Data Remediation

Green Light for Defensible Data Remediation

In December 2015, the electronic discovery provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were amended to substantially expand the Safe Harbor against sanctions for destruction of electronic data.  In my November 2015 white paper, C-Level Guide to Covering Your Information Governance Assets, I predicted that the amended rules signaled a pivot away from one of the main sources of eDiscovery uncertainty – the inconsistent imposition of severe sanctions for the loss of electronically stored information (ESI) relevant to dispute resolution.  The prediction holds. The prior Safe Harbor under the 2006 FRCP provided modest protections against sanctions where ESI …

Read more

Legally Defensible Data Remediation

A document retention policy is in reality a document destruction policy.  Therefore, a key reason for an organization to adopt a document retention policy is to establish a program for the deletion/destruction of information that is not required for business, regulatory and other needs.  This reality is made necessary by the fact that digital information is growing at an unprecedented rate and that much of it is contained in “unstructured” storage such as email, SharePoint and shared network drives.  Data hoarding not only increases direct information technology costs but it presents other substantial risks and costs to an organization ranging …

Read more

Legal Hold 101 – Data Retention and Destruction

Every gambler knows That the secret to survivin’ Is knowin’ what to throw away And knowin’ what to keep ‘Cause every hand’s a winner And every hand’s a loser And the best that you can hope for is to die In your sleep The Gambler lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC Some of the more frequent questions asked of eDiscovery attorneys when teaming with IT professionals on archiving and other retention policy projects, relate to the timing, scope and especially the release of legal holds.  Misconceptions about “Legal Hold” abound, many of them (unfortunately) coming from litigation attorneys stuck in …

Read more