Historical Essays

Wrapping up my coverage of the first Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat, it seems strange that almost a month has flown by. Then again, we have been in serious growth mode at eDJ now that Jason Velasco has come on board. As I am working on my ILTA 2011 sessions on Predictive Coding/Remote Collection and the Cloud for Firms, it becomes clear that my sessions in Carmel have changed my expectations of audience participation and content quality for conferences. I put a lot of thought into how to prevent the two classic conference panel killers, ‘Death by Powerpoint’ and the ‘Charlie Brown Speaker’. The informal setting and intimate audience gave me the freedom to take risks that might not have flown as well in the packed, stifling rooms of LTNY.

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2011-08-16 13:41:45  As CEO of a media company, I thought it would be a good idea to learn more about social media and how to utilize it.  I’m not an old fogey by any stretch of the imagination, but I really didn’t fully embrace the Twitter community or blogosphere until recently.  This is surprising because I always considered myself [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2011-08-18 09:43:28  My last two posts about our information governance survey results hit on some positive trends – information governance is a defined model for managing information that many organizations are executing on and it encompasses the management of both structured and unstructured data.  I’ve also argued that we are in the early days of information governance [...]

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2011-08-18 13:33:49  I saw a report today that HP will make a $10 billion bid for Autonomy.  If true, it's major news.  We've always known that the software giants covet the information governance market (of which eDiscovery is a major component).  But, none have made truly significant purchases yet.  There have been signs, though, that the big [...]

Legal hold initiatives have dominated my corporate consulting engagements for the last year, especially implementing holds across enterprise archives such as Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, EMC’s SourceOne (EmailXtender) or Commvault’s Simpana (although rumors indicate that Commvault is discontinuing their discovery templates). It makes sense that corporate legal departments tend to start by tackling the greatest risk that they are responsible for, preservation of all potentially relevant ESI – especially email. Acquiring an enterprise archive allowed them to capture (journal) all communications, thus providing immediate ongoing preservation. Now that the immediate risk has been mitigated, corporate IT has begun to scream about the rapidly growing corporate digital landfill. I have corporate clients who are accumulating 5-7 TB of email per year at an escalating pace. That explains my backlog of clients wanting to protect potential evidence within their archives so that they can expire (delete) all non-records according to their retention schedule. Sounds easy, but having done a lot of these has taught me that there are frequently land mines buried just under your communication trash. This inspired me to write a report detailing the common issues, solutions and best practices around implementing legal holds on enterprise archives.

The last few posts in my information governance (IG) series have focused on the growing acceptance that IG is a defined model for managing information that companies are currently executing on, the fact that IG encompasses both structured data and unstructured content, and the state of relative immaturity in overall IG practices. The survey data is presenting a good news / bad news scenario: there is some agreement on what IG is and the component practices within it (records management, eDiscovery, archiving &storage, security, compliance, privacy, etc), but seemingly not a ton of proactive IG initiatives. This is not uncommon in emerging markets where unique challenges exists, e.g. getting huge volumes of diverse types of electronic information under control.