August 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY ViewCREATING A REPEATABLE, FLEXIBLE AND DEFENSIBLE ESI PLANt happens every day. Thousands of employees are using all manner of devices, generating paper documents, communications, and electronically stored information (collectively "ESI") in over 100 countries, all while making and selling an equally high number of SKUs to our global customers. As an employee in a growing company, this is a normal business day; as Chief Legal Officer ("CLO"), it looks like the mountain of discoverable ESI materials just grew yet again. So how does a CLO scale and tame this figurative and literal ESI mountain? By working with IT and business partners to create and implement a repeatable, flexible and defensible ESI plan.Sounds easy or hard, or both. Yes to all. Defensible and compliant e-discovery begins with content and data management, linked to a global document retention policy and supporting processes to preserve and protect essential information from loss or spoliation, and over time, having a process for eliminating that which is not relevant to reduce the time and expense of maintaining and reviewing it later. Easy to say, hard to implement. Why? ­ At least three reasons at the outset that require a change in mindset for an ESI process to work: (1) Internal business partners resist content management processes and document retention no matter how automatic and technology enabled;(2) The legal process, timeframes, motivations and requirements are different from those of the business, including the IT department. It's easy to advocate that everyone collaborate and communicate to connect all stakeholders on the requirements, objectives and timeframes for collecting and producing the requisite ESI as part of a standard business process. But this requires advance coordination work by Legal, IT and the management team to prevent stress and disruption. In the context of doing this while a case or cases underway, the laudable but elusive goal to bridge the gap between the law and the technology seems like changing the wheels on the bus while it is moving. (3) Let's be honest, lawyers don't always understand technology even though they are supposed to be providing direction to IT and external vendors on the ESI process. Some degree of technical competence and in-house sophistication is required to work in tandem with IT and external vendors to create a technology and legal workflow developed as the requests, as well as what may be relevant to search and secure from the data set, evolve along with the legal matter at issue. Why does all this matter? We all want to win the case or successfully resolve a matter. On the positive side, ESI related issues are often case-I Mark Van De VooreMARK VAN DE VOORDE, CHIEF LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER, VICTAULIC
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