Counsel to Counsel - January 2008 - (Page 8) best practices INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: Purging Pragmatically LIANE R. KOMAGOME | HEWLETT-PACKARD CO. Liane R. Komagome is litigation and discovery compliance counsel for the corporate law department at Hewlett-Packard Co. in Houston. Liane recently co-chaired a Counsel to Counsel session on this topic. She can be reached at liane.komagome@hp.com. implementation In reviewing recent studies in my work as discovery compliance counsel, I have found that an average corporate lawsuit involves slightly under 1,000 data custodians who, on average, store eight gigabytes of data on each of their hard drives. Some have less, but many have more—in some cases close to 40 gigabytes. steps situation • Institute an information management initiative. • Limit the amount of informal business or personal data employees can retain on their PCs. • Allow additional storage, but at a cost to the employee’s department. • Conduct regular compliance audits. • Tie compliance to the employee’s year-end bonus. Based on these numbers, if/when litigation ensues, the cost of collecting, sorting through, reviewing and producing the data can be as much as $10,000 per gigabyte. In most cases, only 7 percent to 9 percent of what is gathered is ultimately produced. the risk of incurring substantial costs—as much as $10,000 per GB—billed back to their departments. Requiring manager approval for this additional expenditure will force managers to monitor employee compliance. To further measure and ensure compliance, a random auditing program should be instituted, along with a stiff penalty for noncompliance. For example, employees who continue to maintain more than eight gigabytes of data on their hard drives may not be eligible for a year-end bonus. Include this information management initiative in both orientation and ethics training for new hires, as well as periodic mandatory ethics training for all company employees. This will boost corporate awareness and further drive compliance. Inside counsel must find a way to allow employees to store informal business or personal information locally without inevitably assuming out-of-proportion e-discovery costs if/when litigation ensues. in-house counsel challenge As a convenience, many companies permit employees to back up their hard drives once a week, regardless of the amount of data held by the computer. As a solution, implement an information management initiative that forces employees to purge their hard drives of informal business or personal information on a weekly basis. approach adopted measuring success A significant reduction in custodian-retained data will significantly reduce e-discovery-related data collection, culling and review costs. Introduce this initiative through corporatewide mandatory training. Explain the difference between records retention and a litigation-based document preservation order. Next, modify the standards regarding what informal business or personal information will be backed up by the company (critical and regulated company information should be stored separately on central servers). Permit only a limited amount of data, e.g., the first eight gigabytes, to be eligible for automatic PC backup. Since there is no way of knowing which eight gigabytes of data will actually be backed up, employees will focus on keeping only that data they feel is most necessary. The company may offer employees additional backup space but at a cost: Employees electing to secure additional storage may be able to do so but at future issues to consider Consider reducing the amount of data employees may store—for example, eight gigabytes to six gigabytes— within a year’s time. Moreover, consider eliminating employee convenience-driven PC backup completely and force employees to store all employee-created data on company-managed central servers. Knowing legal, IT and other entities are able to view their data will make employees more mindful of what they keep. 08 LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell®
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