E-discovery Adds Twist To Litigation

Here is a topic that seems to be heating up in the press lately. E-discovery is fast becoming an attention grabbing headline.

From GCN:

New rules for electronic data discovery during litigation, combined with the massive amount of electronic data now available in federal databases, will require closer communication between the legal and information technology departments at federal agencies and standardized processes across business units, according to panelists discussing enterprise search and e-discovery at the FOSE Conference and Exposition in Washington.

The civil rules of procedure, which went into effect Dec. 1, 2006, have “really changed the environment for the IT folks” in the last year, said Edward Meagher, deputy chief information officer at the Interior Department. “We need to start saving documents that we previously didn’t save and ensure documents are searchable and retrievable and do it very rapidly. E-mail, voice mail, instant messages, text messages — all are now in discovery [in a legal case] and so they need to be searchable,” he said. “It’s one of those issues that’s really crept up on us.”

With millions—and perhaps billions—of e-mails alone in even a single part of the federal government, searching electronic data is no small task, and the technology to do so is still a work in progress. Add to that legacy data that is no longer accessible and the relative difficulty today in searching electronic documents, combined with expectations that enterprise searches should be as easy as a Google Internet search, and compliance with e-discovery rules becomes all the more challenging.

Read on.

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ed. On a completely unrelated note…it has been a lonnnng day.

[tags]E-Discovery, Computer Forensics[/tags]