protocols and ways we will work. It is the way we use the infrastructure and what we use that infrastructure for. As shown in the titles of each column and row in this 'matrix'.

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Source: AIIM ECM Master Certificate Program

What does it mean?
Every organization is responsible to comply with discovery requests in civil litigation, the question is how prepared is the organization to comply? When faced with eDiscovery, organizations must be able to produce the materials, defend how it is maintained, retained and disposed of. When a discovery order is received, the organization needs to have established and consistent processes on placing a legal hold to suspend disposal and commence gathering, filtering and delivery of the requested materials. Ignorance of regulation and poor content and records management practices are no excuse for non-compliance. Organizations must be proactive in establishing policies and procedures and providing tools and training employees need to ensure corporate compliance. Technology will help enable us to reach and maintain compliance but it must be viewed as a tool to support the policies and practices the organization has adopted within its information management structure and governance.

Bob Larrivee is Director and Industry Advisor at AIIM International, the world leader in providing education and training in ECM, ERM, BPM, IOA, EMM, E2.0 and PDF/A. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text15176 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it