E-DISCOVERY
Quick Wins for Legal and IT Collaboration By JOHN SANCHEZ
H
ave you ever forgotten to create a legal hold only to get a multi-milliondollar sanction ordered against your company? Even if you’ve never lived your worst nightmare, the events that became your most significant compliance issues probably didn’t start big — or concern many people. However, while each legal event may not necessarily involve terabytes of data, they collectively consume considerable personnel time and resources. From internal investigations to responding to subpoenas to privacy compliance and more, this steady stream of small legal events combined with leadership’s calls for corporate digital transformation requires frequent and extensive collaboration between the office of the general counsel (OGC) and the company’s IT department. As a result, the little legal events add up. BACK TO CONTENTS
As elusive as they may seem, opportunities do exist for legal and IT teams to collaborate more effectively — not just to get a handle on the growing pile of little legal events in less time but to reduce their risks and costs to the business. Let’s take a look at a few ways the OGC and IT teams can work together to achieve these efficiency and compliance gains. • Start small by targeting highvolume, low-risk legal events. No legal team wishes to spend their whole week creating a legal hold, yet it’s a common occurrence. The disproportionate spend and personnel resources required to respond to small legal events like holds make a strong case for enterprise investment in software tools whose use can save money, time and resources, while at the same time managing risks and compliance defensibility. Although there
are always areas where the OGC and IT teams can work towards something better, faster and cheaper, starting small with lowrisk, high-success tools is a tried and true strategy for building consensus and confidence among these stakeholders and their teams. Legal hold compliance is one such high-volume, low-risk legal event that consumes an inordinate amount of OGC and IT time and resources, particularly for companies that manage these repetitive workflows manually. For companies with distributed teams working across time zones and multiple source data repositories subject to legal hold, the inefficiencies of these manual workflows only compound, and the OGC and IT teams will often struggle to coordinate sending notices and preserving data across enterprise repositories. As a result, it can take weeks or even months for preservation to come into full legal hold compliance. • Enable self-service legal hold with integrations. Starting from scratch every time your company has to issue a legal hold is a sure sign that implementing self-service software could return efficiency gains right away. These tools enable the business user to execute all steps of a target workflow from end to end. For legal hold, the OGC user should be able to manage the processes of sending preservation letters and tracking custodian acknowledgment entirely, while at the same time preserving data for identified custodians. In each aspect, integration of your legal hold software tool with enterprise applications is fundamental to success.
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