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

Therefore, the only real solution to solve the e-discovery burden now and in the future is to start properly managing all of your enterprise information as part of daily operations. Figure 2 (on Page S7, Best Practices for E-Discovery, February 2010 or download PDF) shows the relation between e-discovery and information management.

Reaction Mode vs. Smart, Proactive Practices
While in-house e-discovery systems are generally implemented to investigate a specific legal matter, more and more organizations are looking for a solid and robust foundation from which to pursue proactive, enterprisewide objectives for information management.

In fact, the costly and disruptive nature of e-discovery often triggers a broader information management initiative championed by executive leadership.

Proper information management initiatives may be based upon principles similar to e-discovery (i.e., identification, collection, review, etc.), but it often requires additional technology, procedures and user training to help organizations achieve corporate governance despite the continued—and rapid—growth of their data populations.

Information management involves not only archiving, but also the implementation and enforcement of retention and disposition schedules to ensure organizations are not storing vast volumes of information unnecessarily. It is actually quite similar to the culling process during e-discovery, yet in a broader form that is widely adopted as part of daily operations in all departments.

Email, SharePoint, HRM files, project files, customer files, official company records and legal contracts all contain potential future legal liability and cost considerations. For example, retaining 100,000 emails—which may have important files attached—in one’s inbox, sent folder or hard disk exposes the organization to more risk and unnecessary storage costs. And the vast information stored on backup tapes and in MS SharePoint collections in a completely unstructured format presents its own potential risks, especially if the data is related to projects or litigation involving human resources or C-level management. Organizations will always have these types of unstructured data sets, but their potential risk can be managed by the right information management technology and protocol.

Information collections such as the ones noted above need to be ordered and classified in a filing plan, which can be done in a rather straightforward and pragmatic way. This action limits the amounts of data (and thus the potential cost of litigation), makes early case assessment possible on your live data, and limits the need for the expensive processes to collect and preserve all data in advance.

In the end, one will become litigation-ready by making litigation response as unobtrusive as any other daily operating procedure.  

ZyLAB’s Universal Approach to E-Discovery and Enterprise Information Management
Since 1983, ZyLAB has worked alongside professionals in the auditing, legal and intelligence communities to develop the best tools for investigating and managing large sets of archived data. These award-winning technologies have been bundled into the ZyLAB Information Management Platform, an integrated and modular e-discovery and enterprise information management platform that puts you in command of boundless enterprise data in order to mitigate risk, reduce costs, investigate matters and elicit business productivity and intelligence.

The ZyLAB eDiscovery & Production System helps organizations accomplish this by providing an end-to-end e-discovery response system that begins and ends with proper information management practices. Through the application of our technology and best-practice methodology, ZyLAB clients are able to more easily and cost-effectively respond to litigation today, while also keeping their information in order for future litigation.

Key advantages of the specialized ZyLAB eDiscovery & Production System are:

• Perform large, time-critical investigations with more control, less manpower and in less time;
• Reduce the cost of legal review by automating the organization and processing of documents;
• Unclog the review pipeline by systematically minimizing the quantity of documents requiring manual or external review. Enhance data retrieval reliability and find what other systems cannot find;
• Make better, faster legal decisions based on real-time information about your documents and e-mail, but also MS-SharePoint and other supported collections; and
• Scale the system to your environment without incurring volume charges.

ZyLAB also offers specialty systems to become litigation ready, all supported by our robust search capabilities and an XML-based archiving framework that is designed specifically for enterprise information management:

• Corporate compliance and enterprise information management;
• Email and MS-SharePoint archiving;
• Back-office records management for organizations facing legal risk, such as construction, outsourcing, customer service, medical or HRM environments; and
• Federal and local government records management.