Holiday toast overheard tonight: “Long live e-discovery confusion”. EDD confusion is good for service providers, vendors and law firms. Not so for General Counsels, who should do more to reduce confusion.
CommVault, a provider of data archiving, protection, and resource management systems with e-discovery solutions, recently released a a press release on a survey of EDD preparedness. The key finding: of 375 IT managers responding “only 20 percent are aware of the [FRCP] amendments governing e-discovery, and only 6 percent of the total respondents have actually implemented a solution to address the issue.”
The amended rules are old news. Even eWeek and Information Week have carried numerous stories. So IT managers have no excuse, but the real responsibility lies with GC. They should educate IT, which would do a lot to reduce confusion.
The press release implicitly chastises IT managers: “Nearly as startling… only 14 percent of IT departments had made any effort to engage the legal department on the new standards.” Even IT managers with dim awareness of EDD have little motivation to learn more; they have enough else to do. Of course, GC are also busy, but it’s hard to argue that establishing policies to deal with data doesn’t deserve attention.