Posted by: Debra Logan, Research VP

E-discovery is a topic that continues to attract lots of client interest. With fines and sanctions under the new rules of civil procedure running at about 20 times the rate of procecutions under Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent compliance legislation, clients are right to be concerned. The masses of unstructured content that have been saved over the years is being requested more frequently by opposing counsel and regulators. Those that thought that the "inaccessibility" provision would save them should note that judges are ruling that most data and content, even if its old and expensive to restore, is "accessible" after all.

Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about in the preceding paragraph, it might be time to talk to your security staff, your Exchange administrators, your compliance department or even your in-house counsel. Whether you get sued a lot or a little bit, litigation is a way of life for many companies and an increasingly large burden is falling on IT. Why? Because evidence is digital. E-mail, content on file servers, Excel spreadsheets, transactional data, tape archives - all are fair game under the recently revised rules.

Financial services and insurance, utilities, pharmacueticals, government, energy and other companies are devoting huge monetary and human resources to identifying, preserving and collecting potential evidence for court cases and regulatory actions. Those that fail to do so in an effective and timely fashion are being fined and publicly embarrassed with headline-making IT snafus that include losing files, tapes and even whole file servers.

If you don’t want this to happen to you, maybe you should read "What Every CIO Needs to Know About Legal Discovery" to decide whether or not you are prepared for your next court case. If you are like most companies in most places in the world, you’re not properly prepared for e-discovery. At the PCC Summit, I have a entire presentation on this topic and will be giving the latest MarketScope information on vendors that support this space.