You need to be thinking about e-Discovery

As the economic down-turn evolves into a full-scale deep dive, one thing is certain: investors are going to be looking for someone to blame. That means we can look for lawsuits aplenty in the coming months as people try to find a way to recoup their losses. As the lawsuits pile up, your company may need to start thinking about e-Discovery software, which helps you pinpoint information from a large pile of data.

Before an angry crowd gathers with pitch forks outside of your company's gates, you should be getting your records in order. This goes without saying, bad tidings or not. Your company needs to have solid record keeping before you get the order to send your records to a lawyer's office. Chris Preimesberger at eWeek wrote a fine piece this week on this subject, and I think he's exactly right when he says:

"The e-discovery folks have a point. When lawyers show up in the front lobby, and if their complaint becomes actual litigation, the courts will want to see that an enterprise has corporate-wide policies and processes in place to facilitate the discovery of all information--digital and non-digital--relevant to the case. It's now the law."

That last line bears repeating: "It's now the law." There will be no excuses that you aren't ready or it's too much information to process. Your company is expected and legally required to hand over information when requested. Judges will have little sympathy for your company because you failed to plan properly. In fact, that's your responsibility.

Yet Marie-Charlotte Patterson wrote last month in a Computer Technology Today article that studies have shown that most companies have ignored advice to take a "proactive approach to records management." You ignore this advice at your own peril (ie--Morgan Stanley), as Patterson points out.

The flip side of this, of course, is that e-Discovery vendors have to be feeling pretty good this morning; lots of financial services companies are probably going to be needing their help, but just because your company may be in another industry doesn't mean that you're immune from such actions. It's certainly no coincidence that big players such as IBM recently beefed up their e-Discovery offerings.

So I'm going to offer a bit of unsolicited advice this week and suggest that as you hunker down to face the harsh economic winter, you also spend some of your reserves on records management. Don't wait until you are faced with a court order. Do it now. You'll be glad you did. - Ron