Japan Society, New York - Controlling the Rising Costs... -
[Cached Version]
Last Visited: 8/26/2009
Jeffrey J. Joyce, Vice President, Kroll Ontrack Consulting
...
"For big companies, they have hundreds of possible disputes arise every day with suppliers and vendors and employees, and you do need to balance it, because if you viewed every time somebody raised their hand and said 'hey I've got a problem with you' as a duty to preserve, you would have to shut down your operations," agreed Jeff Joyce of Kroll Ontrack Consulting.
...
"If you've got an employment class action, you're dealing with time cards and HR systems," information that's rarely if ever stored in paper form, said Mr. Joyce.
...
"Some of you at least have probably sent a few e-mails that you hope don't show up in the front page of The New York Times," Mr. Joyce remarked, underscoring the importance of ESI in litigation.
...
"Obviously the regulators get a hold of something like this and it gives them some pretty powerful evidence of what the company's motivations were," Mr. Joyce commented.
...
"You are always graded with 20/20 hindsight, which is the biggest problem," Mr. Joyce said.
"And the decisions you make today might not get evaluated for 18 or 24 months or longer," by which time the people who made the decisions may no longer be with the company.
"One of the biggest things you can do is if you have your procedures and processes in place and you are ready for e-discovery issues, documenting the decisions that are made and the steps that you take as you go through the e-discovery phase of the litigation and having that record available to explain to the judge," he said.
...
Mr. Joyce told of interviewing a client's IT staff and "asking them whether they stored IMs in the ordinary course of business and he said yes, we do.
...
To give an idea of the volume of data, a single backup tape can store 200 gigabytes of compressed data, or a fifth of a terabyte, the equivalent of 17.5 million printed pages, Mr. Joyce observed.
...
In developing a policy, Mr. Joyce said, "make sure you involve the IT folks early, because it's easy for the lawyers to sit in their offices and draft a policy that the IT folks cannot comply with because of storage issues, architectural issues, and the like."
...
"There are a lot of different ways to do it," including a load-file format, "which is a dataset that can be loaded into any number of litigation support tools," Mr. Joyce answered.