Re: e-discovery software and outsourcing insights?

[Steve Werby <smwerby () VCU EDU>]

Valdis,

I agree completely.  I explicitly excluded planning, data collection and
all processes that precede it from the scope of my inquiry because those
are issues that need to be addressed over a longer time horizon and
which require the time and cooperation of numerous constituents.  So I'm
focusing on issues I can address near term.

Given our combination of tools, capabilities and staffing, it's just not
feasible for us to handle difficult-to-predict perceived potential
near-term demand for e-discovery processing, searching, analysis, review
and production.  Adding staff to meet this need is unlikely.  An
e-discovery platform would likely help, especially if legal counsel
could be trained to utilize it for at least some phases of the process.
And services from third-party providers is an option I can't rule out.
If there are other feasible options to consider, please share.

By the way, I'm a Virginia Tech grad so I know all too well about the
unfortunate event you were referring to.  It might help me persuade my
colleagues to make the pre-collection issues a higher priority if I
could share some hard numbers about the potential impact for a
large-scale e-discovery case and efforts necessary to reduce the
impact.  But from a risk perspective, I suspect an incident like that
would be perceived as an unlikely worst case scenario, along the lines
of a tornado taking out our primary data center and our secondary data
center a mile from it.  Who would be the best person to speak with
concerning that - Wayne, Randy, someone else?

--
Steve Werby
Information Security Officer
Virginia Commonwealth University
VCU Information Security - http://infosecurity.vcu.edu/
News, Tips & More - http://www.twitter.com/vcuinfosec
Best Practices - http://infosecurity.vcu.edu/docs/infosecbp.pdf

On 2/26/2010 3:51 PM, Valdis Kletnieks wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:11:25 EST, Steve Werby said:
>
>
> > Do you have experience or insights about e-discovery platforms that
> > cover all phases of the process after data collection (processing,
> > searching, analysis, reviewing, production, etc.)?
> Insight:  If you wait till after data collection, you've made your work
> about 63.4 times harder than you had to.  You *really* want to sit down
> and do some up-front work to make the back-end work easier.
>
> A few years ago, we had an unfortunate incident on campus, where we literally
> ended up doing the first steps of data preservation while still in lockdown.
> The fact we weren't ready for it beforehand, combined with a legacy tape
> system that used 40G tapes, conspired to leave us holding the bag on some
> 18,000 tapes. We're *still* dealing with the fall-out from that - by the time
> we're done we'll have easily blown 10 man-years on it.  And that's before
> we've actually handled a single e-discovery request.
>
> Moral: You *really* want to look at your ongoing business practices, and see
> where you can make things simpler for when things go bad...