Helping a Client With e-Discovery

How many of you are familiar with e-discovery or FOIA?  Not many I'll bet.  We're in the middle of assisting a client deal with an e-discovery request.  Even with our automated systems it can be very time consuming.  They've been hit with a request to provide copies of all communcations either incoming or outgoing from any employee with any of about a dozen organizations for a very long period of time.

For those of you that haven't yet had the task of dealing with either an e-discovery request or an FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request, here's the CliffsNotes version of what's involved.  E-discovery is the electronic version of the legal systems "discovery" system where parties in a law suit can demand any and all documents or other material (including e-mails and instant messages) related to a given person or issue for any period of time.  FOIA is similar but is confined to governmental organizations but requests can come from just about anyone.

We're assisting our client sift through about a million e-mails trying to find communications between any of about a dozen organizations by any employee in their organization over the last 5 years.  Fortunately, we automated their e-mail archival process several years ago so the process should only take a fraction of the time it would take an organization not so well prepared.  Still, this isn't a huge organization and the realization that there would be so much information to sift through is kind of staggering now that we're going back through the archives!   This project would have taken hundreds of hours to complete without the archival system.

More and more organizations are required by law to retain copies of documents and communications for longer and longer periods of time.  Whether you're a HIPAA regulated agency, a governmental agency or school subject to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests or just a regular business, you should recognize that you need to be able reach back in time to pull togther communications and documents of all kinds at a moments notice.

There are systems out there that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and even more to install but we've got a very affordable alternative that won't break your budget.  If you'd like a demonstration, please give me a call at (847) 639-7000.