E-Discovery: Pre-Litigation Considerations for In-House Counsel

• Posted by Geoffrey G. Gussis on December 26th, 2005


• Filed in Litigation

If 2006 brings a large lawsuit against your company (and InhouseBlog hopes it does not), will your company be able to meet its e-discovery obligations?

"Consider all of the electronically stored information throughout your company — including far-flung offices, servers that may be maintained by third parties offsite, and even computer files of contract employees. Consider the volume of electronic information that is created — and destroyed — each day. E-mails and more e-mails; Word documents in multiple versions; PowerPoint presentations; Excel spreadsheets. Multiple copies of every one of these.

Now imagine being told by your litigation counsel — or by the judge — that you must locate, review and produce all of that electronically stored information for purposes of a pending lawsuit. And that you must take steps to ensure that no potentially relevant data is destroyed — that you must stop all business deletion of electronically destroyed information, even the most routine practices, such as rewriting of backup tapes and the deletion of e-mails by individual employees."

Link: Legal Technology - E-Discovery: Pre-Litigation Considerations for In-House Counsel.