Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2012-01-10 10:53:16 For the past two months, eDJ has been running a survey on eDiscovery and The Cloud. The results teach us some excellent lessons: that eDiscovery is an afterthought in The Cloud and that The Cloud does not kill off on-premise collection and preservation tools. Now, eDJ has published the first report in our series on eDiscovery and The Cloud: “Gearing Up for The Cloud and Social Media.” One finding is that The Cloud and Social Media have generated more heat than actual action.
Just because information in The Cloud and Social Media are not the dominant sources of data for eDiscovery today does not mean that companies should not address them as part of a holistic eDiscovery and IG strategy. It is clear that usage of The Cloud and Social Media is growing. In fact, even President Obama has called for the U.S. Government to begin investigating a move to managing digital records in The Cloud. Such records include social media. President Obama’s order calls on government agencies to “improve the management of existing and ongoing records–including emails and social-media communications. Their plans should include the use of cloud-based services or storage systems for digital recordkeeping.”[1] When Government agencies begin adopting technologies and practices, it is common for corporate America to follow along or at least get over some of the concerns about those solutions; in the case of The Cloud and Social Media, the primary concerns are security, privacy, and control of the information.In addition to The Cloud and Social Media usage simply becoming more commonplace, there is another reason to address these data sources in eDiscovery and IG plans – case law is emerging that says companies have to. There may not be an overwhelming amount of case law pertaining to The Cloud and Social Media, but one important case to note is “IN RE NTL, INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION; GORDON PARTNERS, et al., Plaintiffs, -against- GEORGE S. BLUMENTHAL, et al., Defendants.” The main idea in this case is that if a company has “access to documents to conduct business, it has possession, custody or control of documents for the purposes of discovery.”[2] One of the keys to The Cloud and Social Media is ubiquitous access to information, essentially putting companies on the hook to be responsible about eDiscovery of that information.Check out the full report, where you will see some more interesting data and get some pragmatic advice on how to incorporate The Cloud and social media into holistic eDiscovery strategies.