Using Data Mapping and Assessment to Minimize eDiscovery Cost and Risk

Last week Dennis Kiker contributed an interesting article to Law Technology News entitled How To Manage ESI To Rein In Runaway Costs. At the heart of the problem is that we’re a country of corporate data hoarders. We keep data past its expiration; we don’t have a good system in place for categorizing and managing it, and are overwhelmed when a legal request necessitates identifying and collecting data relevant to a case. Dennis states:

Despite the high cost of its painstaking preservation and storage, much of this data will never be relevant to any legal case. Indeed, according to a 2009 survey by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Legal departments have historically focused on the ‘right side’ of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – the analysis and review stages. However, if the quality of collected data in the review platform is unnecessary, insufficient, spoiled, or irrelevant; this significantly increases an organization’s legal cost and risk.

Kiker goes on to say… the best approach for many companies is to get serious about cleaning up their information environments. By “taking out the trash” in a major way, companies stand to make big cuts in their annual data-storage bills, which can also run into the six figures. This also enables them to more quickly and more accurately identify potentially relevant information for the attorneys to sift through during a review process, potentially lowering their legal bills.

Legal teams are increasingly realizing the business value and ROI from strengthening their company’s ‘left-side’ EDRM capabilities and understand that sound information governance practices result in highly targeted and effective eDiscovery.

The article points out that shrinking the overall stack of data is a good start to minimizing eDiscovery costs, but companies also need to find all the relevant information contained in their data. He says:

Data mapping offers a way to solve this problem. The basic idea is to create a master index that spells out exactly where content is stored. Surprisingly, many companies have never taken this critical information management step.

In fact, Barry Murphy was reflecting on the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Conference and commented in his blog: Get specific. Know where data lives and do the data maps.  It’s impossible to preserve data if you don’t know where it is.

At StoredIQ we couldn’t agree more. To prove it, during the month of August, StoredIQ is extending a promotional offer for our data assessment and mapping service. The first 10 qualified companies will pay only $10,000, a savings of $5,000 off list price.

StoredIQ Data Assessment Services provide unprecedented visibility into the unstructured data across the enterprise. This invaluable service quickly gives organizations critical understanding of their business content to make more informed decisions about the management, retention, and disposition of their data.

To learn more about this offer and to take the first step toward managing your escalating ESI-related costs and risk – contact us today!

Upcoming New FINRA Regulations… Are You Ready?

Amendments to broker-dealer books and records requirements under FINRA 4511 and 4512, take effect December 5, 2011. The new rules require member firms to make and preserve certain books and records to show their compliance with securities laws, rules and regulations. These requirements will undoubtedly impact ongoing records management and retention processes for broker-dealers, as well as impact future FINRA audits and legal discovery requests.

Planning for FINRA Compliance
With the effective date only a few months away, broker-dealers will need to be prepared to show updated policies and procedures with supporting systems to be ready for their 2012 FINRA audit. Compliance officers should ask:

• Do we have the systems capabilities in place to identify, track and preserve the required records?
• Is now a good time to perform a holistic data assessment review of the information and records your firm currently has stored across all data repositories, content management systems and archives?
• Are you able to implement defensible data deletion policies as prescribed by the new FINRA requirements?
  Can your current data storage and archiving capabilities withstand the volumes for day-to-day reporting and historical archiving? If not, how can you strategically clean up your data storage?
• Will new technologies be needed to assist, and what does the implementation timetable look like to be in compliance by December?

Meeting FINRA Requirements with StoredIQ
StoredIQ’s Information Governance solution provides broker-dealers with a comprehensive, secure and efficient approach to meeting their FINRA information governance needs. With StoredIQ, companies can manage risk and contain costs by leveraging automated compliance and governance policies.  The result is an efficient and cost-effective answer for today’s highly regulated business world.

By implementing StoredIQ now and planning accordingly, broker-dealers can be in compliance by the December 5th FINRA implementation date and ready for a 2012 FINRA audit examination.

To learn more, download the StoredIQ FINRA Solution Sheet or contact us for more information.

Early Case Assessment Finds Its Proper Place in the EDRM

For the past year we at StoredIQ, like everyone else in the eDiscovery space, spent quite a bit of time talking about our early case assessment (ECA) capabilities. Which is why our ears perked up last week when George Rudoy contributed an article to Law.com reflecting on ECA, its definition, and its evolution from a novel feature to finding its proper place in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). In his post, Rudoy states:

“While the debate on the usefulness and effectiveness of ECA continues, it should be noted that how the term is defined continues to evolve. Some of the service providers adapted quickly enough to have ECA as part of their “arsenal” a few years ago. Many of these tools were designed to filter metadata after collection and help the company decide how much a case will cost. This is a noble objective, but not completely in line with the original intent of ECA — which was to help an organization determine its risk exposure and make strategic decisions about a case based on that analysis.”

We couldn’t agree more. In fact, we’ve been talking about the importance of performing ECA at an earlier phase of the EDRM for a while now. We believe that for ECA to have its greatest potential impact it needs to be performed during the identification phase of EDRM, prior to collections. StoredIQ’s ECA technology, Analyze Anywhere, indexes unstructured electronic data and makes it available for searching and analysis without affecting metadata or content, prior to any movement or collection of data.  This ability to do ECA on data “in the wild” allows legal counsel to assess the merits of a dispute, formulate a legal strategy, and make decisions concerning the matter significantly faster than post-collection ECA. Additionally, it makes the data set that is ultimately produced for downstream, formal review not only qualitatively enriched and context aware, but also considerably smaller, thereby significantly reducing legal costs and risks. According to Rudoy:

“The premise of early case assessment is to give legal teams the ability to conduct up-front, fast, intelligent data gathering, with probative queries on the dataset to reduce it to a relevant universe that can be assessed.  Legal teams have a need to see “what they got” faster than what traditional EDD services typically can provide. “

StoredIQ can form threads, comparisons, relationships and statistics much faster than human reviewers can. Our user interface includes dynamic visuals, detailed reports and an intuitive dashboard to accomplish in-depth analysis of once unwieldy amounts of discovered data.  As the data set is culled —by custodian, file type, email domain, date range, key terminology, etc. — the StoredIQ Scoreboard presents a running count of the files retained (and eliminated from consideration) and automatically calculates the potential savings from the downstream review cycle.

By accomplishing ECA near the beginning of the eDiscovery workflow, ECA finally achieves the goals it originally set out to accomplish for improved legal strategy decisions and cost reduction.