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Lower your legal operation costs by owning your data and applying common sense
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Stephen Breyer, a justice on America’s Supreme Court,
recently expressed concern that, with ordinary cases costing millions just in
e-discovery work, “you’re going to drive out of the litigation system a lot of
people who ought to be there” so that “justice is determined by wealth, not by
the merits of the case.” While the common American citizen arguably will be
priced out of the justice system, I think that many corporations both big and
small face similar problems.
The costs of discovery are high and technology might lower
some of the costs, but the real solution requires action before litigation. A
real solution mandates that companies control the information they create and
responsibly manage it from inception to termination. Most companies lack strong
information management process and underlying technologies. Corporations that
have the technology and process still must transform the behavior of the
employee.
What do I mean? Well, if an employee has no reason to think
before sending an e-mail, why would they think? Imagine, if you audited a dozen
(12) of your employees for compliance with the signed digital information
management policies set-forth in your handbook and then circulate an e-mail
firm wide stating that x%, which I would wager that over 50% failed, you would
see a direct connection made between what I send and my job. It seems to me
that it is not really the legal system that is growing out of control, but
rather the ancillary costs around litigation are making it so costly, which are
driven in part by a failure to take information management responsibility.
Organizations that calculate the total cost of review
per-litigation matter, I believe will realize rapidly that the legal operation
costs fall largely in having to manage the deluge of digital information.
Hopefully, this realization sets off a chain reaction where they realize that
less information equals less costs, and begin to actively engage technology,
legal, business, and risk stakeholders to come up with a pragmatic solution.
What is a good business reason to pay a third-party company to search,
preserve, and produce information that your IT team maintains, secures, stores,
and manages on a daily basis? Run the numbers! What if you had less information
to review? What if you had an internal team to search, preserve, and produce
the information to outside counsel? Calculate these savings internal to your
company.
Google
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Of course, the average litigant seeking justice confront serious fiscal
imbalance any time they are looking at litigation, and these additional costs
certainly will not make it any more equitable.
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