The E-Discovery Imperative

A conservative estimate suggests 44 zettabytes of data will be produced  annually in the next three years. With over a billion emails sent every day, manually sorting and categorizing data is simply not feasible. That means electronic discovery solutions have become  a must for law departments.

Nonetheless, organizations remain slow to take full advantage of them. There are numerous high-profile examples, going back years and persisting to the present day, of the corporate disaster than may result. Last March, for example, a Volkswagen CIO was brought to court for intentionally destroyed digital evidence related to what became the car company’s diesel emissions scandal, and in July of last year, the telephone headset company Plantronics was sanctioned  $3 million for spoliation after a senior vice president knowingly deleted as many as 90,000 emails in an antitrust case.

Recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provide another powerful impetus to adopt e-discovery. Addressing issues like document preservation, they make it difficult to claim ignorance if proper e-discovery technology is not applied, and they give judges the ability to take action when relevant data is replaced or destroyed. There may  be severe punishment for noncompliance. We also find many other countries, including Singapore and Canada, are elevating their standards for how attorneys handle electronically stored information.

Ignoring e-discovery, or choosing to remain with outdated methods, will result in expensive consequences and compromise the ability of attorneys to perform their legal duty.