From Litigation Response to Litigation Readiness
Bringing E-Discovery In-house Now Prepares for Enterprise Information Management Later

Only about 1% of organizations are reportedly prepared for full-scale e-discovery activities. As a result, the vast majority of organizations facing litigation are forced into a costly reaction mode in order to respond to discovery requests within court-imposed timelines.

So, when the clock is ticking and the meter is running, how do you sift through internal databases, networks, computer systems, servers, archives, backup or recovery systems, laptops, PDAs, mobile phones and pagers to assess your legal risk and defend your organization? And further, how can you possibly meet the rigorous demands of the impending e-discovery while also preparing your organization for litigation that may be looming?

Take Control Of Your Information Now
In most cases, the review of information for relevance and privilege and the processing of vast volumes of data in preparation for formal legal review are the most expensive elements of e-discovery—accounting for as much as 50%-80% of the budget when using external sources. Therefore, more and more organizations have acquired advanced tools to help them to control the costs and risks of the e-discovery process. Most notably, organizations have started to deploy information management software and systems to help them respond to a specific legal matter now and prepare for future litigation.

And the technology options abound:  advanced culling; processing and (forensic) full-text indexing; concept and fuzzy search; automatic pre-classification of documents into privileged, claim-related and non-related documents; intelligent redaction; machine translation; pattern recognition; relevance ranking; exact and near de-duplication; email trail visualizations; and many other smart and innovative solutions.

But the most comprehensive and desirable systems are those that incorporate true information management capabilities so that an organization may assess the case as early on as possible. Secondarily, the best systems automate the more administrative aspects of the e-discovery process (like legal hold workflow and intelligent collections and preservations), thus reserving resources for more thorough legal review and analysis by professionals. The added benefit is that the simplified and automated nature of the e-discovery solution can be easily extended to everyday information management initiatives.

Meet The Needs Of All The Stakeholders
Various dynamics add to the extreme pressure of the situation and underscore the need for a proper methodology for managing vast volumes of information:

• Both in-house and outside counsel want to prevent being ambushed by unknown liabilities. Therefore, one will have to find all of the relevant information—even files that have been deliberately altered and concealed. High recall, coupled with filtering and de-duplication tools, is paramount for e-discovery technology because it gives outside counsel the assurance that they have all of the facts.
• Everyone wants to reduce outside counsel’s risk of court sanctions, fines and negative verdicts. If the potentially relevant information is properly preserved, collected and locked-down in legal hold, outside counsel is relieved of the risk of spoliation (accidental or deliberate) and related court sanctions or fines that can negatively impact the case.
• Everyone wants to reduce the likelihood of premature settlements. Despite their innocence, some organizations settle cases if they believe the cost of e-discovery will outweigh the cost of a settlement. We need technology to bring substantial savings and efficiencies to the client so that they can maintain their legal representation and protect their interests, reputation and cash flow.
• Related to the previous point, executives always have an eye on the bottom line, and as a result, they may demand more proactive and pragmatic information management solutions instead of draining significant resources to defend specific legal matters. 
• E-discovery places an enormous burden on IT departments. Incremental collections from all different electronic sources (on-line, off-line, near-line and in the cloud) are incredibly time-consuming. Automation and preparation can relieve IT tremendously and enable them to focus on more strategic IT solutions to support the entire enterprise.

Litigation Response And Readiness Are Moving Targets
While the latest e-discovery and information management technologies have made great progress toward putting organizations in control of their information assets and liabilities, the environment is dynamic and requires solutions that can scale and adapt to new realities:

• Even after 50 years, Moore’s Law still applies: Every 18 months, the volume of our stored data doubles. At that rate, the amount of information stored by an organization will have grown 100 times over in 10 years.
• The legal industry is one of the most conservative industries out there. Adoption of new technology is not a revolutionary process, but an evolutionary one which leads to higher costs from prolonged inefficiency.
• The use of new social media such as Twitter and Facebook and non-searchable multimedia platforms like YouTube is growing exponentially.
• With the introduction of cloud computing, information is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
• The number of lawsuits will only increase in the coming years due to the credit crisis, but also due to the increasingly litigious nature of our society.