Government Technology - July 2008 - (Page 43)

at Government Technology’s CIO Academy in Sacramento, Calif. A well attended session on e-discovery illustrated just how much confusion surrounds the topic. Many of those at the top of their field admittedly struggled with e-discovery. Former California CIO Clark Kelso moderated a panel of public-and private-sector e-discovery experts, most of whom were legal professionals. A key point made in the session was that virtually any data that can be extracted from a digital source can be considered electronically stored information (ESI), and therefore, could be covered by an e-discovery request, according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. That’s why Tom Greene, special assistant attorney general of the Fix-Alls Don’t Exist There is no single e-discovery solution. But there are several strategies to consider. Washington state is a good example: Robinson and his staff have begun a document management project they call Washington Vault. “We’re looking at how we were managing those electronic records, and how it might be best to provide a common storage and retrieval system for electronic records to be responsive to agency administrative operations, but also responsive to records requests made from the public and the new federal electronic discovery rules,” said Robinson. Still in its early stages, Washington Vault currently is limited to the management of e-mail documents. The vault will use two “If you create something of a documentary nature … it may be subject to discovery.” David Halpern, assistant attorney general, Texas Office of the Attorney General California Office of the Attorney General, insisted government IT organizations must partner with legal counsel to formulate an e-discovery strategy. “This has to be partnership with your inhouse general counsel, your outside litigator and your own staff,” Greene explained. “Basically within 90 days of a case being filed, I, being your lawyer, have to go talk to the other lawyer, and that has to be a conversation that deals with ESI issues. We then jointly supply a report to the court, and then the court has a case management hearing and a case management order is issued.” As the CIO Academy panelists repeatedly said, an agency should be prepared to distinguish between documents that are simply government records and those that could be used as evidence. But how are IT folks supposed to know how to do this? They aren’t, really, which is why the panel recommended agencies partner with in-house counsel. “The advice I and our task force have given state agencies begins with making sure there is a records management program that is understood up and down the chain of command,” Halpern said, “so that all employees have awareness and understanding of their responsibilities to ensure state records that are created are properly categorized, retained and preserved so they could be produced either in a public records request or in litigation.” of Symantec’s Enterprise Vault products: Mailbox Archiving for Microsoft Exchange and the Journaling and Discovery Accelerator. Robinson talked of plans to expand the program to encompass other electronic documents, like instant messaging. Full-featured, off-the-shelf document management solutions are available as well, including products from IBM, Symantec, CA and EMC. The trouble is procuring these products may be too costly for some jurisdictions. Budget-friendly solutions exist, though they tend to lack some features. Mimosa Systems offers an e-discovery solution that it claims smaller municipalities can afford. Safety Harbor, a city near Tampa, Fla., is like many towns in the United States. Safety Harbor’s population is less than 20,000, but as Information Systems Manager James Burke said, “e-mail was increasing at alarming rates.” Like Washington, capacity issues and public records requests put Burke and his three-person staff into a difficult position when trying to manage e-mail. “We needed an efficient way to process public records requests and be able to produce e-mails in accordance with the [freedom of information] laws in Florida,” Burke said. “The IT staff was not happy because we somehow got thrown in there as keeper of the records, even though that’s not generally considered an IT function.” Burke said he chose Mimosa NearPoint software because it offered technological muscle and low cost: about $30,000 for two servers, software and the install. The software gives Safety Harbor features like singleinstance storage, continuous capture and archiving and one-click recovery. Also, Burke found the software easier to manage than some more expensive, high-end products. For Burke’s purposes — primarily archiving e-mail and basic discovery — such software is probably enough. However, a 2007 Gartner study found that the Mimosa software lacked the functionality and capability of a comprehensive e-discovery solution. According to the study, Mimosa is recommended, but users should note that it’s “mainly an e-mail archiving system” and users will “need other vendors to complete their e-discovery functions.” Offerings from vendors, such as Guidance and Symantec, give more complete tools that reach into the deepest corners of a network to find and preserve data. These tools also work better with multiple file formats. However, these solutions tend to be more expensive than entry-level products. The point is agencies must find what fits their specific e-discovery needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. There’s plenty of help available, though. Cornell University offered staff three simple rules for responding to e-discovery requests: hold, preserve and search. They can also easily apply to the public sector. Hold: Take the technical steps necessary to ensure that normal business practices, such as backup tape recycling and other data purging processes, as well as individuals deleting e-mail, are not interrupted so as not to lose data. Preserve: Take a snapshot of electronic data to store and preserve in case of search requests. Search: Execute keyword and timeframe searches on preserved data to discover all documents relevant to lawsuits, including searches explicitly requested by plaintiffs. These rules may not constitute the perfect e-discovery solution, but they’re a good place to start. 43 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - July 2008

Government Technology - July 2008 Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions for ... Generation 2.0 at Work Dangerous Convenience Tainted Justice? Are You Ready? E-Discovery Basics Smart Docs Advanced Math Online Video Blues Spectrum Personal Computing Products signal:noise

Government Technology - July 2008

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